9/25 Discussion

Dorothy Ko writes, "...no state decree or social movement can truly end footbinding until the individual lives have expired one by one. The 'voice' of these woman--not articulated voices but murmurs from within their bodies--arose from an ambiguous space between individual and national histories" (12).
For my question, I would like to examine this "ambiguous space" to which Ko refers. She admits to not understanding how exactly the issue of footbinding, which affected Chinese women individually, became the source of nationalism. She isn't quite sure if it was the work of foreign or indigenous reformers, but somehow, the national history of China and its presentation to the rest of the world used footbinding as a symbol. Is it possible for us to deconstruct this phenomenon, and hypothesize how an issue of gender inequality can be manipulated and transformed into a cultural argument for an entire people? Do the fights for unbinding women's foot and for Chinese patriotism focus on two kinds of oppression, or the same one that manifests in different ways? Do both movements have the same agenda despite the different actors? Are two kinds of evil being fought or is the power struggle the same?