Tracing Euro-American modernism, post-modernism and post-colonial image making in South East Asian art 1930s to 1990s:

The Image of Women in The Shanghai Posters

The diagrammatical studies by Petrus Camper (1722-89) and Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801) turned the fantastic imaging of zoomorphism into a quasi science where through the images of meticulously measured animal and human craniums we can chart evolutionary progress from monkey to Apollo.(Figs 2-3) Cesare Lombrosso later applied the same idea in his studies of the criminal, arguing that the shape of brow, nose or earlobe, for example, revealed evolved or devolved human/animal characteristics of behaviour. (Fig. 4)

When Darwin published The Origin of the Species  aspects of what was to become known as the theory of evolution were, in one form or another, already widely understood elements of scientific theory. His theory of natural selection became  the technical justification for the wholesale subjection of the powerless to the powerful and for the ever-increasing levels in social inequality. The theory of evolution "scientifically" demonstrated that fundamental qualitative differences among human beings existed because natural selection had determined those who were more highly evolved than others. Henceforth, racial and sexual discrimination could be given a legitimate "scientific" basis, rather than the somewhat limp justification that it was "God's will". Darwinism showed why the Negro, the Malay, the Mongolian or the Australian Aborigine are almost precisely what they were five thousand years ago. 2 (Fig. 5)

Craniology, the science of brain measurement, not only demonstrated difference between the races, i.e., superior/inferior, but also situated the female hierarchically below the male. The problem of racist ideology lies less in the fact that "biological" criteria are being used than in the use they are being put to: constructing typologies of kinds  of people in the interest of social and political discrimination and instrumentalization. Biology has had the role  of signifying the natural, the given, the unchangeable, and thus the "objective" grounds on which to construct classes, races, and sexes, thus to justify classist, racist and sexist political order. The critique of biologism is not that there is no biological differences between people--which is a platitude of the first order-- but that the science of biology, like all sciences, is political. Racism and sexism as political practices construct another  race and another  sex, a race of "others" and a sex of "others".
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