Status Updates From Ornamentalism

This is a book of dualisms. The main dualism being: “I understand, but I also don’t understand.”

Ok, did we REALLY need to use words like “synecdochized” and “metonymized”? Or “quotidian”? Like, no one knows what you’re saying. You can’t write one of the first/only theoretical frameworks for Asiatic Femininity by using completely inaccessible language, no one’s going to understand you !!!

i am slightly less confused now

i can just about read and comprehend butler but miss cheng uses too many big words. still, was curious if there are understandings of asian feminism and this looks like the closest i’ll get. so glad i studied material culture before reading this tho

"More than a fantasy reflecting the desires and anxieties of machine cultures, synthetic Asiatic femininity provides a mobile vocabulary and an almost musculoskeletal model through which acolytes of machine cultures realize, often to their dismay, their most radical dreams: the genuine and ineluctable indebtedness of the organic to the inorganic, the primacy of the prosthetic, and more."

thoughts...

"Here I am sketching a Chinese female version of this discursive formation: a smooth beauty that bears the lines of its own wreckage, a delicacy that is also impermeable and insensate. The dream of the yellow woman is thus really a dream about the inorganic."

so fascinating... my uw essay is getting inspired but not getting written