A woman’s shoe. It has a pointed toe and sharp heel, and after much rain it curves upward, giving a sense of instability, a designed inability to walk with both feet on the ground. Women, I am told, live more emotional lives than do men. That is why Chinese women are capable of such great personal sacrifice. Click, click, click across concrete sidewalks and tiled floors; click, click, click through shopping malls and crowded buses. Women, someone says angrily, are more materialistic than are men. That fact alone explains why there are so many second wives in Shenzhen.

I watch women walk past in high heels and don’t only feel inelegant, but also uncomfortable; my legs tire, my toes cramp, and my ankles wobble. But you don’t have to wear heels, a friend reassures me, you’re already tall. So I learn that height, in Shenzhen, is considered a sign of innate, physiological quality. Superiority, actually. That’s why factory workers and waitresses wear high heels, my friend continues. Of course it’s not convenient, but otherwise they’ll have low self-esteem.

What do women in Shenzhen achieve by wearing high heels? The above examples suggest possible answers: despite physical discomfort, wearing high heels lets women live out their dreams, become more attractive, and feel good about their bodies. On the face of it, high heels seem to transform ordinary women into people in control of their own lives (even if we stumble when a heel gets lodged in a crack in the sidewalk). Yet such a formulation provokes interesting questions about the valuation of women in Shenzhen:

What is it about women that makes us ordinary, and consequently in needs of transformation before we are recognized as active, rather than passive social agents? (And given the amount of work that goes into becoming a woman, the question of having one’s agency socially recognized and justified seems particularly acute. A Zen expression has it that “Buddha eyes see Buddha, shit eyes see shit”. Yet what might it mean for understanding women’s agency if “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”? Does our agency ultimately reside in how we are and refused to be seen?)

What kinds of women are eligible for transformation? (In Shenzhen, not every woman wears high heels and these women are not universally “tall enough” to feel good about themselves in flats. Indeed, many of the un-heeled, so to speak, wear plastic flip-flops. Although even flip-flops now come with translucent heels. At any rate, women who don’t wear high heels, include: street cleaners, vegetable hawkers, beggars, bus ticket collectors, retirees, tennis players…So provisionally the question of eligibility is tied to class and task. But we knew that. Every woman who has gone shoe shopping knows this. What about social science isn’t self-evident? Or is the point to keep repeating the obvious until the situation improves?)

What are the limits to and direction of that transformation? (I’m struck by proliferation of two classes of high heel shoe—the professional, low heel for work, and the sexy, high heel for pleasure. Of course, there are attempts to blend the two, and there are some sexy low heels and, inexplicably, rather bland high heels. So, on a crude reading of high heel types the horizons of recognition for women’s agency seem to be office work and sexualized forms of pleasure, with a few minor variations. That is, even if wearing high heels doesn’t seem to get one recognition for intellectual agency might it help one in the pursuit of a banking career? If so, how and how far?)

And why, for that matter, especially given what seem to be the limited returns for wearing high heels, do the terms of transformation physically hurt? (It seems important that the shoes, which folks have pointed out to me as being “sexy” and “beautiful” are all quite high. Somehow a tolerance for lower back pain gets reworked into forms of social recognition. I could argue that social recognition is the reward for living with what is otherwise unnecessary pain. High-heeled women are recognized for having put on the shoe and that act itself is where the transformation from ordinary to active agent takes place. That is, women trade the willing subordination to social codes for a social recognition. But again, I get here and get stuck—why does it have to hurt? Or are we trading in forms of pain? Is it less painful to wear high heels than it is to be considered unattractive? To what extent are we defining being a woman in terms of acceptable pain? And at this moment, the discussion opens to a more general question—is the difference between men and women based on the social distribution of how much and what kind of pain a body might be recognized for enduring?)

I have photographed this shoe in sites where one could not wear it. That is point: putting on the shoe situates one, socially yes, but with reference to a material world. Without high heels (and the concomitant dependence on smooth surfaces to click across), where else might we go? How might we get there?

To see the shoe, please visit: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/00008es5