Polygyny, Bound Feet, and Perversion

Abstract

The practices of polygyny and bound feet, now extinct in China, once held in common an underlying structure of perversion. In novels of the Qing dynasty, the man was perverse when he acted as if having multiple wives was not something he desired or initiated, but was something that arrived to him because of external conditions. In particular, women were the agents of polygynous marriage, not the passive participants, because they allowed and encouraged the man to take other wives. I call this form of marriage passive polygyny, where the man passively accepts polygyny. The underlying link between passive polygyny and bound feet has to do with the same logic by which the dominant subject appears to hand the production of a situation – polygyny or bound feet – to the ones who are dominated or, in the case of bound feet, mutilated. Women mutilated themselves and their daughters, but they did so of their own will, by their own methods, and on their own schedule. In households across China from the Song dynasty to the early Republic, mothers initiated and managed the binding of their daughters’ feet. With a bit of modification, the psychoanalytic definition of perversion describes the deep structure of both polygyny and footbinding, and does so in powerful and compelling terms that no one has yet begun to unravel.