“Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman”, by Anne Anlin Cheng

In « Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman, Anne Anlin Cheng offers a third way to analyze racial embodiment, beyond Frantz Fanon’s “epidermal racial schema” and Hortense Spillers’s “hieroglyphics of the flesh.”

Far from rejecting these theories, she acknowledges their relevance, but she thinks they dismiss the specific reification operated on the Asian woman body, and therefore the revolutionary potential laying in reclaiming this reification to reshape « personhood ».

This third way stands in the reappropriation of Ornamentalism, which sounds so closed to « Orientalism ». First, the author highlights the considerable distinction in the making of the Black woman and the Yellow woman by the White male gaze, using the difference between primitivism and orientalism : « While Primitivism rehearses the rhetoric of ineluctable flesh, Orientalism, by contrast, relies on a decorative grammar, a fantasmatic corporeal syntax that is artificial and layered. Where black femininity is “vestibular”/bare flesh/weighted, Asiatic femininity is ornamental/surface/portable ».
If Black women are resumed by their flesh and hypersexualized through it, Asian women’s flesh is absolutely denied. As if this body couldn’t produce itself one ounce of erotic, but was only dedicated to White male projection : « While Orientalism is about turning persons into things that can be possessed and dominated, ornamentalism is about a fantasy of turning things into persons through the conduit of racial meaning in order, paradoxically, to allow us to abandon our humanness. »

If that shaping of the Asian woman through ornament began during the 18th century with the US interest for Chinese Porcelain, Cheng shows how it is still tragically relevant nowadays, premise illustrated by an exhibition in 2015 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled China: Through the Looking Glas, where « Instead of objects that function as appendages to the human (as one would expect fashion and furnishing to do), what we find here instead are objects that reference other objects. »
Objects and represented bodies operate at the very same level, as accommodations for White desire or at least curiosity. Indeed, she pursues saying that « Of the many “enigmatic objects” (a term used by the exhibition) displayed in this extensive exhibition, the most mesmerizing and confounding one is surely the specter of the yellow woman ».
Not only her body, but also her specter. Let’s say, not only her materiality is shaping, but her entire integrity :
« Dare we say it? Ornament becomes—is—flesh for Asian American female personhood. Commodification and fetishization, the dominant critical paradigms we have for understanding representations of racialized femininity, simply do not ask the harder question of what being is at the interface of ontology and objectness. Here Chinese femininity is not only more and less than human but also man-made; not only assembled but also reassembled. »

Ornament is then a tool for shaping a body, a culture, and finally, a race. « Porcelain is flesh, and flesh is porcelain ». Chinese men are brave disposable laborers, Chinese women are elegant disposable fragile porcelain on which White men can project all their fantasies, and Chinese culture is at the same time admired and suspected of inauthenticity.
And what can we say about this excerpt from the New York Times, about the Chinese women’s gymnastics team at the Summer Olympics in 1996 : “The Chinese remain the world’s most erratic top gymnasts, and today, like many a Ming vase, their routines looked lovely but had cracks in several places.”
From the « White Gold » to the « Yellow (non)flesh, the « model minority » is perfectly reified, yet surrounded by suspicion.

Cheng describes « a fusion between thingness and personhood », and wants to think about « that intractable intimacy between being a person and being a thing ».
Here is the moment when can start the Reclaim process : if people are denied as subjects, furthermore as human, how can they still exercise an agency ? One way some shaped-as-subalterns people choose to recover it is by embracing the monstrosity or strangeness in which the dominant reified them, to dismantle it better (« Queer » is a perfect example).

Then, « The dream of the yellow woman is thus really a dream about the inorganic. The yellow woman is an, if not the, original cyborg ». Yet, as feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway or Anna Tsing, who also work on interspecies kinship and the critics of Anthropocene, have shown, even it if the Cyborg is a creation of the neoliberal surveillance system, absolutely destructive for the environment, this figure can be reclaimed by minorities as the paroxysm of Hybridity and Fluidity, and in a way trap the dominant into their own game. According to this point of view, interspecies kinship could also embrace inorganic technologies.

This is the point where Cheng sees Ornamentalism, if reclaimed by people who were dehumanized by its process, as a way to embrace Otherness to redesign « personhood » and « Humanity » beyond White Modernity definition : « ornamental personhood of Asiatic femininity as a rare and valuable opportunity to consider alternative forms of being, not at the site of the free, natural, modern subject and his or her celebrated autonomy, but, contrarily, at the edges and crevices of a non-European, synthetic, aggregated, and feminine body ».
And the end, « taking seriously what it means to live as an object, as aesthetic supplement » to achieve a more powerful agency, while keeping in mind that « At the same time, if recent critical discourse about the posthuman or what has come to be known as object-oriented ontology can at times feel politically disconnected even as its intention has been to unsettle a tradition of insular humanism and anthropocentrism, it is because it has forgotten that the crisis between persons and things has its origins in and remains haunted by the material, legal, and imaginative history of persons made into things. »

Referring to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Cheng claims that « the dehumanized body might actually require objectness in order to subsist. ». Interestingly, we can find this idea in Herbert Marcuse’s thinking, who shaped it as a queer man : How can we find agency from the position of a reified object of desire ? How this very reified position can be more powerful than our desperate attempts to be recognized as subjects in a world that denies it for us ?