Week of 03.16 - Power and Agency or Who is Entitled to Speak (Truth)?

This week’s readings brought up a lot of the tensions that have emerged from discussions around identity politics. While the “double eyelid” surgery requested by Asian American women would seem to suggest, if not symptomatic of, a Western standard of beauty. The trend of such surgeries, as we can all too easily read are implicated within images and constructs of normalizing “beauty,” which we can argue has been constructed around whiteness. Eugenia Kaw’s reading of the medicalization of Asian American women based around racial markers, while sound in some respects, fell into some of the traps of visual politics and agency. While I do think that Kaw’s reading of the medical institution of plastic surgery brings up the kinds of articulations made by “science” (via plastic surgery) that positions non-white subject as physically abnormal or “puffy,” “droopy,” etc., what struck me in her readings was the sense that she “knew better” than the women she interviewed. Even as Kaw expressed the opinions of the interviewees, which denied desires for white- Western beauty, such statements were often followed by personal commentary unable to accept the women’s’ testimonies. The kinds of categorical judgments made by Kaw about these both unenlightened/ unknowing women and the structuring organization “always” at work in oppressive regimes of visual culture centered on white beauty, seemed to fall into a trap that Katherine Zane articulates in “Reflections.” Drawing from Rey Chow’s critique of the ethnic subject’s being called upon to perform in or to legitimate the ‘authentic ethnic subject,” such “failures” of authentication, as Zane argues, essentialize such subjects as either a victim of power (without agency) or as anti-feminist (Zane, 180).  While the course thus far has made it a point to situated a politics of ethnicity within capitalist commodification and visual politics (i.e. Rhodes, Osucha), the move that Zane and Chow make concerning the ways in which ethnic subject are called upon to prove authenticity and are therefore judged by it, seems to be an important line of thought for this course. Going further, what can we then say about Zane’s move to hybridity (especially in light of the dangers of privileging hybridity that David Palumbo-Liu seems to make in “Written on the Face”)?

Monica