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The Carnal Hand and Fetishism in Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand

Nicholas Y. B. Wong

Introduction

This article will look specifically into the representation of the carnal hand and the fetishized hand in Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand (2004) in relation to the induction of sexual desire and its fulfillment. The portrayal of this particular body part as a mischievous and carnal tool involves a detailed discussion on the relationship between the hand, skin, and the Sartrean sense of touch. The first part of this article is to bring up my observation on the differences between the male and female hand in the short film. Zhang (a tailor) uses his hands to make cheongsam for his clients, one of whom is Ms. Hua (a call girl). His hands derive eroticism to relieve his repressed sexual desire towards the woman not only by finely producing cheongsam especially for her, but also by being a tool of measurement of her body figure. On the contrary, as a call girl, Ms. Hua primarily uses her hands to seduce the opposite sex. In a way, her hands are blunter and more aggressive in providing and re-inviting sexual desires. The second part of this article will depart from the carnal hand and move to the discussion on various observable fetishes, which include the gloves, the cheongsam, and ultimately the hand itself. I will argue that the black gloves (which appear in only one short scene) are a symbol of nostalgia, which stands for the irretrievable romance between Chow Mo-wan and So Lai-chen, who fell in love with each other all the way back to In the Mood For Love (2000) and 2046 (2004). The cheongsam can also be a fetish in the sense that it forms a second skin of the wearer thanks to its tight and revealing cutting. Further- more, by using Freud’s idea from his 1927 essay “Fetishism,” I am going to suggest that the hand could be considered a substitute of the male’s penis in the short film.

The Carnal Hand

The Hand Is All about Touches The Hand was made in the middle of the shooting of 2046. Thanks to the

SARS outbreak in Hong Kong and other Asian countries, the project of 2046 was temporarily suspended. Wong stated that he originally planned to shoot The Hand in Shanghai and the background should be the 1930s. His plan, however, was altered because of the epidemic. Finally, it was shot in Hong Kong and the background was changed to the 1960s. There is only one hint that the movie is set in Hong Kong. The weather report (via the voiceover)

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announces a typhoon is approaching the territory and typhoon signal one has been hoisted. Even though the SARS epidemic seems to have brought so much inconvenience to the production of 2046 and The Hand, it indeed shapes the theme of the short film, which is all about touches and the inhibition against touching each other.

During the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, different health authorities kept advising Hong Kong people to wear a mask and to wash hands as often as possible with disinfectant liquid. It would be best if we could avoid any physical contact with any foreign objects. This inspires the director to make a short film on touching. The opening of the short film already addresses directly the issue of the epidemic. It starts with a scene when Ms. Hua (Gong Li) is heavily infected with tuberculosis and she is visited by her tailor Zhang (Chang Chen). She asks Zhang not to visit her anymore because the disease is contagious. The same scene is shown again near the end of the film. How she contracts such a deadly disease is not told clearly; however, I would speculate that she caught a very serious cold when waiting for “clients” near the wa- terfront every night. This marks a breakthrough in Wong’s films as almost all of his films in the past are thematically about alienation between individuals and the ineffectiveness of their mutual communication. The romance appears and dies out simply naturally. It is therefore interesting to notice that The Hand is his first production in which the physical death of a protagonist ends a romantic relationship.1

The Desire to Touch and Pleasure of Being Touched Barry Reay (2002: 133) writes that “the touching of hands [is] a means

of revealing character. The ‘soul’ [is] declared in the hand as well as in the face.” Unfortunately, such a character becomes elusive in the (post)modernity. The alienation between individuals makes touching such a rare treasure that everybody longs for:

The endless appeal to the sense of touch one finds in contemporary visual imagery, unaccompanied as it is by actual tactile gratification, may have helped make touch the hungriest sense of postmodernity. The inability to touch the subject matter of the images that surround us, even though these have a tremendous impact on our lives, produces a sense of alienation, the feeling of being out of touch with one’s society, one’s environment and one’s cosmos – an isolated fragment in an indifferent universe (Classen, 2005: 2).

Since the touch has become so cherished, the desire for it also changes to be more urging and the pleasure, if fulfilled, would be more satisfying. As Ashley Montagu argues, a person “can spend his life blind and deaf and completely lacking the senses of smell and taste, but [s/he] cannot survive at all without the functions performed by the skin” (quoted from Tuan, 2005: 74).2 One use of the skin and the hand is to strive for desire and pleasure on touching and being touched. On his first visit to Ms Hua’s apartment, Zhang is seduced and intimidated by her “masturbation offer,” which, in turn, brings him an ultimate

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amount of pleasure. Stendhal also expresses the same kind of pleasure in On Love: “The greatest happiness that love can give is the first hand-pressure of the woman one loves” (Stendhal, 1822: 105). During the course of seduction, Zhang remains speechless and timid like a dog inside Ms. Hua’s bedroom. The sensational touch surpasses the power of speech. The verbal language is too thrilled to be expressed; instead, the intimacy and desire triggered by the carnal hand could only be felt by the hungry skin. Havelock Ellis gives a similar account on how speechless he was when his hand was being touched:

One day, while jointly correcting a piece of work, [my colleague] touched my hand. This produced a sweet and pure sensation of thrill through the whole system. I said nothing, in fact, was too thrilled for speech; and never to this day have shown any responsive action, but… I have experienced the most pleasurable emotions (Ellis, 1905: 9).

The masturbation scene not only marks the first encounter with the erotic female hand, but also defines the hand as motioned and sexually inquisitive in nature. As Yi-Fu Tuan (2005: 75) remarks, the hand is “restless; indeed, it is tempting of [it] as curious.”

Reay (2002: 133) states that “[hands are] a badge of occupation and class.” Ms. Hua’s hands help her make a living by pleasing her clients sexually. It is obvious that she is deeply obsessed with them. There are scenes in which she always holds the receiver up high and exposes them in front of the camera.3 There is a courtship scene between her and Mr. Zhao (her client) that takes place in her bedroom. The camera remains on the waist level of both characters. Their faces cannot be seen, but the audience can see very clearly how their hands touch each other’s clothed bodies, suggesting that the hand is the true central character in the film.

The Hand is adapted from a short story named Twilight of a Ballroom Dancer, written by the Shanghai-ese writer, Shi Zhe–cun.4 The short story cen- ters on the hands of the “ballroom dancer” (wu nu, meaning a call girl) named Su Wan. Her hands are usually represented as an authority to tame her pet:

Although Su Wan’s hand is massaging her timid pet, her eyes stared with guilt at the newly replaced bed sheets. They were so white. Purity took over evilness. At that time, Mou Sha [her pet] was squatting next to the cushions. Su Wan extended her hand and touched its soft hair. It was flattered and as usual, it made some sounds of comfort. It even raised its head and licked its owner’s fingers hungrily with its little red tongue” (my own translation).

One interesting point about the presentation of hand in the short film is that the female hand is always represented in the singular form while the male’s is often associated with plurality. Ms. Hua masturbates Zhang and holds the receiver with one hand only. Her lust, pride, and beauty all hide, yet remain restless, in one single hand. The singularity implies the passion she devotes to Zhang cannot relieve the exigency given by the plurality of the male’s. Zhang’s two hands are for the creation of art (i.e. making cheongsam). The seductive art of cheongsam lies in the demand that it clothes the body but to reveal the

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eroticism of the wearer obscurely. As a result, Zhang is literally tailor-making the cheongsam that touches Ms. Hua’s body in the way that she wants her body to be touched. The tightness of cheongsam is very challenging to women because they have to be certain that their bodies do not get slightly out of shape. If any part of their bodies becomes bigger or smaller, the aestheticism and eroticism of cheongsam will be destroyed because it is worn as one whole piece. Critics of Wong Kar-wai’s films also express their views on the use of cheongsam in his works. Stephen Teo (2005: 123) argues it “denotes… that the evil in So Lai-chen is external; it stems from the husband’s betrayal and his affair,” whereas Peter Brunette (2005: 106) regards it as a temporal marker: “we often find out we’re in a different day solely by virtue of the fact that [Bai Ling] is wearing a different cheongsam.” Either way, the core of such erotic clothing still has not been addressed. The cheongsam half reveals and obscures the shape of a female body and forms an outer skin, or I shall say it is almost the wearer’s skin.5 Walt Whitman calls the skin “a form complete”; in this way, the cheongsam would be a completed form covering but also disclosing another form of complete. It is precisely this spirit that enthrones the skin an erotic label, which allows it to become one of the fetishes in the short film.

The hand can be carnal and mischievous by taking its prestigious func- tion of being able to touch and to be touched. Snowball in George Orwell’s Animal Farm proclaims: “The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief” (quoted from Sims, 2003: 149). Mischief always brings along pleasure, which is “[one] side effect of hand’s survival-related sensitivity” (Sims, 2003: 152). When two hands touch on each other, the sensations induced are extreme. It is either eroticism and pleasure, or intimidation and shock. Edmund White indicates in his Proust biography that handshaking could reveal the French writer’s sexuality. Proust rejects to shake hands in a firm manner for fear that “people would take [him] for an invert” (Sims, 2003: 154).6 In spite of this, the hand, through the touch, is an organ of sensation that gives us pleasure differently from other means. To do so, the hand relies on the apparatus of reciprocity to operate:

The touching itself has a clear location on the body: when I palpate an object, the palpation is clearly touched on my fingers. The location of, say, seeing in my eyes is only inferential and indirect and depends upon the discovery that if I move my head or close my eyes, my visual experience changes. Touching breeds touches in the toucher: the touch of the touched. And being touched, which is located in a part of one’s body, draws attention, awareness, to that part of the body. To touch someone is to make them be a touchee and a toucher whose touches focus them on the touched place (Tallis, 2003: 141).

Although Martin Heidegger has found amusing philosophy on the hand (in relation to Dasein), there seems to be a blind spot about the carnal hand that induces desire: “nothing is ever said of the caress or of desire” (Derrida, 1987: 182).7 Raymond Tallis could supplement the inattention:

[the] caress localizes, or aims to localize, the other’s self in the part of the body

Cheongsam covers and touches her body in the way

she wants her body to be I touched .

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that is touched and thereby endeavours to take hold of the other’s self. The caress that delights in the texture of the other’s body does so because in so doing, it enjoys the other’s enjoyment of her body, and hence of the caress which signifies that he or she is present (or consent to be present) at the point where the caresser touches and is touched (Tallis, 2003: 142).

To define the existence of one’s body through caressing another’s body originates from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), in which the idea concerning the co-existence of touching and being touched can be observed:

it is my body as flesh which causes the Other’s flesh to be born. The caress is designed to cause the Other’s body to be born, through pleasure, for the Other – and for myself – as a touched passivity in such a way that my body is made flesh in order to touch the Other’s body with its own passivity” (Sartre, 1943: 507, emphasis of the text).

Desire, in Sartre’s words, is “not only the revelation of the Other’s body but the revelation of my own body” because consciousness “attempts to subordinate itself to its own contingency – as it apprehends another body… as desirable” (Sartre, 1943: 505). Sartre views desire as the reduction to one’s own body:

Desire is not only the desire of the Other’s body; it is – within the unity of a single act – the non-thetically loved project of being swallowed up in the body. Thus the final state of sexual desire can be swooning as the final stage of consent to the body. It is in this sense that desire can be called the desire of one body for another body… The being which desires is consciousness making itself body (Sartre, 1943: 505, emphasis of the text).

In other words, the hand that desires is also a hand conscious of making itself a hand, and this allows both active and passive sensations to take place upon caressing. Such desire has become “the desire to appropriate a body as this ap- propriation reveals to me my body as flesh” (Sartre, 1943: 506). One example of this appropriation would be the caress. Penelope Deustcher (2005: 103) points out “[the] meeting of two desiring bodies is theorized as a complicated game of entrapment,” by which she conceives that the touch is more than simply a physical contact. To express this idea in Sartre’s own words, it is “not a simple stroking; it is a shaping” (Sartre, 1943: 506, emphasis of the text).

Sartre (1943: 507) writes beautifully that “[desire] is expressed by the caress as thought is by language.” Both characters in the film caress each other’s body through the “hand language.” Zhang derives the eroticism by measuring Ms. Hua’s body and he does it twice.8 The first time would be Zhang using pins to locate areas of the cheongsam that need to be tightened. The second time, we can finally see the mutual touches of Zhang and Ms. Hua. It happens when Ms. Hua is abandoned before her marriage to one of her wealthy clients. She therefore moves into a run-down room in Palace Hotel. Not having seen each other for a while, Zhang uses his own hands to measure her body size. Before this scene, mutual touches have never happened.

Ms. Hua uses her hand to masturbate him on their first encounter. Later, there is another scene when both of them are sitting at a table and Ms. Hua

#

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wants to thank the loyal tailor for his dedication. She stands up and moves away from her seat and heads towards the shelf to get some glasses and a bottle of wine. On her way, she slides her hand on Zhang’s left shoulder. This is fol- lowed immediately by a close-up of Zhang who is caught in full surprise and bewilderment. The touches in these two scenes are both seductive and com- municative. They reveal the repressed feelings that are unable to be expressed by words. In these scenes, the hands (both the male’s and female’s) being a non-sexual zone, are where the sexual pleasures, anticipation, and eroticism can be found. The film desexualizes the human bodies but sexualizes the hand, which, according to Reay (2002: 135), has become a sexual object since the late 20th Century. The displacement and re-placement of sexual desires and eroticism from the erogenous zones to a pair of hands makes the male’s and female’s hands a fetish in the film.

The Fetishized Hand In The Hand, the opening masturbation scene invites us to regard the

male’s hand as a substitute of a male penis. Zhang, is his early age as an ap- prentice (indicated by his lack of moustache), sits alone at a dining table in Ms. Hua’s flat. The moaning derived from sexual intercourse can be heard. After her client has left, she calls upon Zhang and asks him to enter her bedroom. This is followed by a medium-shot of Zhang’s profile and the audience can clearly observe that he is having an erection under his trousers. Ms. Hua queries the reason for his erection. She then asks him to lower his hands, which are covering the embarrassing erection and to take off the trousers. She commands him to give her his hand. As told, he extends his arm and she caresses it with her eroticized and delicate hand. The lowering of the male’s hand reveals the erection. The way Ms. Hua touches his hand and forearm symbolically foreshadows the whole masturbation scene that comes afterwards. This scene establishes the hand of the tailor as a fetish.

In “Fetishism” (1927: 357), Freud suggests that “the normal prototype of fetishes is a man’s penis, just as the normal prototype of inferior organs is a woman’s real small penis, the clitoris.” The hand is a fetish simply because it is a substitute of the penis, which is nominally present, but practically unat- tainable under different circumstances. There is a displacement of sexual at- tention and desire from the male genital to his hand. In the short film, Zhang has never seen Ms. Hua naked. All he sees is a clothed female body eroticized by the cheongsam and gloves that ultimately outline the figure of the wearer. Bodily sexual intercourse is absent in The Hand and it is impossible to happen because Ms. Hua only lusts for “money sex.” Her return to Zhang in the final scenes can be explained by the fact that his unconditional companionship can reward her with a sense of dignity and make her believe that she is still desir- able. Nevertheless, her vagina is only open to men with money. Therefore, it only exists in Zhang’s mind as an imaginary vagina that he can never get close

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to. In this way, the sexual desire is displaced onto her hand.9 The hand is not the only form of fetish in the short film. Marian Hobson

(1998:111) states that “[fetishism], or the particular fetish, has to have its own counter-quality, the particular ‘truth’, for which it has been substituted.” Then, one may ask, what is the counter-quality of the hand at this point? If Zhang’s hands are to make cheongsam for women, then the counter-quality of his hands (as a maker) will be the clothes (as a made product). If hands are to be considered part of a body, which means they can be clothed as well, then the counter-quality of them (as the inside) should be the pair of black gloves (as the outside) that Zhang puts into a brownish paper bag on his last visit to Ms. Hua. The erotics of the gloves rely on the warmth that is trapped in the interiority. Raymond Tallis (2003: 127-128) examines the amazing relationship between gloves and the human hand:

The hand warms itself by enclosure in gloves which capture its own heat and feed it back to it. Clothes in general and gloves in particular remind us of our extraordinary relationship to our own body, whereby we see it as an object that has to be tended, not only episodically, as in feeling or grooming, but continuously to ward off potential as well as actual hazards, as in protective, clothing and shelter.

He also points out that the warmth is, as a matter of fact, interactively produced between the hand and the fiber: “the hand warms the glove so that the glove can warm the hand” (Tallis, 2003: 128). In this sense, the fetishistic nature of the black glove worn by Black Spider (a.k.a. So Lai-chen) in 2046 may go beyond the fabrics. It is the heat released by the numerous So Lai-chens that makes the glove more intimate, personal, and therefore erotic. It is reasonable to argue that it would be the residual traces of the female heat that both Chow and Zhang are hungry for. Of course, the fact that gloves have been a preva- lent fetishsized item should not be ignored. As noted by Valarie Steele (1996: 133), the glove has become a symbol of eroticism because of several reasons. First, quoting Philippe Perrot, the gloves “[cover] the organs of touch…[and therefore] emphasize sexual insinuations by simultaneously reining in and stimulating desire.” Second, in the 19th Century, it was improper and immoral to “touch a lady’s bare hand” (in Steele, 1996: 133). Hence, the repression of direct intimacy has in turn strengthened the erotic nature of gloves as the bar- rier. Third, in the Middle Ages, scented gloves were sometimes used to refer to the female genitals, some of which were even “exchanged between lovers, much as engagement rings are today” (Steele, 1996: 133). Gloved hands, in short, have become “a symbol of power much as a booted foot”, bearing a certain “erotic charge” (Steele, 1996: 133).10

The hand, when it is gloved, becomes an insider. Nonetheless, such an insider can also transform into an outsider. In the first masturbation scene, before Ms. Hua touches Zhang’s penis, she slides her hand between his legs

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to reach his buttocks. This symbolic movement departs from the inside and extends to the outside. The camera shoots the scene from his behind and we can see how her hand marks the sexual difference on the sexless buttocks.

The last observable fetish I want to discuss here is the cheongsam. The eroticism of this traditional Chinese style of clothing, as I have argued before, depends heavily on its cutting because it aims to reveal the curved bodyline and form a second layer of artificial skin.11 Interestingly, there is a scene featuring an orgasm simply based on the interaction between two fetishes, that is his hand and Ms. Hua’s cheongsam. In this scene, Zhang slides his hand into the dress half way up. Then, there is a slow motion on the action to represent the emotional sublimation. His hand fondles inside the dress, touches and feels the texture, as if he was feeling her skin and body heat and looking for her body, which is neither present nor absent, visible nor invisible. A tailor’s job is to make a perfect and seamless dress for women. Once a perfect cheongsam is worn and buttoned, the only gaps that exist should be the openings for the head and the legs. Hanif Kureishi writes an interesting quote about desire and gap in his novella The Body. He says:

Desire can find the smallest gap, and it is hell to live in close proximity to and enforced celibacy with someone you want and with whom contact, when it occurs, is of an intimacy that one has always been addicted to (Kureishi, 2002:48).

This quote best fits Zhang’s situation. What he has with Ms. Hua is only the nostalgic intimacy. The cheongsam, as a fetish, somehow projects the woman’s body shape. Her body is not physically present, yet her bodyline is. The absence is what he cannot see while the fabrics could be felt upon touching and allow him to imagine her presence. Putting his hand and forearm from the bottom of the dress makes a highly erotic and fetishistic scene in the way that he is trying to fill the gap with his desire. This gap-filling sexual mode is very similar to the way that a penis is trying to fill a hole in the mouth, vagina, and anus in other sexual practices. In other words, the tailor is faking a “fetishistic” orgasm.

Conclusion In conclusion, I would argue the female hand is the hand in the film seeing

that it consolidates the foundation of sexual desire slowly and romantically built up between the two characters. The hand is carnal and mischievous in nature. It induces desire and eroticism upon caressing both the sexual and non-sexual regions on the body of the other. In this regard, the dialogues of the male and female hands could be regarded as a tango about the desire and pleasure of the characters to touch and to be touched at the same time. The impossibility to reveal the female’s erogenous zones channeled the male’s desire towards fetishism. When her hand and body are unavailable, the craving lingers within the glove and the cheongsam. In Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand, the mouths do not speak; the hands do the speeches in the language of caressing. Love could

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not be guaranteed, but lust fills almost every single frame. The characters do not forget each other because their hands remember it all.

Endnotes 1 Strictly speaking, Happy Together (1997) also involves the notion of death

to terminate a romantic relationship. In this film, Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) commits suicide by cutting his own throat with a blade in his run-down apartment in Argentina. Yet, this scene was cut away finally. Refer to this and other deleted scenes of Happy Together in Buenos Aires Zero Degree (1999), directed by Kwan Pun-leung and Lee Amos, which is a post-production record of Happy Together.

2 Tuan is citing Ashley Montagu’s Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (1978), in which the touch is positioned over other senses. Tallis and Napier also compare the touch and the sight. Tallis (2003: 37) writes that “the eye is richer in information: it is estimated that 90 per cent of the sensory information that reaches us comes from vision. The eye, however, is literally a transparent organ of cognition: it has no separate presence, except when it has been injured and in the minor events of gaze redirection and blinking. The eyes are not active, even less interactive, in the way the hand is; the gaze has no retroactive presence to itself, unlike the grope of the active – manipulative, exploratory – hand. Proprioception from the eye is largely unconscious and takes the form of reafferentation to counter any illusion of instability of the world that might come from the movement of the head and the eye. If the eye has come to be seen as the quintessential appurtenance of the subject, and the gaze has come to be seen as the subject’s archetypal power, this has, I shall argue, been established on the back of the subject-object divide opened up by the cognitive hand.” Napier (1980: 8) also believes that the hand is more superior and important than the eye: “With the eye, the hand is our main source of contact with the physical environment. The hand has advantages over the eye because it can observe the environment by means of touch, and having observed it, it can immediately proceed to do something about it. The hand has other great advantages over the eye. It can see around corners and it can see in the dark.” Benthien (2003: 195) records a similar thought in George Berkeley’s An Es- say Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), which asserts that “[the] eye it- self is capable only of detecting surfaces and colors; three-dimensionality and corporeality, on the other hand, can only be experienced through touch… It is only the sense of touch that teaches the eyes ‘to see… outside themselves.’”

3 The scenes in which Ms. Hua exhibits her hand by holding the receiver are actually what make the short film similar to the original story. In the original short story named Twilight of the Ballroom Dancer by Shi Zhe-cun, the call girl talked on the phone four times. The four phone calls are vaguely included in the short film. Upon adaptation, the director has shifted the focus to por-

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tray the everyday life of Ms. Hua before and after those four phone calls. 4 The short story is printed in Chinese in INK Literary Monthly. Issue no. 20.

April 2005, pp.46-55. 5 Benthien (2003: 24) historicizes the representation of the human skin as

clothes in the Bible. She points out that the use of such metaphors grounds on the postulation that the skin could be put on and off, like dirty clothes to be cleaned: “Central to the clothing metaphor is the process of putting on and taking off the bodily garment. Biblical language, for instance, has the expressions ‘to put on flesh’ and ‘to put on a body’ but also ‘to put on the human being,’ which describes the assumption of human form or, as in the last phrase, a change of attitude…The body garment, as the garment of the soul given by God, must remain unstained; should it become soiled, it must be cleansed by penance (col. 978).”

6 The intention that a handshake can possibly reveal one’s sexuality can also be evident by Wilde. Reay (2002: 137) writes that “[one] of the markers of his degeneracy, interestingly enough, [is] the largeness of his nose” and “his limp hands.” Reay also records what Frank Harris says about shaking hands with Wilde: “He shook hands in a limp way I disliked; his hands were flabby, greasy.” Correlating the limpness of one’s hand to that of the penis, a handshake with no masculine power could be considered as a sign of effeminacy, and therefore, possible homosexuality. Reay’s book also has interesting passages on the role of hands in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, in which this unique body part (be- coming “the homosexual hand” (139) is described as a signifier of “aberrant sexuality” and “sexual ambivalence” respectively (136/7).

7 I am referring to Derrida’s essay “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand.” 8 It is observed that the hand was a unit of measurement in some ancient cul-

tures, “including among the Greeks, Egyptians, and Hebrews.” For example, “[during] the time of Henry VIII, a decree established the official width of the hand as four inches” (Sims, 2003: 155).

9 In Reay’s Watching Hannah (2002), the author discusses the collections of Arthur F. Munby, a poet, civil servant, and a connoisseur of working women. According to Reay, Munby is fascinated “with the big-bodied working women whom he interviewed, befriended, sketched, photographed, catalogued and described in numerous diaries and journals” (8). Among all the body parts with which Munby was obsessed with, the hands of those women “were one of [his] special fetishes” (127). Not only this, the hands in Munby’s collection feature “slipping masculinity” (132), by which Reay means the size of one’s hand cannot be used to judge one’s gender since those women possess hands “twice as large and strong.” He wrote the fol- lowing diary entry:

… it was the hand of a slight girl to that of a big man of low class: only hers was the man’s. absurd contrast! I, a bearded man of more than aver-

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age height & bulk; she, a woman, still young, and scarcely so tall as my shoulder: and yet, without hyperbole or self-flattery, my hand was white and small and frail-looking as a lady’s beside that thick and clumsy mass (Reay, 2002: 132, emphasis of the text).

The reason why a man’s hand could be more fragile and delicate than a woman’s is that, observed by Reay, “the hand [is] particularly important as an indicator of class and refinement” (133).

10 Steele is referring to the book written by Edward Podolsky and Carlson Wade called Erotic Symbolism: A Study of Fetishism in Relation to Sex (1960), p. 117.

11 Steele (1996: 57-90) discusses the fetishism of corsets, which have been “praised for [their] erotic appeal” (57). She suggests that “[the] corset, like the shoe, [is] one of the first items of clothing to be treated as a fetish, and it remains one of the most important fetish fashions” (58). The erotic nature of the corset stems from many areas. To name a few, it is the tight binding (like the shoe-binding culture in ancient China) of the wearer’s waist and the connotation of discipline and punishment (as in S&M corsets) that make this piece of clothing erotic and fetishistic. Though I believe the notion of punishment might be missing in the cultural history of cheongsam, I find the idea of discipline and its nature of being so tight to expose the bodyline very similar to the purpose of the corset. This similarity could back up my perspective of regarding the cheongsam as a fetish.

References Benthien, Claudia. 2002. Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the

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of Touch, edited by Constance Classen. Oxford and New York: Berg. Derrida, Jacques. 1987. “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand.” (trans) John P.

Leavey, Jr. In Deconstruction and Philosophy, edited by John Sallis. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Deutscher, Penelope. 2005. “Desiring Touch in Sartre and Beauvoir.” In The Book of Touch, edited by Constance Classen. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Ellis, Havelock. 1905 (1942). “A Lady.” Cited in “Sexual Selection Is Man” in Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol I. (New York: Random House.)

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Nicholas Y.B. Wong is a teaching fellow at the Department of English of Hong Kong Institute of Education. He has just completed his MPhil thesis on investigating the relationship between body parts, desire, and fetishism in contemporary films and literary texts. Besides academic research, Wong is also interested in creative writing and has published poems and short stories both locally and internationally.