Footbinding in the museum

• Published in: Interventions (London, England) Vol. 5; no. 3; pp. 426 - 439
• Main Author: Ko, Dorothy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Ltd 01-07-2003
• Subjects: Body Modification; Canada; China; Culture; Ethnography; Exhibitions; Exoticism; Females; Feminism; footbinding; Gender; museum; Museums; Narratives; narrativity; Ontario; Otherness; Postcolonialism; Shoes; Sympathy; Women
• ISSN: 1369-801X; 1469-929X
• DOI: 10.1080/1369801032000135657

In describing the concept, organization, and reception of an exhibition on shoes for bound feet at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, this essay ponders the perils of telling stories about footbinding. The narratives perpetuated by missionaries and feminists are so successful in dramatizing the violence and pain that a visceral recoil has become the predominant mode of identifying with the subject. Indeed, we have built our own images of our modern self and its aspirations to freedom and mobility on the bondage of the traditional Chinese women. The visceral recoil, on deeper analysis, is thus a form of excessive sympathy. Such identification creates an unequal relationship between the knower and the subject of his study or curiosity. Telling the story of footbinding with objects in a museum exhibition entails other risks. How to draw in viewers suffering from an overload of visual enticements without fetishizing the subject? How to display an unfamiliar culture without exoticizing it? One strategy of intervention is to frame the narrative with the cosmology of the place inhabited by Chinese women, a place defined by motion and connection between the domestic, urban, spiritual, and material domains. Another strategy is to control the viewer's access to the women's bodies in a process of revelation that culminated with the advent of such modern imaging technologies as photography. A third strategy involves the saturation of the display space with the things made by the women, evoking the world that the things made. The viewers sprouted their own stories. School children tended to focus on the embroidered slippers as beautiful handicraft objects; seasoned journalists (powerful women all) dwelled on the debilitating pain.