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ACCORDING TO HISTORIAN DOROTHY KO, "we hardly know what footbinding is about because the archives fail to answer even the most rudimentary questions. Legends aside, when did it start? How did it spread through time, across geographical regions and across class lines? And, most important, how did women feel about it?" Ko cautions that "there is no neutral or objective knowledge about footbinding" because our sources and informants have a "modern nationalist bias," owing in part to the "intrusion [into China] of Euro-American missionaries" in the midnineteenth century.2 Ko makes several compelling points, including that the custom of footbinding, which lasted over a thousand years and affected virtually every province in China, had so many variations in practice, stories of origin, and reasons for being that it is difficult to speak with any certainty about a master narrative.3 Furthermore, when first-world scholars move beyond a surface-level comprehension of this pervasive tradition, the absence of a complex understanding necessarily points to other elisions, including what Gayatri Spivak might call knowledge of the "consciousness of the woman as subaltern."4 But, neither of these points would be apparent when reading the literatures of Asian America.
Chinese American literature, in particular, serves as an interesting vehicle for studying the trope of footbinding in large part because this body of work uniquely straddles the Asian/American, first-world/developing ". . . the binding altered not world cultural and nationalist divide, and depicts Asian socio-political customs in terms of domestic socio-racial politics (Frank Chin illustrates this dynamic most prominently in his attacks on Maxine Hong Kingston's "fake" use of Chinese myths5). If we can view Asian American literature as a body of work that both arises from political activism and always already contains the seeds of an activist agenda, it may not be surprising to see that in Chinese American literature footbinding is represented through synecdoche and largely puts forth a modernist, first-world feminist agenda. What might be unexpected is to see that this activist agenda ironically objectifies, homogenizes, and ahistoricizes the Chinese subaltern woman in the name of anti-racism and anti-sexism.
You'll remember that synecdoche, the literary device used most often to present footbinding, is a universal trope or figure of speech that typically represents a whole being by reference to only...