women

Emma Thompson on the agony of high heel shoes at The Golden Globe Award 2014 [Bound Feet Blues]

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Emma Thompson

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 →

It’s the small things that make up some of the best stories [Bound Feet Blues]

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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

Storytelling round a campfire

But other stories have their place too. Stories on a smaller, less epic Continue reading →

Go Girl Guides! The ultimate feminists launch the “Free Being Me” badge to challenge unhealthy body talk [Bound Feet Blues]

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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

Girlguiding's new body confidence badge

I feel very strongly that a sense of shame and self-worthlessness permeates our identity as women, either externally imposed on Continue reading →

Bound Feet Blues: Inside the mind of a woman crippled by bound feet in ancient China

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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

 

 

Solo Performance: Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes (work in progress)

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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.

Small Feet

I’ve always had small, delicate feet. My shoe size is 3.5 and it’s a real problem trying to Continue reading →

Follow my Mood Board for Bound Feet Blues on Pinterest

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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 →

Fascinating X-ray photo of a woman’s contorted foot in stilletoe heels [Bound Feet Blues]

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It looks almost like torture. The bones in the foot sit in an excruciating 90-degree bend and the nails in the stiletto make it look like some medieval tool of pain. This is a woman in high heels, photographed not with normal visible light, but with high-energy x-ray radiation of the sort doctors use to examine broken bones.

That’s the description in this Guardian article about the photo below, by art photographer Hugh Turvey

Photograph of a woman's foot in a stiletto
I’m excited to find this image and to learn about … Continue reading →