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"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 Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity, motherhood, and handiwork.
Her absorbing, superbly detailed, and beautifully written book demonstrates that in the women's eyes, footbinding had less to do with the exotic or the sublime than with the mundane business of having to live in a woman's body in a man's world.".
"Footbinding was likely to have started in the tenth century among palace dancers. Ironically, it was meant not to cripple but to enhance the grace. Its meaning shifted dramatically as it became domesticated in the subsequent centuries, though the original hint of sensuality did not entirely disappear.
This contradictory image of footbinding as at once degenerate and virtuous, grotesque and refined, is embodied in the key symbol for the practice - the lotus blossom, being both a Buddhist sign of piety and a poetic allusion to sensory pleasures.".
"Every Step a Lotus includes almost one hundred illustrations of shoes from different regions of China, material paraphernalia associated with the customs and rituals of footbinding, and historical images that contextualize the narrative. Most of the shoes, from the collection of The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, have not been exhibited before.
Readers will come away from the book with a richer understanding of why footbinding carries such force as a symbol and why, long after its demise, it continues to exercise a powerful grip on our imagination."--BOOK JACKET.
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Previews available in: English
Showing 2 featured editions. View all 2 editions?
Edition | Availability |
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1
Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet
November 5, 2001, University of California Press
Paperback
in English
0520232844 9780520232846
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2
Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet
December 11, 2001, University of California Press
Hardcover
in English
0520232836 9780520232839
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- Created April 30, 2008
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August 19, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
August 12, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
April 30, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |