Cartographies of skin: Asian American adornment and the aesthetics of race

Unrestricted“Cartographies of Skin: Asian American Adornment and the Aesthetics of Race” is a pan-ethnic study of Asian American tattoo practices in California and their significance within a broader cross-cultural context of the Pacific World. I examine how ideologies and epistemologies of race, space, and aesthetics converge on the surface of the skin in ways that can reflect, reinforce, and potentially subvert U.S. social hierarchies and hegemonic cultural logics. I analyze the transformative effects that occur when bodies that display socially imposed racial markings (usually coded as the color of one's skin) become further marked by self-induced forms of body aesthetics. My research incorporates mixed methods of archival research, visual and discursive analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and critical theory to cover topics such as: the transnational movements of labor and aesthetics between tattoo shops in San Francisco and Japan; the meanings of diaspora, temporality, and post-coloniality within the context of tribal tattooing among Filipinos in Los Angeles; and the embodied ontologies and performative epistemologies of a Korean American tattooed drag queen and her queer aesthetics of adornment. By exploring the cultural politics of body modification, I analyze how all bodies are modified in some form or another, thereby destabilizing normativized notions of what is considered natural and normal forms of cultural and national belonging