Representing an unprecedented collaboration among international scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States, this volume rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between Confucianism and women. The authors discuss the absence of women in the Confucian canonical tradition and examine the presence of women in politics, family, education, and art in premodern China, Korea, and Japan. What emerges is a concept of Confucianism that is dynamic instead of monolithic in shaping the cultures of East Asian societies. As teachers, mothers, writers, and...
Representing an unprecedented collaboration among international scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States, this volume rewrites the history of...
In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its origins, purpose, and spread before the nineteenth century. She uses women's own voices to reconstruct the inner chambers of a Chinese house where women with bound feet lived and worked. Focusing on the material aspects of footbinding and shoemaking--the tools needed, the procedures, the wealth of symbolism in the shoes, and the amazing regional variations in style--she contends that footbinding was a reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in a...
In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its origins, purpos...
The history of footbinding is full of contradictions and unexpected turns. The practice originated in the dance culture of China's medieval court and spread to gentry families, brothels, maid's quarters, and peasant households. Conventional views of footbinding as patriarchal oppression often neglect its complex history and the incentives of the women involved. This revisionist history, elegantly written and meticulously researched, presents a fascinating new picture of the practice from its beginnings in the tenth century to its demise in the twentieth century. Neither condemning nor...
The history of footbinding is full of contradictions and unexpected turns. The practice originated in the dance culture of China's medieval court and ...
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...
This pathbreaking work argues that literate gentry women in 17th-century Jiangnan, far from being oppressed or silenced, created a rich culture and me...
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, body and sexuality.
Showcases the centrality of gender in the formation of modern China
Demonstrates the extent to which translated feminisms -- whatever they mean -- have transformed the terms in which modern Chinese understand their own subjectivities...
This volume, which brings together articles by scholars and activists in China, Japan, Canada and the US in multiple disciplines, seeks to illuminate ...
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...
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 exchang...
This volume reveals the existence of a previously unknown stratum of literate women among the urban gentry in 17th- and 18th-century China arguing these women, far from being oppressed or silenced, created a rich culture and meaningful existence within the constraints of the Confucian system.
This volume reveals the existence of a previously unknown stratum of literate women among the urban gentry in 17th- and 18th-century China arguing the...
