Zane makes an important move in contextualizing eye surgery in different and particular nexuses of class and location, highlighting the way eyelid reconstruction is used by Chinese in the Phillipines to reinforce the a marker of class status, and by Latin-Americans in Japan in order to pass as Japanese and immigrate (173). In this vein, I want to complicate Palumbo-Liu’s idea that eye surgery among Asian Americans in the U.S. constitutes a move towards hybridity and holds in it suggestions of a post-racial future. The hybrid metropole that Palumbo-Liu discusses can not be taken apart from its supporting periphery, spread out across the globe in the farms and factories that sustain it. For every Asian-American subject in the visual economy of race, there are hundreds of Asian and other people of color who are subjects in the invisible economy that produces the entire material existence of the metropole, and it is important to place hybridity in this context.
What effect does the preponderance of eye surgery, and the different possibilities of its interpretation (including but not limited to an acquiescence and perpetuation of racist ideology, a destabilization of that same racist ideology in calling into consideration the connections between physical characteristics and interiority/self) have on the subject that does not get eye surgery, especially the subject in this periphery?
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