Discursive Power and Objects of Agency

Reading Kaw's articles in which she described Asian American women as objects of grievance were very unsettling. Particularly, I found it unsettling for her to have presented Asian American (AA) women as agentiveless and objects of swallowing in Freud's process of melancholia. Referring to Cheng's Melancholia of Race, this fetishized cosmetic surgery can be read as metonymic for the politics of identities and agency: (white) America has eaten AA women's identities and those identities have been integrated into such a system of normalized whiteness, which, argued Kaw, was desirable. Yes, perhaps AA women were objects of grievance, but as Cheng complicated in her usage of psychoanalysis--What about the agency of the object (Asian American women) being swallowed? What about the privileging of the subject who swallows the object? (I believe Kaw privileged the subject over the object by having read her informants in such a way, even though her articles critically engaged the object.) Was the object passive? Kaw showed these positions as irrefutable and essentially fundamental: AA women as objects and white as subjects, and this contributed to her overall flawed argument. And the fact of her using just one ethnic Asian category as representative of the totality of Asian Americans was problematic. Because of her insistence on AA women victimhood, it made me wonder, at times, if she was trying to exploitatively show the psychological damages inflicted on AA women or if she speaking to the more problematic color/racial line. And her research made it uncertain whether by saying Asian American she actually spoke for the entire race of Asian Americans. Were all Asian Americans wanting plastic surgery? Did whites not undergo surgery for the same purposes as well? Was Kaw perhaps essentializing Asian Americans? My last interjection is simple, but important: Couldn't AA women have gotten plastic surgery to blur the racial/color line that have ascribed certain phenotypes to Asians? Kaw's articles were ludicrous in that her arguments and research findings were simple and superfluous, in which her discursive argument has the potential to shape perceptions of AA communities.