Knowing Bodies, Knowing Self: The Western Woman Traveller's Encounter with Chinese Women, Bound Feet and the Half-Caste Child, 1880–1920

Abstract

This essay foregrounds three encounters with China in English-language travelogues, written by British, Australian and American women between 1880 and 1920: the encounter with Chinese women, footbinding and miscegenation. Discussing issues of gender and race this essay draws on models from feminist theory, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, which have featured prominently in travel writing studies in recent years. In close readings of a number of these female travellers' representations of the above encounters, the essay employs Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception to illuminate these scenes in their common focus on the body in relation to experiencing and knowing, as the French phenomenologist calls it, ‘the self, the world and the other’.