1. Though I find problematic the way many of our readings oppose the “mental” and “physical,” I think appearance is seen as expressing an inner essence; “the eyes are the windows to the soul.” According to the logic of positivism, observing someone closely will reveal the truth about their nature. How does the ability to change one’s appearance complicate this? Since people have more control than ever over their appearances, do we still put as much stock in appearance as reflections of an inner essence? Do we in fact put more stock in it, since people can use appearance alterations to “express themselves”? Do these ideas of a) expressing oneself through appearance-altering technologies and b) the body revealing someone's true nature both stem from the same essentialism? Both seem to reflect the idea that a self inheres in all of us, which is expressed — not created — through physical markers of identity. If, in trying to resist this notion that our appearance says something about identity, we alter appearance to express how we truly identify, aren’t we buying into the very notion we’re resisting?
2. The elephant in the room when reading Zane and Kaw was the question, can the subaltern speak? Who was driving the invention and use of these technologies: Asian women or white men? Are the women Kaw interviews doing what they, as Asian American women, truly desire, or are they buying into an oppressive ideology? It seems to me like both: Ideology creates individual desires, and nobody is exempt from that. Their choices are personal, but the personal is political.
3. Like Pecola wants her eyes to absorb whiteness, Kaw argues that Asian women who get eye surgery want to internalize markers of a white subjectivity from which they have been rejected. Is this a melancholic relationship?
4. Is the question of race-related surgery really one of race, or is it one of gender and beauty? In other words, is Asian women's feeling of inadequacy the result of racism, or the result of not-thin-white-and-blonde-with-huge-lips-and-eyes-and-boobs-and-a-tiny-nose-ism (which does discriminate based on race but also discriminates against women in general)?
On an only slightly related note, large eyes are considered universally attractive in evolutionary psychology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection_in_human_evolution). Does this have racial and/or racist implications?
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