From cultural capital to national stigma: The anti-footbinding movements in China and Taiwan.
详细信息
文摘
This study analyzes how the millennium-long practice of footbinding declined as a national stigma at the turn of the twentieth century in China and Taiwan. The first part focuses on the process whereby footbinding was enframed within the ocularcentric modernity. The hegemonic technologies of seeing---via journalism, medical science, exhibitions, photography, and radiography---not only visualized what had been concealed under the binding cloths but also constructed, represented and displayed it as something evil in accordance with the episteme of vision: pathologically, disease and filthiness; anthropologically, markers of barbarism; and aesthetically, the hideous taste of beauty. The second part examines the social-cultural contexts that sustained and popularized the practice of footbinding. It explores the significance of bound feet in the formation of gender and ethnic identity as well as of the gentry habitus, by which girls' footbinding, like boys' studying, symbolized as a form of cultural capital for themselves and their families with which to maintain or approach a higher social position. The opening-up of an "in-between" space (treaty ports) and the emergence of "in-between" elites (compradors and new intellectuals), which brought about a hybrid culture and challenged the gentry habitus, is discussed as well. The third part looks at four efforts to abolish footbinding, each of which was characterized by a specific cultural framing shared by its activists. The anti-footbinding movement in late-nineteenth-century treaty ports organized by Western missionaries and memsahibs, who consciously or unconsciously assumed responsibility for the civilizing mission, highlighted an ideology of cultural imperialism. The anti-footbinding movement led by late-Qing reform nationalists centered around the discourse of national preservation. The anti-footbinding campaigns in the Republican era launched by state regimes with relative stability---the warlord regime in Shanxi Province, the Nationalists' Nanjing regime and the Communists' Yanan regime---exemplified the state-building projects in relation to social control, economic production, and war mobilization. The anti-footbinding movement in colonial Taiwan initiated by native elites who agreed with the colonial authorities' condemnation of footbinding highlighted the colonial discourse and anticipated the overall colonization of lifestyles.