Ornamentalism

by Anne Anlin Cheng

Yet according to court recording and press coverage at the time, the women in question mostly wore uninteresting, black, loose-fitting clothes. (Let us remember that these women had been aboard a cramped ship for over a month.) Thus all the categories that the California court took to be visually and hence materially evident in this case—corporeality as evidence of racialized subjectivity, feminine decoration, the relations between skin and what rests on it—turn out to be not evident. The invocation of ostentatious female ornamentation—that most visible and material of categories—pivoted between imagined presence and projected absence. The women were thus simultaneously dressed up and stripped down. The evidence of an overmaterialized and scopically available body emerges not out of bare flesh or real ornaments, but instead from their phantasmic conflation, an overlapping of surfaces located in teasing peripheries: the borders of a collar, the peep of a hem, the gleaming edge of a sleeve.

Draw this out more? How ormamemtals exist within mans imagination