Ornamentalism by Anne Anlin Cheng Notes

Borders and Embroidery

• Dr. Otis Gibson's quote (1874) distinguishes virtuous women from others based on style.
• Galen Johnson on Merleau-Ponty: Embodiment is a style of the world, thus all perception stylizes.

The Case of the Twenty-Two Lewd Chinese Women

• This case examines the relationship between Chinese women and the American conceptualization of legal personhood during 19th-century immigration reform.
• It is a little-known but important habeas corpus case.
• The case involves Asiatic femininity and its ornamentality.
• It went through several courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, marking the first time a Chinese litigant appeared before the highest court.
• The case offers insight into how a raced and gendered body becomes legible to the law through its supplementarity.
• The case demonstrates the Orientalist imagination of 19th-century American law and the logic of ornamentalism.

Logic of Ornamentalism

• The displacement of biological “personness” through the fabrication of synthetic “personness” within the logic of legal personhood.

Ornamentalism and Orientalism

• The workings of ornamentalism abet the assumptions of Orientalism, functioning in a disciplinary and punishing way.
• The conflation of things with persons unveils the fragile, sartorial, and synthetic foundation supporting proper legal personhood.
• The questions of who is considered a person and who can be seen by the law take surprising turns throughout the litigation.
• The display of extravagant Asiatic ornamentality generates a drama between the visible and the invisible, the present and the imagined.
• When the yellow woman materializes as a recognizable legal category, she also becomes unassimilable and disappears into the thingness that defines her.

Propositions:

1. The law contributes to the making of Asiatic female visuality, conflating race with synthetic adornment, revealing the artifice of race.
2. The forensic use of visual evidence started with the phantasmic construction of “illegible” and “foreign” bodies, not modern technologies like photography.
3. 19th-century Orientalism altered the assumptions of 18th-century natural laws and continues to impact contemporary conceptualizations of legal personhood.

The SS Japan and the Detention

• August 24, 1874: The SS Japan arrived in San Francisco from Hong Kong with almost 600 Chinese passengers.
• Rudolph Piotrowski, the California commissioner of immigration, allowed everyone to disembark except 22 young women (ages 17-23), deeming them “lewd.”
• Piotrowski believed the women were prostitutes because they were traveling alone.
• He requested Captain John Freeman to pay a 500 bond per woman for them to disembark, which the Pacific Mail Ship Company refused.
• Piotrowski ordered the women detained and forcibly returned to Hong Kong.

Legal Proceedings

• Four-day trial (August 26-29, 1874) in the Fourth District Court of San Francisco.
• Judge Robert F. Morrison agreed with Piotrowski, affirming the state’s right to protect itself from “immoral, pestilential visitation.”
• September 7, 1874: The Supreme Court of California affirmed Judge Morrison’s decision (Ex Parte Ah Fook, 49 Cal. 420 [1874]).
• The 1874 California State Political Codes granted the commissioner of immigration the right to assess passengers arriving from foreign ports.
• Paul Kramer observes little difference between disability, immorality, and Chinese femininity in the eyes of California officials and the law.

Burlingame Treaty and Detention

• The women possessed proper papers and had the right to enter the country under the 1868 Burlingame Treaty between China and the United States.
• They carried signed documents and had been interviewed by Chinese and U.S. officials in Hong Kong.
• Captain Freeman testified that he saw no untoward behavior on the part of the women during the voyage.
• Despite this, the women were detained and treated like criminals.

Circuit Court and Supreme Court Rulings

• September 21: The case went before the Circuit Court for the District of California, where Justice Stephen Field ruled in favor of the women (In re Ah Fong, 1F. Cas. 213 [1874]).
• Field viewed it as the state overstepping its power and recommended the government take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
• The women were released except for Chy Lung, who stayed to represent the others.
• The case, Chy Lung v. Freeman (1875), went before the U.S. Supreme Court, where Field’s ruling was upheld, and Lung was released.

Aftermath and Implications

• The Case of the Twenty-two Lewd Chinese Women generated a media storm that quickly subsided after the case was decided.
• There is no further information about any of the women after their trial; they disappeared into the streets of Chinatown.
• It was possible the women came to find spouses or work.
• Chinese women in America at the time faced human trafficking and familial structure issues due to male trans-Pacific labor migration.
• Many Chinese men abandoned their wives in China and started new lives in the United States, sometimes taking new wives.
• The outcome had darker implications for the future of Chinese immigration.

Page Act of 1875

• The Page Act was passed (named after Horace Page) prohibiting the entry of “undesirable” immigrants and imposing penalties for bringing people from China, Japan, or any Asian country to the United States for forced service.
• The Page Act aimed to end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.
• Gender and race were significant factors in immigration policy, indicating anxiety over the Supreme Court’s decision in Chy Lung.
• The Page Act was the first restrictive federal immigration law, prefiguring the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
• The Page Act anticipated the racial-sexual panic during the Progressive Era.
• The liberation of the women in the Chy Lung case was bittersweet and a Pyrrhic victory.

Context of Discrimination

• The discourse of the Yellow Peril was consolidating and intensifying.
• California passed laws to get rid of the Chinese after soliciting their labor.
• Foreign Miners’ Tax Act of 1850: Siphoned off wages of Chinese miners.
• Chinese Police Tax: Charged to persons of the “Mongolian race.”
• Chinese adults were prohibited from testifying against whites.
• Chinese children were denied access to public schools.

Visual Component and Ornamentality

• The proceedings at the District Court invoked dilemmas about gendered and racial corporeality.
• The intense visual component in the deliberations in the California state courts complicated the intersection of ornament, raced bodies, visual evidence, and legal personhood.
• The trial court focused on superficial feminine style rather than biological components or legal interpretation.
• The prosecution investigated what the women were wearing, particularly their ornaments.
• Detailed discussions about forms of costume, fabrics, cuts of sleeves, and hairstyles occurred.
• The case turned on whether the women were “lewd,” requiring a determination of the difference between respectable Chinese wives and debauched Chinese prostitutes.
• The women were displayed in court, and expert witnesses provided accounts of Chinese courtesan sartorial style.
• Witnesses included white men who did not know the women, did not speak Chinese, and whose qualification was residence in China.

Testimonies on Sartorial Practices

• Dr. Otis Gibson described courtesans wearing flowered garments, silk, and bright colors, while wives wear plain colors except on gala days.
• Gibson also noted differences in hairstyles and decorative accessories among prostitutes.
• Mr. Ira M. Condit concurred that bright colors (especially yellow) indicate dissolute character.

Incoherence and Presumptions

• The testimonies were incoherent and contradictory, blurring the boundary between respectable wives and prostitutes.
• Police officer Delos Woodruff noted that crowded tenements made it difficult to ascertain proper familial relations in Chinatown.
• The incoherence of the testimonies did not loosen the association between Asian femininity and debauchery.
• No one tried to ascertain whether the women were actually prostitutes.
• The presumptions about their character, linked to their eligibility for legal personhood, rested on the seemingly frivolous category of ornaments.

Ornamentation and Racialization

• The association between ornamentation and debauched femininity condensed around the Chinese female body, especially as views of China shifted from fascination to suspicion.
• Unlike African Americans, whose racialization was based on “blood,” the racialization of the Chinese was tied to their physical appearances and foreign-looking bodies.

Speculative Ornaments

• The ornaments under debate were speculative rather than factual, posing an evidential challenge for the state.
• Dr. Gibson reached for what was not readily available to the eye, describing hidden variegated silk or fancy clothes under their outside clothing.
• The prosecutor called several women forward to inspect their sleeves, hems, and hair.
• The women mostly wore uninteresting, black, loose-fitting clothes due to their month-long cramped ship voyage.
• Categories taken as visually and materially evident turned out to be not evident.
• The invocation of ostentatious female ornamentation pivoted between imagined presence and projected absence.
• The women were simultaneously dressed up and stripped down.
• The evidence emerged from a phantasmic conflation, overlapping surfaces located in teasing peripheries.

Ornamental Personhood

• The eminent English legal historian Frederic William Maitland ascertained that “the only natural persons are men. The only artificial persons are corporations.”

Questions of Personhood

• Maitland's assertion comes into question when race and sexuality are introduced.
• Who constitutes a “natural person,” and how do we move from a biological to a legal standing?
• What legal alchemy enables the transformation from singularity to collectivity, from embodiment to abstraction?
• What does the “feminine” do to this equation?
• How do racialized individuals, often exempted from personhood, fit into this postulation?
• The exclusion of women, and in particular women of color, from the discourse about legal personhood may not seem surprising, but the peculiar critical agency that their absent presences lent to the adjudication of what counts as a person in U.S. legal history demands much further consideration.

Visual-Legal Culture

• The case of Chy Lung allows us to view a visual-legal culture during the critical decades when anti-Chinese sentiment and modern American citizenship intertwine and are forged.
• Chy Lung dramatizes how the judicial making of the “Oriental body,” a moment of making racial difference highly visible, is also paradoxically the moment when that body disappears into ornamentality, and the idea of what is visible, of what can be seen in the courtroom, becomes denaturalized.
• One of the most fascinating aspects of this case must be the question of what constitutes “visual evidence” and how racialized femininity impacts and alters that assumption.
• In the nineteenth-century courtroom, “race” turns out to be a drama of re-codable surfaces and metaphoric displacements.
• What constitutes visual evidence and what does it mean to produce evidence?
• What does it mean to bear witness to and participate in the “reality” of bodies that are produced at the margins between imagined interiority and equally imagined exteriority?

Photographic Evidence and Visual Culture

• Jennifer L. Mnookin observes that the use of photography as evidence in courtrooms in the late 1880s triggered an unprecedented groundswell of visual representations—maps, charts, models, and so on—in the courtroom.
• Mnookin also argues that the entrance of photography into courtrooms brought into existence that category of proof we now call “demonstrative” or “constructed” evidence and initiated broader changes in courtroom practice and the conceptualization of evidence.
• Witnesses, attorneys, plaintiffs, and defendants actually went out and made evidence themselves.
• Evidence was something to be constructed as well as collected.
• These forms of visual evidence turned jurors themselves into virtual witnesses, able to see the evidence directly with their own eyes.
• The late nineteenth century thus witnessed the birth and development of a new way of establishing truth: the emergence of a “culture of construction.”
• New and entangled questions about its reliability—that is, evidentiary dilemmas—also emerged, in spite of the photograph’s promise of objectivity and indexicality.

Asiatic Female Body and Legal Presencing

• The heavily visualized and intensely spectralized Asiatic female body in that California courtroom offers something of a protophotographic forensic dilemma, with all its material promises and accompanying evidentiary crisis.
• The trial demonstrates that those real bodies in fact had to be marshaled, created, and constructed in order to be “evident.”
• This was never a case about the politics of self-presentation; it was about how the legal system affirms and expands its own epistemic jurisdiction.
• The so-called materiality of the Asiatic female body does not function indicatively even if its figuration hinges on a language that is persistently indicative.
• Chy Lung instantiates a dilemma of legal presencing: how to make bodies evident in the eyes of the law.
• Legally, it’s the body that seems to tell all, when in fact it’s the body’s surface that speaks.
• The ineluctable corporeality of the Asian female body depends, counterintuitively, on that body’s fundamental spectrality.
• Asiatic female visuality is a figure whose materiality is acquired through the imagined projection of the real that in turn relies on an ongoing fluctuation between presumption and facticity.

Ornament and Legal Adjudication

• Alan Hyde tells us that the law relies on a distinction between the physical and the discursive body.
• The seemingly peripheral and trivial presence of the ornament offers the very mediating agent that enables the law to make the necessary slippage between the biological and discursive body.
• Asiatic feminine ornamentality plays a vital function in the legal adjudication of racialized personhood that sanctions categories and hierarchies of oppression.
• The question of what is a natural body and what is on a body have a long, troubled, entangled, and formative history in U.S. legislation, especially when it comes to adjudicating which body counts and which does not.

Roberts v. The City of Boston (1849)

• Roberts v. The City of Boston (1849), the desegregation case that served as a precedent for the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Justice Lemuel Shaw states that their civil covering is not; confirming equality before the law based on the commonality of naked bodies, but it immediately delimits that universality by subsuming the biological body in the social body—or, more accurately, social ornamentation.
• All bodies may be considered equal, but their civil covering is not.
• Social ornament is itself subject to difference: male versus female and white versus racial otherness.
• What makes a theoretically blank body come to emit meaning and visibility turns on this external overlay.

Sartorial Logic and Ornament

• Gary Watt traces the long etymological connection between law and dress.
• The ornamental function of the sartorial should be pinpointed in order to consider the act of “dressing” or “putting something on” as a dynamic and judicial process.
• Dress designates civility and quotidian order, but ornament designates a category of dress that is marginal, excessive, and nonutilitarian.

Skin and Legal Personhood

• Racialized corporeality, like legal subjecthood, is always already an effect of a sartorial and ornamental logic.
• Rights and legal personhood are decorative rather than biological or essential.
• Skin is a distinguishing mantle that confers or rescinds rights.
• Ozawa v. U.S. (1922): Denied citizenship to Takao Ozawa based on being Asian/Japanese and not white.
• U.S. v. Thind (1923): citizenship against the repeal, court asserted that “whiteness,” must be understood by what the Court called “common understanding,”

Slippages and Erasure

• Legal personhood is constructed along a series of delicate slippages between bodies and their surfaces, essences, and attributes.
• The sartorial cladding of a person to render him or her visible in the eyes of the law suggests that legal personhood has very little to do with “natural” bodies even as this legal fiction has real effects on real bodies.
• The case against the Chinese women unfolds multiple layers of covering and absences.
• Bodies have already been subjected to other forms of erasure.

Mobility and Constraint

• The ghosting of these women’s bodies veils the profound crisis of mobility conditioning these women’s lives.
• The quotidian constraint of female movement speaks to more than gender inequality.
• These women placed themselves in the new global economy as both agents and commodities.
• The women stated that they came to America to become “seamstresses.”

Modern Conceptualization of Rights

• The California state immigration law allows petty state officials such as Piotrowski to extort money.
• That law produces shallow profiling.
• The state does not have the power to determine immigration policy and U.S. foreign relations.
• The 1876 Supreme Court case is an ongoing rebuke to the practice of racial profiling to this day.
• What does it mean that the legal language about our civil rights is tied to and relies on an ideal about “natural personhood” when legal personhood is anything but natural?

Natural Personhood

• Best contends that the conceptions of slave property are indebted to abstract rather than biological aspects of personhood.
• Allewaert argues that plantation labor practices and ecological peculiarities contest the ideal of a person as a discrete, purely biological agent.
• The Asiatic body sheds light on the particularly synthetic and sartorial roots of legal personhood.
• The questions of what is a natural body and what are its natural rights have a long and troubled history in U.S. legislation.

Johnson-Reed Act and Categorization

• Before the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, racial categories in the United States were far from rigid.
• The issue is not yet so much legal personhood per se as what kind of person is or is not acceptable, that is, the preconditions for legal personhood.
• This case signals the beginning of a legal process of categorizing people that will become the foundation for solidifying modern racial categories.

Sartorial Resurfacing and Authenticity

• The language of the sartorial resurfaces in both critical legal studies and colloquial conversations, symptomatically referring to the divide between individual authenticity and social coercion.
• The sartorial as a function of the ornamental is more than rhetorical and speaks to something structural about the law’s imagination.
• The relation between personhood and its external covers or decorations must be understood as vitally, even if disturbingly, imbricated.
• Contemporary antidiscrimination laws are based on natural and immutable traits (such as blood, chromosomes, and skin color) but do not protect superficial characteristics (behaviors, style, cultural practice, and other, more ornamental practices).
• One of the tasks of formulating the new civil rights must be the freedom to exercise one’s vision of one’s sense of authenticity, the right to self-fashioning.
• Covers and ornaments can indeed enact a “hidden assault on our civil rights,” but as we have seen (via the “clothing” of race), they also form the basis for anchoring our rights.

Practices and Selfhood

• The ideal of a naked or unornamented self cannot be the solution to the problem of racism, oppression, or discrimination, for that ideal denies how the (racialized) “self” is always already an effect of the ornament worn.
• Clothing and ornaments can offer the performance, the habitus, through which we acquire our sense of selfhood.
• Our experiences of our own racial, sexual, and ontic identities arise most acutely precisely at the intersection of being and the doing that supposedly decorates it.

Sartorial Selves

• What it means to be at home in your own skin turns out to signal the necessary distance between ontology and its ornaments.

The Law's Imagination

• The Orientalism that fueled Chy Lung blinded the men in power into making categorical mistakes; but the ornamental logic reveals something deeper about the illogic of how a person comes to be legible to the law.
• To think about law and the ornament is therefore to confront a set of political dilemmas that structure personhood and, by implication, racial materiality.
• The Case of the Twenty-two Lewd Chinese Women reminds us that being seen is not a condition of the visible but of the law and that how a body matters is a less a function of flesh than of ornament.

The Stamps

• The women’s bodies were in fact “ornamented” after all. Their skin was literally imprinted by legal ornaments that the law both imparts and erases.
• Retrieving this last, lost ornamental detail compels us to confront the invisibility of the visible on the one hand and the visibility of the invisible on the other.

Arnold Genthe and Chinatown

• Arnold Genthe was sparked by the slums of Chinatown. He captured some of the most memorable images of San Francisco’s Chinatown before the 1906 earthquake.
• The success of these images of Old Chinatown allowed Genthe to quit his job as a tutor and set himself up in a studio on Nob Hill, achieving the American Dream.

Photography and Criminality

• Anna Pegler-Gordon traces the origin of our passport photos today to the anxious need to identify and discipline “indistinguishable” and illegal Asian bodies in the nineteenth century.
• Delos Woodruff, in Chy Lung case, authored a private album of 144 photographs, what today we call “mug shots,” that he took of so-called Chinese criminals.

Afterimage

• Genthe’s photographs on gritty subjects stand in contrast to rare but eye-catching portraits of women and young girls.
• How are we to read this conspicuous femininity on the streets?
• There are Genthe’s pictorial meditations on Chinese femininity as a phenomenon on and of the street. Genthe was fascinated by the specter of the mobile Chinese female body.
• What is haunting about these photographs is precisely what they manage to evidence in spite of Genthe’s revisions.
• What are the conditions under which a (raced and gendered) body becomes visible? This question drives at the psychological, social, and even legal basis for forging identity and its concomitant rights.