Walking in the Forbidden City: embodied encounters in narrative geography

Abstract

This paper engages contemporary literature from body studies to situate the Confucian body and its interactions with the space of the Forbidden City. The analysis demonstrates how discomfort, anxiety and the restraining of the body unfold through embodied encounters in the space. The paper focuses on the limits to what is possible in the movements of body, and how these movements rely upon and resist the space promised by Confucian thought. Understood as an embodied activity, walking is mobilised in this investigation by comparing the journey to meet the emperor taken by eunuchs and provincial officials in Imperial times and my own bodily experience in contemporary time.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] I include other associated bodily activities, such as touching, hopping, squatting and crouching, into the walking task.

[2] Hester Parr and Olivia Stevenson (2014, 567, original italics) claim that narrative meets ‘the demands of academic output to be resourceful—to act as resources and as mediums of knowledge transfer and exchange.’

[3] As Crawford (2015, 222, original italics) states: ‘those [bodies] who were shamed … came to disparage their own bodies engendering what was referred to as body image distortion or disturbance, a state that could in turn cause serious degradation of the ego, personality, identity, or self-concept.’

[4] I also adapt Days’s use of images to visually substantiate her analysis in my Ficto-Critical passages in the next section to underscore how the integration of images consolidates readers’ understanding of bodily experience and the sense of being with the body in the space.

[5] They are officials dispatched to serve at provinces and cannot return to the capital (Beijing) without permission.

[6] The buildings of the Ministry of Rites were located to the North East outside of the Forbidden City.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty Research Grant of the University of Science and Technology [FRG-17-047-FA].

Notes on contributors

Peng Liu

Peng Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Arts, Macau University of Science and Technology. He works in the field of Culture Studies and Visual Culture, with a focus on the notion of embodiment. Recent publications include chapters in: Body Tensions: Beyond Corporeality in Time and Space (Brill, 2014); Fashion Exploring Critical Issues (with L. Lan, Brill, in press). He is currently finishing a chapter in Affective Architectures: More-than-representational Approaches to Heritage to be published by Routledge. He is also a practicing visual artist working with a wide range of mediums.