Writing on Asian women who seek cosmetic surgery to look "pretty" and "smart," Kaw critiques them for conforming to the normalized standards of beauty based on Caucasian women's features. Such critique, as it attempts to deal with Asian women's status as the racial other in the American society, nonetheless denies these women's agency in accepting cosmetic surgery. I want to trouble Kaw's critique by exploring possibilities of a more empowering understanding of these women's choice.
In light of Cheng’s theory of the melancholia, the cosmetic surgery can be seen to mark the internalized ideal swallowed by the racial other; it is injury to the body in a literal sense. But Cheng calls for an understanding of injuries beyond the merely affective responses of sadness, but rather “a deep sense of how that sadness - as a kind of ambulatory despair or manic euphoria - conditions life for the disenfranchised and indeed, constitutes their identity and shapes their subjectivity” (Chen 23-24). Also, in light of Haraway’s deployment of the metaphor of a cyborg to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialism, there are ways in which critique of Asian cosmetic surgery as a call to authenticity is oppressive rather than liberating. Engaging with these two critical texts, I want to explore the extent to which identity and agency emerge from a state of being damaged rather than a state of pure originality.
If something like cosmetic surgery can be associated with agency, we must then ask, what can this agency bring to politics? How is politics possible for those who choose to knife their bodies? Can politics accommodate a concept of identity based on constitutive loss? And what kind of new politics does renouncing the notion of a complete, essential subject call for?
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