Late Imperial China

Hands

Having just put aside the silver plectrum,

She sits down and picks up the gilded needle.

To make drawing lots she writes in small standard script,

Competing at gathering flowers she breaks her delicate nails.

They are easy to turn over, but it's hard to know what they express.

They can reach out, so one doesn't object to their softness.

Holding a golden shuttle, she weaves by the loom,

Close-fitting sleeves conceal slenderness.¹

We seek those ruled by partial sight and limited voices—not partiality for its own sake but, rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible.²

In late imperial China, female hands performed various tasks that had to be learned, from mundane, gender-specific work such as binding the feet, holding an infant, weaving, sewing, embroidering, preparing food, to more exalted forms of cultural performance such as playing a musical instrument, holding a book to read, or moving a brush over the surface of paper to write or paint. Many of these activities required or implied extensive training and discipline; some entailed rigorous and regular practice from a young age. The skillful female hand, then, in a metaphoric as well as literal sense, gave rise to the productivity and visibility of many Chinese women recovered by contemporary historians and scholars of literature.

In this study I explore specifically how the female hand is connected to knowledge and the construction of subjectivity and homosociality in the everyday practice of embroidery. I take as my guiding premise that women were the subordinate group within the orthodox Chinese gender and social hierarchy, but in spite of, or because of, their subordination, I want to draw on the notion of everyday practice through which the French scholar Michel de Certeau sought to re-vision and empower consumers, the "dominated element in society," as inventive in the ways they "make (bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules."³ Although my emphasis on women as producers seems to run counter to Certeau's focus on consumers, I see their inferior status in a dominant culture as broadly analogous. Certeau resuscitates the "passive," "colonized" consumers of popular culture by identifying their tactics and inventiveness in acts of everyday life such as reading, walking, and cooking.⁴ Chinese women were constructed by Confucian gender ideology as "passive readers" or "recipients," figuratively speaking, of the dominant culture. This statement is not meant to revive the stereotype of the victimized traditional woman that has been deconstructed by the seminal work of social historians such as Dorothy Ko and Francesca Bray. However, I am mindful that, despite women's active participation in and contribution to family and, by extension, social and economic life, their sphere of action and influence remained circumscribed by the hegemony of orthodox Confucian ideology. Therefore, to approach women's subjectivity from the critical perspective of the everyday could disclose modes of experience and agency otherwise obscured, and demonstrate, in concrete instances, the complex and partial ways in which women negotiated positions of empowerment, [End Page 2] knowledge, and authority. I believe the focus on the subject of embroidery, as practiced and represented by literate women of the gentry class, constitutes a productive way in which to explore the relation between forms of local practice and knowledge and possibilities for social transformation, as I elaborate below. From a political and social concern inspired by feminist theorizing on agency and subjectivity and by feminist activism for women who continue to be subordinated in societies and cultures of the present, I hope in my study to recover certain modes of agency, if not resistance, among Chinese women of...