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Original RadFem Art: Exploring Body Modification Through Chinese Footbinding
I Used To Feel Pressured To Produce Silver Linings When I Talked About Male Violence Against Women and Girls, Until I Started Learning How to Feel
I’m currently working on a series of paintings, with this one being the first..still unsure of its name. This particular piece is inspired by Su Xi Rong from Shandong province, China; a woman who lived through the male torture practice of footbinding. During a rereading of “Woman Hating” by Andrea Dworkin, I was reminded of a photo series by Jo Farrell on some of the last women who survived Chinese footbinding.
I looked at the photos and had that familiar visceral reaction of feeling a woman’s pain. This was followed by that connection of female solidarity, of survival, of knowing that us women go through so much male brutality that’s barely spoken of. Yet we’re called weak and fragile. There’s this myth that women are taught not to be tough. That’s a mischaracterization of what’s going on. Women and girls are taught to be “tough” in a sex-specific way. What tough means for women and girls is learning to tolerate male torture until we stop screaming. The more comfortable we can pretend to be with the uncomfortable, the more we’re seen as strong. This isn’t the world we asked for, it’s a manmade world that we’re fighting to simultaneously survive and dismantle.
The specific ways in which men and boys torture women and girls continually changes, but the roots are always the same. It’s all female-hating. And the perps are systematically male.
Su Xi had to tell herself to keep going because sex-based oppression is just how things were, and are…This man’s world is meant to strip women and girls of sovereignty, and Su Xi was growing up when we had even less class access. As much as we can see her resilience, my hope with this painting is to also show the depravity, loss, grief, and suffering women endured through body modification such as footbinding.
The technical aspect of my painting is inspired by Su Xi Rong, but the story of my artwork diverges into my own world of fiction. I want to make this clear because painting based on a person can be interpreted as truth about their experiences. My painting is a summation of my interpretations of male-created body modification and the specific realities of Chinese footbinding, through a radical feminist lens. There are women, maybe even Su Xi herself, that might disagree with my viewpoints. In my research on the topic, I noticed a theme in the published works that came up in my Google web search. There was this repetitive idea that critique and reflections that name footbinding as Male Violence Against Women and Girls are not giving the “full picture” of this practice. There was also a theme of obscuring women’s suffering and the male perpetrators’ roles.
In an interview with Jo Carrell, the BBC host distorts the meaning of female “empowerment” by using the word to describe the rock and the hard place that women and girls live in when we lack meaningful choice. There seems to be this need to malewash the experiences, so as not to point to the male torture of it all. Watch at minute 2:34 in this video to see how this logic plays out in real-time.
Both women seem to genuinely want a better world for women and girls, clearly have compassion, but their own individual need to dissociate from male violence and speak according to male culture’s rules is what wins out. This problem is so much bigger than the individual choices of women. We’re punished if we speak up, we’re punished if we stay silent. There is no meaningful choice right now for any woman or girl in this manmade world.
“Culture”, “tradition”, and “race” get used as gaslighting, this lie that our culture’s too complex for an “outsider” to grasp. There’s this assumption of condescension that is then met with condescension, all to obscure the facts. Maybe because I’ve seen this done within my own South Asian culture, I am now more aware of this trap. But I wasn’t always confident enough to listen to my gut. I silenced these truths because I didn’t want to rock the boat. I was protective of my Indian his-story and didn’t want to be challenged by dissent. I had dealt with the centuries of inherited colorism/racism/xenophobia from outsiders, and I didn’t want to replicate such oppressions. Yet somehow I still did. There were times when I tried to downplay male violence in the name of misunderstood cultures, misunderstood men. My art is my way of forcing myself to see that which makes me want to dissociate into numb ignorance, inevitability, or apathy. My art forces me to face the fact that men have created this culture, that is Male Violence Against Women and Girls. That’s a disgusting pill to try and swallow. That’s why I’m choking on it. You as well.
As visual artists (and other creators and makers), we’re compelled to go where the creativity takes us. Not just for aesthetically pleasing artwork, but for our quest to understand ourselves and the world around us. I absolutely need to earn a living from this labor, I’m almost out of money from my last contractor job, and I need a new income stream. But I also can’t force myself to create art just to be sellable. Whenever I do that, I kill my own artistic language. Then I block my very ability to feel and therefore repair and heal. I am always trying to strike that balance between making a living through my art and making art that makes me want to live. My art serves many purposes. It is all interconnected. The need for expression, the root purpose of any language, will always be the core of my artistic creations. Artists do what we do because we can’t not. We also are worthy of investment for what we add to the world, for the places we travel to, so we can show these reflections.
Just as I write to better express and understand what I think, I draw and paint in the same vein. Visual art is just another language. And this language can take me to a very dark and difficult place, where male torturers live. I travel from my own experiences with men and boys, to that of my sisters everywhere. I see Su Xi’s picture, and then I see a whole web of other stories. From that I weave the one that my knowledge and my bias has written. I imagine what it means for a man to torture a woman in a way that changes her very gait, the very structure of her anatomy and physiology. I think back after puberty when I first started training myself to control my hips when I walk. By age three or four I was taught that when men or boys raped me, it would always be labeled as my fault. I think that was the first time I was taught to fully disembody myself. It was never an inside thought. I see that recurring childhood nightmare where my legs have stopped working. I can’t run, and there’s a man after me. There’s always a man or boy after me in these nightmares. When I’m lucky, I can’t remember these dreamscapes, where I filter everything I’ve seen during my waking hours. I might be able to forget the visuals, but I can never shake the feelings. Those feelings of my heart racing, that impending doom that I can’t get away. I could only watch horror as a girl and young woman, back when I was still numb enough to not feel. Back when I was fully disembodied. Now, there’s not even enough weed in the world to help me hide away. The parts keep coming together.
The woman in my painting is feeling that same doom. Is she Su Xi, is she make-believe, or is she me? I painted that open door for all of us. Isn’t every woman and girl taunted by that supposedly open door? Freedom always feels so close, yet so far away, maybe probable, or impossible? I’m a free American woman, two fully functioning feet and no closed doors. But I too know that feeling of impending doom. What’s waiting on the other side of that door? It’s why years ago I created colorful worlds inside my head. I fought the nightmares with my daydreams of something better and brighter. It didn’t matter as a girl if all my stories were fiction. I told myself, “keep fucking going.” Does every girl have a castle on a cloud in her dreams? Resilience…hope…is a sick and funny thing. It operates just like insanity. Yet without it, I know I’d be dead.
I look at the photos of Su Xi and ask, what was the artist Jo Carrell, trying to capture? What was Su Xi trying to show or hide from the observers? We see Su Xi’s hazy smile, while the camera sharpens its focus on her feet. Her hands rest on her lap, a juxtaposition of embodiment; a reminder of the importance of each cell, each limb.
I reflect on how we adapt when we have no choice…it’s do or die for women and girls. If a man takes away our feet, we learn to make do without complaint. Would anyone listen anyway?
From, “Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China “by Laurel Boussen and Hill Gates
Another compelling moment in the BBC interview with Jo Carrell is a statement she makes on how the body modification hasn’t “inhibited” these women “at all” (minute 3:41).
Out of context the absurdity seems obvious. But when you watch the entire interview it becomes clear that this misguided reflection is meant to give the audience a sense of hope, a sense that it’s not all bad. And most importantly the message to the self that women and girls won’t be victims. As if divorcing ourselves from the word means we can kill the memories or male risk. As if the word is the problem, not the unspoken words, male perpetrator. But I keep asking…”it hasn’t inhibited them at all,” compared to what? Is this not a circular argument? Are we to believe that breaking your foot doesn’t inhibit you at all? Are we to believe that having a disability doesn’t inhibit you at all? Or that when you have to put food on the table, it will appear as if nothing inhibits you to make that happen? Is our quest to not name male culture as a violent culture causing the snake to eat its own tail? What happens when we force silver linings? I know everything wasn’t taken from her, from me, or from any woman or girl. We exist far beyond males’ victimization. I write daily in my gratitude journal. I watched that movie about Mary Vincent, who had her arms chopped off by a man, and how she kept going. I have clung to “at least” for so very many years. The double-edged sword of my existence. I laugh, thinking “isn’t that how we’re taught to see the world as girls?” We’re taught, “it could always be worse…at least, at least, at least…” We’re taught we must learn a lesson, we must make the best of it. And most importantly, never ever ever call yourself a victim. Lest we be reminded that there’s a perpetrator. Lest we be reminded that we are full, feeling, human beings. We are not dolls, no matter how many times men treat us like one. We’re not tough when we can’t feel, but it sure does make it easier to deal.
I think our mothers and grandmothers teach us these male myths for well-intentioned reasons. Anything can become reasonable after having a man hold a gun in your mouth for hours. We only look at our mothers, because impact is all that ends up mattering. But she’s the one closest to us, forced to take care of us, so of course she is the messenger. What does it change if we shoot her? This male thinking has been beaten into her by a man with his hand on her throat. Our mothers are not simply apathetic or cruel. They are the product of a distorted ecosystem, one where clinging to false hope is the norm. Our mother’s, mother’s, mother’s, mother’s, mother’s dreams were stripped away by male enslavers. Women had their female history stolen from them and replaced with male fairytales. Our mother is trapped and trained in that false hope, one that can only ever mean a nicer cage, maybe a nicer guard. Mothers are trying to spare their daughters, by dampening her hopes. Mothers try to cynically warn daughters that the road ahead is treacherous and that mother doesn’t know how to get out of this. She imparts hope through hopelessness, through a message of succumbing to endless harm reduction, to make the best of a bad situation. She wants to marry you off to the richest man, because she can’t see out of his male-created box. It’s pointless to try to find blame amongst the enslaved. It’s not our mothers’ fault for parroting lies. She is trying to survive the men who hold the power of the parasitic plantations. Our strategy can’t be to blame our mothers, to forgive her, to kill her, or to follow her lead. Instead our strategy should lead us to learning the plantation owners’ names, all his descendants, so we can make sure he and his brethren can’t ever do this again. Su Xi moved about the world on broken feet so that one day her daughter might have two feet that work. Maybe our mothers are waiting for the prodigal daughters to return. The daughters who, one by one, wipe out the male torturers.
This is where the story of my artwork is taking me. And it all starts with that one photo, of Su Xi’s foot resting on her mattress. Why does she make me think of my own mother? Her scars were so very different, yet I feel a yearning and an endless pit of despair so similar. I was the prodigal daughter from day one. I saved my mother, while she tried to snuff my life out. When all my high school friends felt disgusted by the Andrea Yates case, there’s a reason I secretly felt pain for the mother. I’ve experienced the violence of women trapped in a manmade cage. I’m never surprised when my fellow female inmates turn on me, but they don’t turn on the males. Male parasitism will have a woman doing insane things in the name of survival.
When I paint Su Xi’s foot, my lower lip twitches. I can feel the ducts in my eyes contract, but I’ve spent all my tears for the month. I’m learning how to feel for the first time in my life, because I’ve routinely dissociated as a matter of survival. I know in my gut that Su Xi coped this way too. I see women and girls all around me, moving like zombies, knowing how to look pretty while they do it. I’m a woman too, so I can see right through it. I was once a zombie girl, I too was trained to perform impenetrable. I can say I was a victim of rape without wincing. I can name my list of traumas without flinching. But I can’t feel it, at least not yet. So I paint. Maybe one day I’ll be the kind of woman who’s tough enough to feel without being afraid.
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