body mutilation

Is looking Chinese really so awful?

/ Yang-May Ooi / Leave a comment

Looking Western seems to be an ideal of beauty for some Chinese women, according to an article in the Daily Mail. They are getting cosmetic surgery on their faces to remove their Chinese features – making their eyes bigger, sharpening their noses and reshaping their faces to seem longer.  Is looking Chinese really so awful for these women that they feel they have to destroy their own faces to look more Western and therefore in their minds more beautiful?

Looking at the photos in the article, I am reminded of depictions of women in anime comics, which originated in Japan – with large saucer like eyes and heart shaped faces, mapping Western features onto Eastern female faces. The skin tones also seem to have been altered to look paler and pinker. There, too, in those comic books, Western features are idolized.

Chinese woman before and after Westernizing cosmetic surgery

Bound Feet Blues explores why women in ancient China were prepared to do violence to themselves and their daughters in the context of footbinding, which mutilated a girl’s feet beyond repair. That brutal cultural practice died out about 70 years ago. But it looks like it has returned but in another form.

The underlying message of both bound feet and this Westernizing cosmetic surgery seems to me to be that Continue reading →

Would you get naked in front of a hundred people? Ten Women did

/ Yang-May Ooi / Leave a comment

In the finale of the theatre piece Ten Women, the women on stage tried an experiment. What would it be like to show our ordinary, un-Photoshopped bodies in all their frailty and glory to the world?

The all female cast asked themselves that and also invited any members of the audience to join them. Some of the performers stripped naked, others left their underwear on and still others remained fully clothed. No-one in the audience joined them apart from the writer/director and producer who were sitting among us.

It was a powerful, uncomfortable and also celebratory end to the work in progress show exploring what being a real woman with a real body means in a society where “the image of a hyper-sexualised, grossly exaggerated, objectified woman’s body is used to sell pretty much anything”.

TEN WOMEN smaller

Written and directed by Bethan Dear and produced by Amy Clamp from true stories drawn from the other women in the ensemble, Ten Women is a thought provoking piece that tells … Continue reading →

Bound Feet Blues: Would you slice up your feet to fit into your shoes – like the ugly sisters in the Cinderella story?

/ Yang-May Ooi / 1 Comment

In the Cinderella fairy tale, when the Prince finds the glass slipper dropped by Cinderella, he travels around the kingdom trying to find the woman whose foot is the perfect fit for the shoe. Many women long to marry the Prince, including Cinderella’s ugly sisters but their feet are too big – so they resort to chopping off their toes and their heels to make their feet fit into that single perfect glass slipper.

You think this is a fairy tale.

Well, think again.

It seems that women today are having foot surgery so that their feet fit more easily into high heel shoes or sandals, according to an article on Shape magazine on Cinderella Foot Surgery.

They are asking for toe shortenings… nail re-sizing, “foot facelifts,” “toe tucks,” and foot narrowing… [and] “toebesity” surgery [liposuction on fat toes]

Having spent so much time researching the brutal Continue reading →

Decades after the practice of bound feet died out, women are still mutilating their bodies in the name of beauty [Bound Feet Blues]

/ Yang-May Ooi / Leave a comment

This is a fascinating article about Chinese photographer Ji Yeo and her project to photograph women in the recovery room just after cosmetic surgery – See http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2014/mar/18/ji-yeo-cosmetic-surgery-frontline

According to the Guardian, she hated her body when she was younger – which was tied into her low self esteem –  and looked into having cosmetic surgery.

She didn’t have the surgery but started the Beauty Recovery Room photography project instead, taking photos of women just after cosmetic surgery.

A shot from Ji Yeo's Beauty Recovery Room series

As I’ve been thinking about bound feet and why women in China did that to themselves for my story performance Bound Feet Blues, I’ve been so much more aware of issues around women and their self esteem, body image, the role of fashion as power and body mutilation/ modification.

This project is particularly striking for me because it involves Chinese and East Asian women – symbolically making Continue reading →