Ever since I’ve been working on my story project Bound Feet Blues, I’ve been drawn to news and other matters to do with women’s feet and shoes – especially anything that hobbles us, limits movements and involves pain.
I am excited to see a Guardian report on the rise of ugly – but comfortable – shoes.
The article quotes Natalie Kingham, head Continue reading
I’ve been researching the history of bound feet for my solo performance piece Bound Feet Blues.
According to Wikipedia
Bound feet became a mark of beauty and was also a prerequisite for finding a husband. It also became an avenue for poorer women to marry into money; for example, in Guangdong in the late 19th century, it was customary to bind the feet of the eldest daughter of a lower-class family who was intended to be brought up as a lady. Her younger sisters would grow up to be bond-servants or domestic slaves and, when old enough, either the concubines of rich men or the wives of laboring men, able to work in the fields alongside them. In contrast, the tiny, narrow feet of the “ladies” were considered beautiful and made a woman’s movements more feminine and dainty, and it was assumed these eldest daughters would never need to work. Women, their families, and their husbands took great pride in tiny feet, with the ideal length, called the “Golden Lotus”, being about 7 cm (3 inches) long.[7] This pride was reflected in the elegantly embroidered silk slippers and wrappings girls and women wore to cover their feet. Walking on bound feet necessitated bending the knees slightly and swaying to maintain proper movement and balance, a dainty walk that was also considered erotic to men.[8]
The Guardian has this amusing piece commenting on the new fashion for flat shoes for women.
“Fashion trends generated by the fashion industry exist to make life complicated…. Now that the fashion industry has realised that women are fed up with being told they need to wear five-inch heels to look stylish, they’ve proffered flat shoes, but complicated ones.”
For me, there’s also something about fashion that is meant to make those in the latest fashion feel special – AND to make those who don’t have the latest outfits and accessories feel small, ugly and humiliated. It’s a power thing – a way to control women to fit in with the self-styled “elite” arbiters of what is fashionable. More than that, this mindset also extends to body image – by making us all want to fit in to an ideal skeletal body shape so that those who don’t end up feeling shame and self-loathing. It’s a way of controlling women and our bodies.
In researching the history of bound feet for my story performance Bound Feet Blues, I’ve been reflecting on fashion and its insidious destructive power. The elite in ancient China set the trend for bound feet and as it became more Continue reading
I’ve been meaning to post this item for awhile. Emma Thompson is fabulous and one of my all time heroines. I loved her appearance at The Golden Globe awards earlier this year – for her irreverence and cheekiness, all the while maintaining her cool elegance and stature.
I love that she appeared barefoot with her stilettoes in her hand – and joked about the red colour of their soles being the blood from her feet, revealing what all of us women can feel in high heels but never dare to say! Painful feet is of course Continue reading
We often think that stories need to be grand and on an epic scale to be compelling. We think that great stories involve heroic, larger than life characters. And so, we come to believe that our own stories mean very little because they happen on such a small scale compared to people who have been through war, disaster, terrible illnesses and events that seem “Worthy” of recognitiion.
I am of course not disrespecting the trauma and suffering of people who have been through those harsh and terrible experiences. Those stories are meaningful and need to be told.
Storytelling round a campfire
But other stories have their place too. Stories on a smaller, less epic Continue reading
The Guardian reports that the Girl Guides are launching a new badge “Free being me” to encourage young girls to have more confidence and a more positive sense of their own bodies:
“The charity believes girls are under intense pressure to look a certain way and hopes courses designed to unmask beauty myths, expose airbrushing and challenge unhealthy body talk will boost their confidence. Girls who complete the training will be awarded a “free being me” badge if they can show that they have taken up the mantle and worked on spreading the message in their schools and communities.”
Read the whole article at http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/20/girlguiding-body-confidence-badge-guides
I feel very strongly that a sense of shame and self-worthlessness permeates our identity as women, either externally imposed on Continue reading
As an author of memoir or true stories that is the big dilemma: how do you tell stories about your life without upsetting the people you love who may be an integral part of those stories – especially because they are an integral part of your life?
I’ve mulled over this long and hard as I’ve been working on Bound Feet Blues, which tells stories from my life – and which inevitabley involve those people who are an important part of my life.
My blog post on my main blog StoryGuru explores this dilemma in more depth: see True Stories Told Live: Innocent Bystanders May Be Written Into This Story [Bound Feet Blues]
“One of the challenges about true stories told live – ie telling stories from your own life – is that they involve other people. And while these people may have signed up to your life as a friend or enemy or lover or relative or colleague, they may not have signed up to be in your story, whether that story is a written memoir or an oral story told live to others. So, how do you tell stories or write books about your life without upsetting those who appear in them because they happen to be around during the incident you are talking about?…
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Photo: thanks to flattop341 on flickr.com (CCL)
What was it like to be a woman crippled by bound feet? This question has always haunted me ever since I was a child when I learnt about the bound feet women in China.
I have been researching this question for my story performance Bound Feet Blues.
You can read my essay about the practice of footbinding and how it affected generations of women emotionally and pyschologically over at my main blog StoryGuru.co.uk: see “Bound Feet Blues: What was it like to be a woman crippled by bound feet in ancient China?”
“For a thousand years, women crippled their daughters to create perfect dainty little bound feet which were beloved by men and became the currency for a good marriage. What was it like to be one of those women? Why did they carry on such a cruel practice?
…. [READ MORE]”
Photo: flyer for Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes – from the author’s personal archive
In Chinese tradition, women with tiny bound feet were desirable as wives and lovers, their delicate feet seen as objects of both status and sexual fetish. In her first full length storytelling piece Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes, Chinese-Malaysian story performer Yang-May Ooi explores themes of female desirability, identity and empowerment in this personal story told through the shoes in her life.
The image of Chinese women with bound feet has haunted me since I was a child. I think of these women who have been crippled for life ever since they were 4 years old, unable to walk, with broken stumps for feet beneath the delicately embroidered silk shoes. Just so they can appear to have little, dainty feet and seem to be elegant and graceful – and therefore desirable and marriageable.
I’ve always had small, delicate feet. My shoe size is 3.5 and it’s a real problem trying to Continue reading
Images can help the creative process. Artists, writers and other creatives use Mood Boards to help them in their work. Discover how Author and Story Performer Yang-May Ooi has been using Pinterest to collect pictures in a Mood Board for her current project, Bound Feet Blues.
For Bound Feet Blues, I’ve found it helpful to collect images of bound feet and the Chinese cheong sahm (long dress) as well as other images – no matter how tangently – that relate to the various themes I’m exploring:
# Chinese Continue reading
Bound Feet Blues - A Life Told in Shoes 