Draft:Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding

Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding is a 229-page book written by Dorothy Ko that discusses the evolution of discourse surrounding footbinding.

Synopsis

Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding consists of the following sections:

Part I: The Body Exposed

• Chapter 1: Gigantic Histories of the Nation in the Globe: The Rhetoric of Tianzu, 1880s-1910s
  • Ko begins the chapter with a revealing anecdote that Zhiqiang Shoe Factory in Harbin- the last factory producing shoes for women with bound feet- closed down in 1999 before proceeding to a cursory
• Chapter 2: The Body Inside Out: The Practice of Fangzu, 1900s-1930s
• Chapter 3: The Bound Foot as Antique: Connoisseurship in an Age of Disavowal, 1930s-1941

Part II: The Body Concealed

• Chapter 4: From Ancient Texts to Current Customs: In Search of Footbinding's Origins
• Chapter 5: The Erotics of Place: Male Desires and the Imaginary Geography of the Northwest
• Chapter 6: Cinderella's Dreams: the Burdens and Uses of the Female Body

Reception

Sinologists have commended Ko's outstanding ability to deconstruct established notions surrounding footbinding by engaging in the complications and contradictions that together construe the diverse significances of footbinding with defamiliarized approaches to textual analysis in Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. Charlotte Furth praised Ko's ability to rise "above feminist, nationalist, and Orientalist polemic by means of a daring narrative strategy combined with a subtle, personal authorial voice." Harriet Evans remarked favorably on Ko's unconventional chronological arrangements and incorporation of eclectic sources, such as connoisseurs' writings, artifacts, and photographic evidence, to evince "rich historiographical imagination." Paul S. Ropp recognized the profound insight Ko lent through her connection of male connoisseurs' zeal to preserve the aesthetic, moral, and erotic imaginations of the bound foot with shared experiences of marginalization upon the displacement of dynastic institutions and her attention to the silences of the male intellectual elites regarding an apparent imperative to subsume women's mobility under an ideal Confucian order. On the other hand, they have also commented on the asymmetry of Ko's presentation, especially the conspicuous overrepresentation of male-informed discourse in the book, the underrepresentation of authentic women's perspectives toward footbinding, and generalization of extant footbinding literature as "histories of anti-footbinding."