The law contributes to the making of Asiatic female visuality in ways that conflate race not with biological epidermis, as is often assumed, but rather with synthetic adornment, thereby revealing the abstraction and artifice fundamental to the logic of race. (2) The forensic use of visual evidence started not with the introduction of modern technologies like photography, but instead with the phantasmic construction of “illegible” and “foreign” bodies. (3) Finally, nineteenth-century Orientalism’s impact on the legal imaginary altered the assumptions of eighteenth-century natural laws and
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