Dorothy Ko

Collects information about footbinding in China, using color and black-and-white photography to chronicle the history of the practice.

Shoes for Bound Feet

Every Step a Lotus

Lydia He Liu

Rebecca E. Karl

The book repositions He-Yin Zhen as central to the development of feminism in China, juxtaposing her writing with fresh translations of works by two of her better-known male interlocutors. The editors begin with a detailed portrait of He-Yin Zhen's life and an analysis of her thought in comparative terms. They then present annotated translations of six of her major essays, as well as two foundational tracts by her male contemporaries, Jin Tianhe (1873-1947) and Liang Qichao (1873-1929), to which He-Yin's work responds and with which it engages. Jin Tianhe, a poet and educator, and Liang Qichao, a philosopher and journalist, understood feminism as a paternalistic cause that "enlightened" male intellectuals like themselves should defend. Zhen counters with an alternative conception of feminism that draws upon anarchism and other radical trends in thought.

Essential Texts in Transnational Theory

The Birth of Chinese Feminism

Footbinding is widely condemned as perverse & as symbolic of male domination over women. This study offers a more complex explanation of a thousand year practice, contending that the binding of women's feet in China was sustained by the interests of both women and men.

A Revisionist History of Footbinding

Cinderella's Sisters

An inkstone, a piece of polished stone no bigger than an outstretched hand, is an instrument for grinding ink, an object of art, a token of exchange between friends or sovereign states, and a surface on which texts and images are carved. As such, the inkstone has been entangled with elite masculinity and the values of wen (culture, literature, civility) in China, Korea, and Japan for more than a millennium. However, for such a ubiquitous object in East Asia, it is virtually unknown in the Western world. Examining imperial workshops in the Forbidden City, the Duan quarries in Guangdong, the commercial workshops in Suzhou, and collectors� homes in Fujian, The Social Life of Inkstones traces inkstones between court and society and shows how collaboration between craftsmen and scholars created a new social order in which the traditional hierarchy of �head over hand� no longer predominated. Dorothy Ko also highlights the craftswoman Gu Erniang, through whose work the artistry of inkstone-making achieved unprecedented refinement between the 1680s and 1730s. The Social Life of Inkstones explores the hidden history and cultural significance of the inkstone and puts the stonecutters and artisans on center stage.

Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China

The Social Life of Inkstones

This pathbreaking work argues that literate gentry women in 17th-century Jiangnan, far from being oppressed or silenced, created a rich culture and meaningful existence within the constraints of the Confucian system. Momentous socioeconomic and intellectual changes in 17th-century Jiangnan provided the stimulus for the flowering of women's culture. The most salient of these changes included a flourishing of commercial publishing, the rise of a reading public, a new emphasis on emotions, the promotion of women's education, and, more generally, the emergence of new definitions of womanhood. The author reconstructs the social, emotional and intellectual worlds of 17th-century women, and in doing so provides a new way to conceptualize China's past, one offering a more realistic and complete understanding of the values of Chinese culture and the functioning of Chinese society.

Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China

Teachers of the Inner Chambers

Wang Zheng

This volume, which brings together articles by scholars and activists in China, Japan, Canada and the US in multiple disciplines, seeks to illuminate the problems and possibilities involved in translating feminism from the metropolitan ‘West’ to a locale rife with its own ideas about gender, class, the body and sexuality. Furthermore, these articles showcase the centrality of gender in the formation of modern China by demonstrating the extent to which translated feminisms – whatever they mean – have transformed the terms in which modern Chinese understand their own subjectivities and histories. This book is essential reading for students, academics and general readers interested in East Asia, comparative women’s history, feminist texts and the politics of translation.

Translating Feminisms in China

Martina Siebert

Kai Jun Chen

This volume brings the studies of institutions, labour, and material cultures to bear on the history of science and technology by tracing the workings of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwufu) in the Qing court and empire. An enormous apparatus that employed 22,000 men and women at its heyday, the Department operated a "machine" with myriad moving parts. The first part of the book portrays the people who kept it running, from technical experts to menial servants, and scrutinises the paper trails they left behind. Part two uncovers the working principles of the machine by following the production chains of some of its most splendid products: gilded statues, jade, porcelain, and textiles. Part three tackles the most complex task of all, managing living organisms in nature, including lotus plants grown in imperial ponds in Beijing, fresh medicines sourced from disparate regions, and tribute elephants from Southeast Asia.

Mobilizing People, Objects, and Nature in the Qing Empire

Making the Palace Machine Work

Joan R. Piggott

Joan Piggott

JaHyun Kim Haboush

This book rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between "Confucianisms" and "women."

Dorothy Ko

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