Her Feet Hurt: Female Body and Pain in Chen Duansheng's Zaisheng yuan (Destiny of Rebirth)

Abstract

This paper investigates the female writer Chen Duansheng’s tanci fiction Zaisheng yuan, a story centered on a cross-dressed female protagonist. Evoking story-telling and stage performance, tanci fiction is a lengthy, rhymed narrative genre favored by female writers in the early modern Jiangnan region. This paper approaches Zaisheng yuan from the perspectives of gender and the senses to exam-ine its representations of the female foot and pain. Zaisheng yuan repeatedly asso-ciates pain with the female practice of footbinding and spotlights the bound foot to address the female characters’ distress and identity crisis. While the haptic-oriented descriptions of female feet speak to the gender stereotypes, through depicting both passive and active revealing of female feet, Zaisheng yuan demonstrates the emerging possibilities of female agency. In contrast to the male literary tradition, which treats the female body as a static spectacle, Zaisheng yuan endeavors to por-tray bound feet as an ongoing experience that causes pain from daily movements and calls for sympathetic audiences and mutual support from the female commu-nity. However, there are also times when the experience of pain, physical and especially psychological, cannot be shared, not only between genders but also between mothers and daughters, and this may indeed create obstacles to female companionship. To sum up, pain caused by bound feet provides a framework to shape the way women experienced the world, identified themselves, and inter-preted the possibilities and limitations of their ways of living in early modern Chinese society.