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.

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

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.