Footbinding as Fashion

"It’s a comprehensive and convincing look at footbinding as a whole that will serve as an invaluable resource for further research on the practice, especially in Taiwan."

"In his meticulously researched and elegantly argued book Footbinding as Fashion, John Shepherd has made a major contribution by introducing a new body of evidence, the 1905 and 1915 censuses conducted by the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan."

"Shepherd provides insight in his book as he draws from historical records from diverse areas and times in China and Taiwan to illuminate the practice...It is now difficult to getfirsthand data about the practice from footbound women. Shepherd, however, has produced a highly detailed, historical account of footbinding in China."

"[A]n excellent book and contributes greatly to the literature on footbinding. It is comprehensive in its scope and innovative in its methodology and style of analysis. Above all, it is creative and convincing in its approaches and conclusions and in contributing to theoretical understandings of this custom."

"Footbinding as Fashion demonstrates convincingly that local social status hierarchies and the desire for respectability were the key influences on the spread or curbing of footbinding."

"Shepherd argues that footbinding was merely a fashion, but one closely linked to marriageability, and thus important to status competition."

"This book is a bravura performance: scientific anthropology, historical anthropology and sinology combined to deal with Chinese footbinding through ethnographic analysis, a skillful disaggregation of data sets, and an orientation towards theory guided by a critical (and convincingly dismissive) examination of pre-existing hypotheses regarding footbinding and the factors supporting it in late imperial China. By isolating footbinding as 'fashion,' Shepherd succeeds in a revisionist interpretation of this crippling practice, one offering a far better understanding of its very mixed acceptance by the Han Chinese."

"John Shepherd confronts the hypothesis that the Qing conquest government attempted to proscribe footbinding in China soon after it captured Beijing in 1644, and that these policies produced a reaction among Chinese elites that made footbinding as a marker of Chinese identity in the conquest state, eventually accruing even more ideological significance in relation to subordination of women and anxieties over economic competition.  Shepherd re-examines the evidence for the Qing period and adds a deep case study of turn-of-the-century Taiwan to suggest that that these hypotheses are too grand. Instead, he reinstates contemporary commentary both Chinese and foreign, and clarifies past explanations by anthropologists and sociologists, to argue that the meaning of footbinding was not identity, or the entanglements of male eroticism, or economic anxieties, but mundane concerns of beauty in the eyes of self and of the beholder, shaped by  the enduring thrall of conformity."