To dismiss this scene as yet another regrettable example of racist prurience or Puritanical conservatism is to miss the extraordinary negotiation of the visible and the invisible at play here. The California court took the Chinese female body to be self-evident. But how that body evidences the invisible in its visibility or vice versa has yet to be fully examined. What happens when we consider the ideas of body, skin, cloth, and ornament as interrelated metaphors for thinking about personhood in American social and legal realms in the nineteenth century, and what are the legacies of these
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