Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam

Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke University Press, 2021) examines the afterlife of the Vietnam War, and its continued impact on our understanding of race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, materially and metaphorically, the book considers the work of wartime scientists in the U.S. Military Dermatology Research Program, who attempted to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers’ bodies, while helping to shore up the widespread use of these same chemicals, alongside the labors of women in contemporary Vietnam, who continue to struggle to remediate war’s biochemical effects. By foregrounding the histories of US militarism, biomedical investigations, chemical warfare, consumer culture and the bodies of U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers, prisoners, and civilians who have been the subjects of research and remediation, Experiments in Skin advances a transpacific theory of aesthetics and politics critical to our understanding of colonial modernity and the lives lived in its shadows.

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States. Co-Sponsored by the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies.