Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

In this advertisement that  was found in The Georgia Straight, we are confronted with a truly insidious manifestation of oriental-ornamentalist ideology. To deconstruct and textually analyze this “advertisement”, I drew upon the theoretical frameworks of Anne Cheng, that lie at the intersection of earlier work from both Edward Said and Hortense Spillers, wherein Cheng states “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” (Pg 1, 2018). The viewer, or more poignantly in this case —the sexual consumer, is confronted with an artificial body, whose main telos is a site upon which, mostly, men, can carry out their sexualized fantasies of desire and conquest. This simulacrum of a body, necessarily reproduces the symbolic realm from which our real bodies find their meaning. This means that much like our “biological bodies” are tied up in and mediated by symbolic discourses, so too is this imitation of a body. Gender and Race are just two of the “realized” discourses that end up marking, or “symbolically branding” this imitation. The above overarching text “ADULT PRODUCTS” acts as a grounding, that solidifies the absolute “objectivity” of the advertised commodity, and places it fully within the realm of alienated commodity. It’s as if, in creating this body, the designer has jumped the transcendental gap that separates subject from object. This suturing of subject and object, creates a paradoxical in-between that is simultaneously more-than and less-than human. This racialized, engendered representation of sexualized fantasy, acts as a spectral projection, illuminating our societal collective-cultural-unconscious in a way that is both uncanny and strangely familiar.

When attempting to deconstruct an image such as this, I found myself trying to “de-racialize” and “un-gender” the imitated body, in an attempt to remove race and gender from the implicit hegemonic gaze. It simply was not enough to “re-present” the image in a more authentic manner, because in doing so, I was subjectively re-creating the racialized and gendered  discourses that permeated the imaged-body in the first place. Instead, I overlayed face parts, hair, a less contoured shirt, and changed “doll” to person, while leaving spaces of emptiness. This highlights  how othering always-already stems from the self, and simultaneously how the object of our desire (in this case the “sex person”) has an inherent lack, such that acquiring, attaining, or conquering this embodied-fantasy leaves the experiencer in a state of constant need. In other words, we always locate ourselves in the object we desire, and since it is safe to assume this advertisement is a product of the heteronormative white-gaze, incorporating whiteness into the frame, elucidates that which frames our desire. Additionally, the spaces of emptiness seek to directly highlight the ‘constructedness” and artificiality of such an image, and how even amalgams of representations leave spaces, of that which is failed to be represented. No fantasmic representation will authentically portray that which it seeks to represent. I argue that the result of these changes creates a an un-representation—representing something that fails andresists representation altogether. This culminates in a feeling of uncanny-ness similar to the original image, except this one frames the frames which constitute the hegemonic, heteronormative, white gaze.

References:

Cheng, A. A. (2018). Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman. Critical Inquiry, 44(3), 415-446.