About the Book
In Experiments in Skin Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology Research Program to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers' skin. These dermatologists sought relief for white soldiers while denying that African American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were also vulnerable to harm. Their experiments led to the development of pharmaceutical cosmetics, now used by women in Ho Chi Minh City to tend to their skin, and to grapple with the damage caused by the war's lingering toxicity. In showing how the US military laid the foundations for contemporary Vietnamese consumption of cosmetics and practices of beauty, Tu shows how the intersecting histories of militarism, biomedicine, race, and aesthetics become materially and metaphorically visible on skin.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Mysteries of the Visible 1
1. Skin Stories: Making Beauty in the Culture of Renovation 23
2. The Beautiful Life of Agent Orange 49
3. An Armor of Skin: Pacific Threats and the Dreams of Infinite Security 76
4. A Laboratory of Skin: Making Race in the Mekong Delta 104
5. Weak Skin, Strong Skin: The Work of Making Livable 134
Epilogue 161
Notes 165
Bibliography 201
Index 219
About the Author :
Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and author of The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion, also published by Duke University Press.
Review :
“Experiments in Skin is a fully dazzling treatment of the aftermaths of the Vietnam War. Working expertly at the intersection of military history, chemical warfare, modern medical research, race, dermatology, beauty, and skin, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu tells a fascinating and important story about how contemporary Vietnamese beauty culture has arisen from an ugly history of US militarism-the afterlife of warfare in its enduring marks on Vietnamese skin as well as military efforts to heal and even perfect soldiers' skin. Tu renders extraordinary insight into the tightly entwined histories of militarized technology and a rising beauty culture, giving name to whole new territories for analysis.” - Matthew Frye Jacobson, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History, Yale University “Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu advances a theory of aesthetics and politics that is urgently relevant to contemporary postcolonial theorizations of colonial modernity and the resistance to it. By historicizing the emergence of dermatology in the context of American empire and war, Experiments in Skin embodies the best of cultural studies methodology and analysis.” - Jennifer Terry, author of (Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America) "Experiments in Skin has extensive, detailed notes, and the depth of Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s analysis is evident as she cites military archives, newspaper articles and her own on-site research. . . . It is written in a journalistic style, which makes it accessible to a wide audience who might wish to learn about the heavy topics presented." - Bella Dalton-Fenkl (International Examiner) "Experiments in Skin is an ambitious and multifaceted account of the social afterlife of militarized medical science; its interdisciplinarity permits its author to draw insight from revealing juxtapositions. . . . Drawing together critical science studies with ethnography, Experiments in Skin contributes not only to medical anthropology and the history of medicine but also to a nascent critical research literature on beauty products and industries. Its chapters would make thought-provoking contributions to advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars in critical environmental studies, cultural studies, feminist studies, medical anthropology, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, and Southeast Asian studies." - Martha Lincoln (Medical Anthropology Quarterly) "Experiments in Skin is a superb gift: beautifully written, intellectually expansive, accessible and engaging. One of the most admirable aspects of Experiments in Skin is its ambitious capacity: it covers a lot of intellectual ground, but does so in such a way that still maintains analytical depth and thoroughness. Tu’s capacity to balance both is enviable, and is a quality that makes this book such an engaging and enjoyable read." - John Paul (JP) Catungal (Society and Space) "It is well beyond the scope of a short book review to do justice to Dr. Tu’s exacting empirical research, or her powerful and affecting prose. But what I want to emphasize in my comments here is how Experiments in Skin is a fundamentally geographical book. It is, at its core, a book about places, the people who inhabit them, and the connections between them." - Wesley Attewell (Society and Space) "In this insightful-and indeed beautiful-book, Tu offers us a model of scholarly work that not only undertakes a rigorous examination of the archives of militarism and science, but also a theorization of the forms of life remaindered by war."
- Linda Luu (Society and Space) "Readers of all stripes will find much to appreciate and admire in this interdisciplinary historical project, as Tu provides the probing critical analysis and somatic language needed to tackle the deep entanglements of military racism, prison torture, and chemical warfare. Experiments in Skin is a book for anyone interested in what stories our skin have to tell, despite the endless technologies of maiming and the politics of denial. If our history is embodied, then our skin remembers well that living history, and it never lies about what cannot be denied or covered up." - Long T. Bui (American Historical Review) "By conjoining the United States and Vietnam through their similar relationships with skin, Tu offers new ways to understand how military, medical, and commercial interests have shaped and influenced the ways Vietnamese women have sought to cure and relieve skin disorders. . . . In tracing the history of experiments in the skin, Tu powerfully articulates how Vietnamese women do not hold the same desires as the US military holds. . . ." - Shani Tra & Sunshine Blanco (Journal of Asian American Studies) "In pursuing the ghostly traces of latent histories, Tu’s book theorizes the connections between surfaces of racialized, gendered, commercialized, militarized, and medicalized skin on multiple scales across the US and Vietnam, while being attentive to alternate logics of relationality and responsibility." - Elizabeth Wijaya (Pacific Affairs) "By considering the scientific contributions and innovations of the Global South, Nguyen Tu disentangles social and medical theory from its purportedly Western origins and places it in a global context. Perhaps the question at hand is not just how dermatology’s beginnings concern women in contemporary Vietnam but also how this line of inquiry can be furthered in Vietnam studies." - Allen L. Tran (Journal of Vietnamese Studies) "Through a meticulous examination of both concrete and intangible evidence-from archived records and visual artifacts to haunting tales and women’s care practices-Tu articulates a compelling exploration of the enduring chemical legacies in Vietnam. The book brilliantly exposes how these legacies are deeply ingrained in the skin of contemporary Vietnamese people."
- Sojeong Park (Asian Journal of Women's Studies)
