When we attend to the critical labor of ornament, we will repeatedly find the intersection of beauty and terror, immateriality and corporeality, life and privation across a wide range of domains. Scars blossoming into the shocking beauty of chokecherry. Bare flesh growing like jewel shards. The law adjudicating legal persons through the sartorial. It is at the site of the unexpected entanglement with, or the inconvenient animation of, the ornament during moments of intense pain and privation that we begin to discern how the ornament as aesthetic decoration marks a political problematic about
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