“This essay is driven by the haunting of a different kind of racialized female body whose “flesh” survives through abstract and synthetic rather than organic means and whose personhood is animated, rather than eviscerated, by aesthetic congealment. Culturally encrusted and ontologically implicated by representations, the yellow woman is persistently sexualized yet barred from sexuality, simultaneously made and unmade by the aesthetic project. She denotes a person but connotes a style, a naming that promises but supplants skin and flesh. Simultaneously consecrated and desecrated as an inherently aesthetic object, the yellow woman troubles the certitude of racial embodiment and jeopardizes the “fact” of yellowness, pushing us to reconsider a theory of person thingness that could accommodate the politics of a human ontology indebted to commodity, artifice, and objectless.”
-eviscerated: (v) deprive (something) of its essential content
-ontology: (n) philosophical study of being. More broadly, it studies concepts that directly relate to being, in particular becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.
-supplants: (v) supersede and replace
At the beginning portion of Cheng’s article on Ornamentalism, she discusses how society depicts “yellow women” and gives us some in depth details on the social construct through a vivid and complex use of word choice. Through two main literary devices, word choice and juxtaposition, she showcases the difficulties “yellow women” have to face everyday in displaying their personalities and courses of action, but also the complexity that comes with being a “yellow woman”.
Word Choice: Throughout this paragraph, Cheng uses specific words to describe “yellow women”. While she could have chosen simple words like deprive or replace, she instead uses words like eviscerated and supplants. This purposeful use of diction reveals not only the author’s plethora of diverse vocabulary but also insinuates that being a “yellow woman” is more than something simple but rather should be looked at as a complex ontology. Cheng not only uses these more complex words to describe what society negatively thinks, but also what society should positively think about “yellow women”. Because of this, she’s really conveys that although the world may look at “yellow women” in this simple way, there’s more to unfold and the layers deserve more intricate and elaborate views. It’s more of a spectrum of qualities to analyze and not just that construct society stereotypically placed on them.
Juxtaposition: Cheng uses a variety of opposites to describe the spectrum of what society sees in “yellow woman” and what they don’t want to see yet should have the rights to portray. Cheng says things like, “persistently sexualized yet barred from sexuality”, “made and unmade by the aesthetic project”, and “consecrated and desecrated as an inherently aesthetic object”. This use of juxtaposition does more than just explain what society does and does not want to see, it also showcases the difficulties that “yellow woman” have to deal with on a daily basis- the societal pressures they constantly have to face, which essentially contradict from their emotional, sexual, and individual freedoms. These juxtapositions show that this spectrum is hard to be in the middle in and is only looked at in society at one end of the spectrum or the other. Cheng brings up a great dilemma for the “yellow woman” of being in-between a rock and a hard place, which is expressed through the diction and contiguity in this passage.
When reading your discussion of Cheng’s use of juxtaposition, I remembered my experience of witnessing the contradictory portrayal of women in Japan. A few summers ago, I was walking through a convenience store in Tokyo and noticed how many newspapers, DVDs, and magazines contained sexualized images of female characters on the front covers. Moreover, when strolling through Akihabara, I passed by a few maid cafés (female employees must wear maid outfits when serving customers). It appeared that the objectification of women was normalized throughout Japanese culture and was even used as a marketing tactic to increase sales. However, although females are hypersexualized in Japanese pop culture, women are expected to meet traditional gender roles that idealize pure and innocent women. After reading your analysis, I immediately realized how females in Japan are truly perceived “at one end of the spectrum or the other” but never in the middle. I wonder what the root of this occurrence is and how it came to be in Japanese culture…