Cartographies of Flesh: Biopolitical Mapping of Beauty, Racial Dys-Appearance, and Desir-Ability in Julia Cho's BFE

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper explores how Julia Cho's BFE reimagines the diasporic body as a spatial and semiotic site where the politics of beauty, race, and belonging converge. The geography of “BFE”—Butt Fuck Egypt, a nowhere-space marked by isolation and desolation—functions as a metaphor for the racialized body itself: peripheral and subjected to the normative gaze of whiteness. Through this spatial and corporeal parallel, and through the prism of somatic semiotics, BFE reveals how aesthetic ideals operate as biopolitical mechanisms that regulate the visibility, legibility, and social recognition of racialized flesh. These apparatuses produce patterns of “dys- appearance,” in which bodies dysfonctionally appear—simultaneously hypervisible and illegible—excluded from the normative order. Drawing together performance analysis, feminist theory, and biopolitical critique, this paper proposes the concept of “cartographies of flesh”: a model for understanding how racialized bodies are mapped and disciplined by the aesthetic and political logics of whiteness. Within this framework, the racialized body is inherently dys-qualified from beauty and rendered disabled through “desir-ability”—the socially and politically mediated capacity to be desired—functioning both as a biopolitical tool for regulating femininity and as a site where white epistemic legibility and embodied refusal intersect. In this way, this paper reframes beauty not as a mere aesthetic attribute but as a social technology of legibility, illuminating how racialized flesh becomes the surface through which the regime of whiteness inscribes, governs, and is contested in contemporary performance.