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While a slender body is a prerequisite for beauty today, plump women were considered ideal in Tang Dynasty China and Heian-period Japan. Starting around the Southern Song period in China, bound feet symbolized the attractiveness of women. But in Japan, shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth long were markers of loveliness. For centuries, Japanese culture was profoundly shaped by China, but in complex ways that are only now becoming apparent. In this first full comparative history of the subject, Cho Kyo explores changing standards of feminine beauty in China and Japan over the past two millennia. Drawing on a rich array of literary and artistic sources gathered over a decade of research, he considers which Chinese representations were rejected or accepted and transformed in Japan. He then traces the introduction of Western aesthetics into Japan starting in the Meiji era, leading to slowly developing but radical changes in representations of beauty. Through fiction, poetry, art, advertisements, and photographs, the author vividly demonstrates how criteria of beauty differ greatly by era and culture and how aesthetic sense changed in the course of extended cultural transformations that were influenced by both China and the West.

The Libidinal Economy of China engages a range of post-colonial and psychoanalytically informed thinkers in a truly cross disciplinary study. Lacanian theories on hysteria, femininity, and narcissism are applied in the international domain of geopolitics to formulate a general theory on China’s relationship to the West. David Eng and Homi Bhabha are employed for discussing racial fetishism in contemporary China, while Slavoj Žižek’s ideas on violence and the Other are engaged in explaining the emotional dimension of national identification. The study concludes that China and the New Chinese Nationalism is firmly under the gaze of a Western Other analogous to a male gaze. That Other rules the libidinal economy of consumer culture, which explains China’s recurring history of wanting to emulate and catch up with the West while simultaneously reacting to such an attained intimacy with castration anxiety and aggressive hysteria.

\"This is a highly interdisciplinary work that deals with the issues from philosophical, historical, literary, cinematic, and post-colonial perspectives. Bodies in China explores a wide range of subjects seldom studied in comparative philosophy and Chinese feminist thought. First, it takes female bodies in Chinese context as the foci to discuss a different conceptual model for replacing a Cartesian dualistic model; secondly, it offers a variety of interesting materials, sources, and cases studies as cross-references to build up the ground for a further study of traditional value and contemporary practice; and thirdly, it has engaged Chinese philosophy as a critical intervention to reframe existing scholarship in different gender issues and aesthetics.\" ROBIN R. WANG, LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY, USABodies in China uses Chinese philosophy to reframe Western scholarship on gender, body, and aesthetics. Does Confucianism rule out the capacity of women as moral subjects and hence as aesthetic subjects? Do forms of Chinese philosophy contribute or correspond to patriarchal Confucian culture? Can Chinese philosophy provide alternative perspectives for Western feminist scholars? The first section considers theoretical and philosophical discussions of Western traditions and how the ideas offered by Confucians and Daoists can provide alternative body ontologies for critical feminist practices. The second section reviews female aesthetical representations ranging from The Book of Songs to the work of the controversial body artist He Chengyao. The third section traces changing perceptions of femininity from imperial to its current cosmopolitan era using a range of case studies including Ming dynasty literature, Hong Kong women's fashion in the 1960s, and the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Overall, this book discusses new conceptual models that feminist scholars are using to displace dualism and emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian models and metaphors.

Even though footbinding was not practiced by every woman in late Imperial China, the aesthetic, financial, and erotic advantages of footbinding permeated all aspects of language. In Aching for Beauty, Wang interprets the mystery of footbinding as part of a womanly heritage-\"a roaring ocean current of female language and culture.\"_x000B_