Dorothy
Ko
Department of History
Barnard College
One cannot attend to early modern women in a global frame without attending to definitions of modernity. One cannot attend to modernity without analyzing the unevenness in discursive and material powers that lies at its core. This paper seeks to reexamine the modernity of seventeenth-century China by mapping the impact of commercialization and global trade on women's domestic labor. Instead of relying on texts by male chroniclers, I analyze the archive of things produced and/or consumed by women: cosmetics, mirror stands, sewing implements, embroidered purses, and fashion accessories. My working hypothesis is that these objects open doors to the productive and desiring bodies of women that are not knowable from the archive of written words. In so doing, my goal is to map a cosmology of female desires from the tactility and sensuality of their material worlds.
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