- The body as a Sacrificial Landscape -
Jacqui Kuraj - dance performance, percussion, vocals
George Bishop - contrabass saxophone, alto saxophone, soprano saxophone.
Footbinding has long been perceived as a barbaric practice and a gruesome expression of female oppression. The explanation of the choice of the foot as a fetish is an approach to the womans genitals from below.
In social psychology, the Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot and then revering it like fetish after it has been mutilated is the Chinese males way of thanking the woman for having submitted to being castrated.
" The fetish is a substitute for the penis: the woman's (the mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in and does not want to give up. The fetish achieves a token of triumph over the threat of castration and serves as a protection against it. It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects. Because the fetish is easily accessible, the fetishist can readily obtain the sexual satisfaction attached to it. The choice of the fetish object seems determined by the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one - In very subtle instances both the disavowal and the affirmation of the castration have found their way into the construction of the fetish itself."
Freud on Fetishism (1927)
Affection and hostility in the treatment of the fetish runs parallel with the disavowal and the acknowledgment of castration.
This cruel institution crippled countless Chinese women over the course of 1,000 years.
Footbinding began in the late Tang dynasty, sometime around 950 A.D. The practice spread from the Imperial court to the upper class, and then throughout the society. Banned by the Republican government in 1911, footbinding persisted in remote areas of China until the late 1940s.
Men, who often emphasized the erotic appeal of footbinding, wrote most of the Chinese literature.
Your Jade-like body can barely support your white jade jewels:
your feet - gold lotus beautiful below the saffron blossom robe.
- A poem by Li Kaixian (1502-1568)
The bound foot is known as the Lotus foot, because the shape resembles that of a Lotus bud. The soles of bound foot shoes are the shape of a lotus bud and sometimes have a lotus bud embroidered on them.
Three inches was said to be the ideal length for a womans foot. There were competitions for the smallest and the best formed feet and the prettiest shoes. Foot contests were taken quite seriously and the winner acquired a reputation as a famous beauty.
Traditionally footbinding generally began between the ages of five and seven. Because wealthy families could afford to bind their girls feet very tightly and at an early age, tiny feet became a symbol of gentility. Gentry wives, courtesans and concubines seem to have been particularly likely to have had their feet bound very small. First hand personal accounts of footbinding testify that the procedure was extremely painful. The girl childs feet were bound tightly with bandages, which forced the four small toes inward and under the sole.
The large toe was left free. Then the heel and the toe were drawn forcefully together, breaking the arch. In some areas the footbinding procedure took place in two separate stages, with the second stage occurring several years after the four small toes were bound. Footbinding apparently played a part in the neo-Confucian revival. Earlier in the Tang dynasty, relatively liberal attitudes towards women were prevalent, and aristocratic women had a number of social and economic rights. By the Song dynasty however, contemporaneous with the rise of footbinding, women were increasingly confined at home.
The social and legal restrictions women faced were paralleled by the physical restrictions of footbinding.
As a Chinese ditty said:
Bound Feet, bound feet,
past the gate cant retreat.
Chinese women with bound feet walked with difficulty, often with the faltering steps and the use of a cane. Footbinding drastically restricted womens mobility. Athletic games and dancing were impossible once footbinding became the general practice.
The eventual disappearance of footbinding began with the rise of modern nationalism in the early twentieth century. Progressive Chinese men and educated women increasingly criticized it as a backward custom that retarded Chinas modernization.
Loading...
4:55Goddess Devika - Smoking 1by goddessdevika108,822 views
Link to this comment:
All Comments (0)