Although I agree with Kaw--that Asian American women who undergo plastic surgery do so out of self-loathing, as an "expression of alienation in society and a negation of the body induced by unequal power relationships" (77)-- I am left wondering about the agency of these women using race as a technology to manifest their self-creation.
The testimonies of the women interviewed clearly display the affects of the naturalization of white female beauty as normal and the most desirable, idealized beauty, as well as the workings of the medical industry to make eyelid surgery appear a 'necessity' to achieve economic success and assimilation into American culture. It is clear, as Kaw argues, that the subjected are complicit in the reproduction of their own domination.
Yet, I wonder if there is a kind of racial liberation possible in using technology to recreate oneself--by rejecting one's given or essentialized racial characteristics and distrubing race's reliance on visuality to create a more ambiguously raced self. These women do not become white, but are no longer typically or identifiably Asian. Is there anything viable or empowering in the ability to procure some of the social privileges of whiteness by discarding the visual markers of race to become self-created (non)racial subjects? Are these women "breaking the bounds of racial categories" (20)?
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