are you aware of china's footbinding tradition?

this is absolutely fascinating to me, my impression is that the average person doesn't know much about china, and I thought footbinding was a pretty niche thing, but it was a huge target for building nationalism and was a fetishized image for the west. guess that was. successful

essentially, the western gaze on china c.1900s was demeaning (much as it is now, except its present-day manifestation is pictures of dog meat festivals), and men in china felt humiliated being gazed at that way, particularly as the nation-building project post-dynastic rule began

so there's two things that form a confluence, the first is that christian missionaries pushed a rhetoric of having "natural feet" that painted having bound feet in terms of an external morality (that later incorporated buddhist symbols for more localization)

that language was adapted by men involved in nation-building, who chose footbinding as a target and equated it with the supposed financial burden of women and their purported lack of means of production (I am hedging bc women did a LOT of textile work and domestic work)

footbinding became the symbol of everything wrong with china, and people within china pushed for its eradication to clean up its image to be accepted by the west, basically. and part of that was the shock tactics of photographing & xraying the feet

bear in mind that the bound foot is considered an erotic symbol and it's pretty much like disseminating photos of vulva. the image of the bound foot had until then only been represented in text and illustrations, and photography was considered invasive

so having bound feet became criminalized—women's bodies being legislated against, basically, except based *solely* on presentation. there is zero discourse about the uterus here

there were straight up factions that started up, strategically, to normalize the idea of women unbinding their feet. men controlled the discourse and westerners were clueless, so the idea was that you could just reverse the binding and women would be liberated!

except plot twist, binding the feet involves breaking bones, and any attempt to unbind them will not restore the "natural foot" and in fact could make life more difficult, from a purely physical standpoint, not to mention the social consequences

at the same time, westerners are sending postcards of bound feet back home to be like "LOOK how STRANGE the chinese are!" which created a feedback loop of having to clean up china's image for the west no matter the cost to women, no consideration of women's interiority or voice

so, long story short, chinese men played into respectability politics and threw women under the bus to get westerners' respect. and the fact that westerners appear to *still* know about footbinding despite not knowing even how much land china occupies is mindblowing

the discourse succeeded. it had repercussions on women's bodies and the nation's psyche. the average person did not connect feet to the state and global politics, but it was positioned as such. footbinding was quite literally canceled

perhaps the most mind-blowing part is that none of this earned the respect of the west. because the footbinding discourse is still positioned in that titillating gaze and is perhaps one of the first impressions that create further titillation over, for example, dubious food

like, damn. the rhetoric worked. the discourse worked. it's absolutely not trivial to point out when Discourse is happening

(footnote: if you didn't know, china occupies about the same amount of land as the USA, but the population is 4x, almost 5x larger)

(oh my god I swear "foot"note was an unintentional pun. for once.)

for reference, this is the book I've summarized: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520253902/cinderellas-sisters it is REALLY GOOD, and doesn't actually go into that much detail about the binding itself; it is fascinating as an example of revisionist history that can challenge the traditional narrative

setting aside the question of whether footbinding was bad or not, the author traces the cause and effect of why this particular symbol became relevant to the national discourse, and fills in the gendered bits of the narrative

ko deconstructs everything that the west and that men have just accepted as the truth as parts of a discourse with a purpose, and, while ko is ultimately unable to show the voices of women in depth (bc they were often in oral history traditions and not recorded)

ko does a fantastic job of centering the interiority and agency of women and questioning all the discourse based on that premise, without being polemical or moralistic about it

basically it's just a really well-written history book

and, funnily enough, this history book going over the 1800s/1900s has given me SO. MUCH. INSIGHT. into how discourse happens on twitter. because the words and reference points change, but people? hoo boy, we do not change.

I'm looking at the argumentation and shame culture and rhetoric of displacing blame onto the already marginalized and I'm like

oh, one of the biggest things that resonated? if people wanted to truly eradicate footbinding for what it was, the easiest way would be to just ban it completely on young girls so that it would die off within a couple generations, quietly and not all that invasively

but nation-builders knew that wasn't enough. they had to create the *spectacle* of creating change. it mattered less whether something was successful, more that there was an attempt. and the method of creating spectacle and leaning into the shame culture was to be punitive

if men had truly wanted to uplift women, couldn't they have provided the economic opportunities for women to have more means of production? couldn't they have provided education? couldn't they have pushed back on the idea of a woman's only path being marriage?

but nope, they created squads *of men* to enter women's private spaces and quantify, measure, and violate their bodies to create this image of enforcing the rules and shifting the ideology. they! were! virtue signaling!!!

the tactics of pushing agendas has truly not changed much. I mean, sun tzu's art of war continues to be relevant for a reason