 |
||||||
|
||||||
|
The Liberation Of Chinese Women Since Footbinding
A Symposium In Toronto Addresses The Leaps And Bounds Of Chinese Women By Keith Lowe On the North American cultural landscape, the Chinese woman is a relatively new and sketchy figure. How she fills out in form and color will be very interesting indeed, not only to North America but possibly to China and Asia as well. Here are some interesting figures seen so far, and chosen at random. Shadows in the background, there were the now stooped crones who belatedly joined their menfolk recruited to build the railroads. Sizzling on the silver screen were the young Suzie Wongs sculpted by white soldiers' desire. Existing in a timeless geography of China were the eternal keepers of the family flame depicted in the novels of Pearl S. Buck. In the real time of the Second World War, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek walked the American stage in her dazzling cheongsam to urge US support for China in resisting Japanese invasion. As the cold war thawed Madame Mao in coarse cotton jacket could be heard screaming defiance from jail in Beijing. In the wake of Nixon's inscrutable visit to China in 1972, rangy volleyball players and impossibly muscled swimmers filled television screens as they held sway in international womens' competitions. __________________ As the new millennium opens, we search the horizon for the real Chinese woman. Several factors make the search urgent. Firstly, we are keen to see what kind of woman has emerged from the centuries-long crucible of war and revolution, and especially from the last revolution in which women were proclaimed to hold up half the sky. Secondly, the tide of women's liberation has swept through the white countries of the world, and now seems poised to ebb if it cannot penetrate the dikes surrounding the non-white and Muslim countries. Thirdly, commercial globalization over the last three decades has brought Chinese women to North America in what appears to be larger numbers than men, with swifter assimilation for women. __________________ Markers of Chinese femininity have in the past developed outside of China, argues history professor Dorothy Ko of Barnard College, Columbia University. Her point is even more relevant now that the globalization of culture is hastened by electronic media. Such trends as the highly deliberate placement of Chinese women as news announcers on US television (Connie Chung and younger replications) need careful analysis and interpretation. Print and electronic advertising use images of Chinese women far more frequently than their proportion in the population. They are beginning to appear as martial arts exponents – slender sassy and sexy – in movies and TV serials. Last year the Taiwan movie industry gave the world Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger, in which the woman warrior, a figure deeply embedded in Chinese popular literature, was vividly depicted. A key marker of Chinese femininity – the phenomenon of footbinding and lotus shoes made for bound feet – seems to be becoming a focus for feminist scholars, and is being reinterpreted in the light of modern psychology and anthropology. See for example the book by Wang Ping, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2000. In 2001 Dr. Dorothy Ko curated an exhibition of lotus shoes for The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, entitled Every Step a Lotus: Shoes in the Lives of Women in Late Imperial China. Her view is that footbinding as practiced over a thousand years was paradoxical – being heinous and oppressive to women on the one hand, but on the other hand secured their role as bearers of the Confucian family system. With the success of this exhibition, which closes in June 2002, and the publication of a book by Dorothy Ko based on the exhibition, I thought it would be a fine opportunity to use the exhibition as a basis for imagining the future of the Chinese woman as a figure in North American and perhaps global culture. I thought this would be done best by local Chinese women artists – dancers, poets, novelists, composers, visual artists – challenged to think globally about the roots of their creativity and the possibility of their survival as artists in North America. The artists have responded most enthusiastically, and have been augmented by a few feminist scholars and cultural critics. BY LEAPS AND BOUNDS: IMAGES OF CHINESE WOMEN SINCE FOOTBINDING, takes place at The Bata Shoe Museum on April 13, 2002. The event is sponsored by the Chinese Cultural Centre of Greater Toronto, and the honorary patrons are Senator Vivienne Poy and the chair of Bata Shoe Museum, Sonja Bata. It is open to the public. For further information, please contact Keith Lowe at Keith.Lowe@post.Harvard.edu
This website: Copyright © 2002 Dream World Media, LLC. / Urban Mozaik Magazine. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in Urban Mozaik Magazine are not necessarily those of Urban Mozaik Magazine and the publisher cannot be held responsible for them. This website/publication, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. |
||||||
