UC Santa Barbara

“Golden lilies” is a euphonious English term widely used to refer to bound feet or bound-foot Chinese women. The female foot, although is usually seen as a personal and trivial matter today, was seriously implicated not only in Chinese nationalism and modernization, but also in U.S. enforcement of Chines exclusion laws, as well as in the construction of U.S. superiority in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), footbinding had become a widespread practice among all social classes in China. In the face of national crisis resulted from Western encroachment and Japanese aggression, Chinese elites and nationalists launched nation-wide anti-footbinding campaigns to revitalize the nation in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, the Otherness of China appeared most vividly in the custom of footbinding. Paradoxically, however, U.S. immigration officials perceived bound feet as a sign of better morals and higher class. Bound feet thus became a means to obtain an exemption from U.S. laws against Chinese immigration. Therefore, this dissertation started with a simple question: What made possible the admission of the Other?

Footbinding has been commonly considered as a topic of Chinese history and as a subject of feminist critique of the “male gaze.” This study instead, investigates it as a visual, discursive and bureaucratic vehicle in U.S. enforcement of Chinese exclusion laws across the Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shifts from prominent themes of U.S. immigration historiography–restriction and exclusion–to who was admitted by examining the bodily proof of exemption, knowledge production in the immigration administration, and the larger social milieu which granted validity to those rationales and logic.

Using Chinese- and English-language sources, this dissertation not only challenges U.S. construction of the Other by exposing fissures and instabilities of U.S. orientalist representations of footbinding, but also provides a critique of Chinese participation in orientalism. An exploration of immigration case files reveals that racialized, gendered and classist perceptions of Chinese bodies were utilized to crack the gates of the United States, which in turn, reinforced footbinding as a timeless oriental practice, visualizing the backwardness, cruelty and racial inferiority of China. An examination of historical newspapers, magazines, and periodicals indicates that there was no monolithic condemnation towards footbinding in U.S. discourses and that the Chinese internalized orientalism in their reaction towards the U.S. discourses and displays of “golden lilies.” Drawing information from extensive missionary publications intended for different audiences in both countries, I challenge the often-exaggerated missionary success in banning this practice by showing how missionary accounts rendered invisible the Chinese-led anti-footbinding movements. In addition, this study analyzes immigration archives as a contested site of knowledge production to reveal the technologies utilized by law enforcers to marginalize Chinese voices and place the Other in a different time. Tracing how white female bodies were discussed and measured across the Atlantic and in untold stories of Chicago Cinderella foot contests, this dissertation explicates striking similarities between U.S./Western foot fever and Chinese footbinding.

Through a comparative and trans-Pacific lens, I demonstrate the power of the visual and the body in shoring up multiple forms of U.S. orientalism in a trans-Pacific public sphere and in making possible the paradoxical codification of the Chinese Otherness in U.S. inclusion. This approach allows us to juxtapose the changing reality of China with timeless, static U.S. representations. It shows the paradoxes of U.S. inclusion undergirded by its operations of differences, which often denied coevalness with the Other. This study offers insights into the historical forces that have contributed to fortifying racial, social, cultural, religious and institutional borders with the Other. It reveals how this past as a collective memory and legal legacy continues to shape contemporary assumptions about inclusion and exclusion, tradition and modernity, and globalization and nationalism.