In Ornamentalism, Anne Anlin Cheng explores non-European, modern Western personhood through examining the discourse of Asiatic femininity. Objectification is, of course, not a new topic. But Cheng challenges current racial and gender studies literature that commonly condemns objectification of human beings, and particularly objectification of women's bodies. Cheng defies the dichotomies between persons and things, subject and object, interiority and exteriority, agency and oppression. Reading a wide range of texts—court testimony, cinema, fashion, novel, and science fiction—she reveals an understudied human figure that entails a fusion between synthetic objecthood and organic personhood. In proposing Ornamentalism as a conceptual framework, Cheng seeks to build an alternative historiography of raced bodies within the making of modern Western personhood: one that is synthetic, feminine, and non-European; one that is “assembled not through organic flesh but instead through synthetic inventions and designs” (p. 19).
Chapter 1 focuses on the intersection between American conceptualization...
