Embodied Supremacy: Racial/Visual Whiteness, the Global Aesthetic Order, and East Asian Women’s Bodies

• In Event: 30421 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8. Uncertain Knowledge and their Epistemic Communities

Abstract

Whiteness is a global and historical construct, yet the distinction between racial whiteness (textual and discursive) and visual whiteness (aesthetic and material) remains underexplored. This paper examines how East Asian women’s bodies function as a critical site where these two forms of whiteness—manifested through skin tone, beauty standards, and cosmetic industries—converge, reinforcing but also destabilizing whiteness as a fixed category. While East Asian women may achieve visual whiteness through beauty standards and skin-lightening practices, they remain racially marked as nonwhite. Despite aesthetic proximity to whiteness, they continue to be positioned as “perpetual foreigners” in the U.S. and ambiguously racialized within global racial hierarchies. This paradox highlights how visual whiteness enables aesthetic assimilation while reinforcing global white supremacy.
Tracing these dynamics historically, this paper examines Japanese colonization in Taiwan as a case study, analyzing how Japanese imperial rule shaped beauty ideals and racial hierarchies in the region. Japan’s Meiji-era modernization, colonial expansion, and the rise of skin-whitening industries played a pivotal role in the naturalization of visual whiteness in East Asian societies, sustaining global white supremacy beyond the region. The colonial governance of Taiwan not only reinforced whiteness as an aesthetic ideal but also functioned as a mechanism of social differentiation, positioning Taiwanese women within a racialized hierarchy that both emulated and was excluded from Japanese imperial whiteness. By distinguishing racial whiteness from visual whiteness, this paper shows how whiteness operates through aspirational aesthetics of East Asian women’s bodies, shaping a gendered global white supremacy. By centering Japanese colonial Taiwan as a site of contestation and commodification, this study contributes to scholarship on race, colorism, feminism, and global white supremacy. Recognizing the distinction between racial and visual whiteness offers a more nuanced understanding of how whiteness is maintained and reproduced beyond U.S.-centric racial frameworks.

Author

• Yen-Yu Lin, DePauw University