Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes

• Published date: 01 June 2015
• Author: Hagar Kotef
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591715579515
• Date: 01 June 2015
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Theory

2015, Vol. 43(3) 334 –355

© 2015 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591715579515

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Article

Little Chinese Feet

Encased in Iron Shoes:

Freedom, Movement,

Gender, and Empire

in Western Political

Thought

Hagar Kotef1,2

Abstract

This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding

in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the

image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own

limitations. The bound feet not merely illustrate a lack of freedom through an

image of disabled mobility. They also situate freedom within global (imperial)

and gendered frameworks. Via a reading of the image and its contexts, we

see that European freedom-as-movement emerged on the backdrop of two

imperial contrasts: (1) images of nomadism (in the contexts of America,

and later Africa and the Middle East), which are only marginally considered

in this paper, and (2) an assumed stagnation, that presumably prevailed in

the East. Yet surprisingly, the image was often evoked to say something

about Europe itself, rather than about its “others.” Therefore, it also reveals

the corporeal dimensions of a concept of freedom that has underlaid a

long liberal tradition. The crushed and squeezed feet of girls in China thus

marked both a gendered and an imperial divide between those who can

move freely, and therefore rule, and those who cannot rule because of their

1Minerva Humanities Institute, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

2Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London

Corresponding Author:

Hagar Kotef, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London,

Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG.

Email: hagarko@gmail.com

579515PTXXXX10.1177/0090591715579515Political TheoryKotef

research-article2015

Kotef 335

lack of mobility; yet at the same time, it undid this division by allowing the

East and its stationariness to permeate Europe through a multiply foreign

body: feminized, racially alien, and geographically distanced.

Keywords

gender, disability, freedom, Locke, movement

It is quite perplexing, Dorothy Ko once observed, that foot-binding, “a prac-

tice in a land five thousand miles away and that ended over half a century

ago, still exercises such a grip on our imagination.” The practice, whose ori-

gin is unclear and whose particularities are so diverse that Ko warns us

against seeing it as a single practice,1 can generate—indeed has generated—

many stories and inquiries. It evokes questions of sexuality (questions of

beauty, desirability, or kinship); of sexuality as oppression (but, Ko proposes,

also as a mode of finding one’s power within an oppressive framework: a

secret language of women, cultivating female networks in a man’s words); of

orientalism (the image of the East and its eroticization in the justification of

imperial formations); of disability (questions concerning health, physical

(im)mobility, and willful maiming); and of global distribution of both national

and gender-based modes of domination. In this brief essay, I mark one narrow

path, traversing some of these questions. Within this path, I refer not to the

practice itself, but its circulation in the West, and in particular the deployment

of the image in a specific lineage within Western political thought.

Following a brief framing, the three main sections of this essay are largely

organized alongside five main layers. First, via this image, I show the corpo-

real dimensions of the liberal concept(s) of freedom.2 “Compressed and hin-

dered from its due expansion,” as Locke would put it,3 the bound foot is often

an index for the lack of freedom. It is this tie between freedom and able,

unimpeded movement that I want to examine here. Bound and hindering

movement, the foot manifests clearly the claim, which Arendt once made and

which many thinkers of mobility have since reiterated, that movement is the

materialization of freedom, as well as its most salient content.4 Within this

framework, footbinding seemingly functions as a complete opposite to lib-

eral freedom. Yet a close examination of the deployment of its image in polit-

ical thought reveals a more complex picture: The Chinese practice is often

evoked, quite surprisingly, to represent the core of European freedom, rather

than its radical contrast. It reveals something about what happens to Western

women, children, or the very habitus of Europeans, and China becomes the

figure of Europe itself. Thus, a reading of the image may become a ground