It is easy to identify the wrongness of treating someone like a thing for one’s own invidious gains, but it is much harder to understand or to judge when one treats oneself like a thing. In making room for stranger forms of less-than-human agency that might erupt out of these moments of ornamentalist transformation, I hope to clear some new ground beyond the political cul-de-sacs of feminist and race studies: the impasse between victimization and agency, antiessentialism and authenticity, and so on. Ornamentalism for me poses less a dilemma of identity than a problematic about the imbrication
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