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Scientists dream of using custom organisms to fight illnesses or even build computers, but there’s a problem: it’s difficult to make the sweeping genetic changes that would give you exactly the lifeform you need. To that end, researchers have found…

With the reveal of the Essential Phone, Android cofounder Andy Rubin announced the Essential Home. This is a device – part of an ecosystem of devices in the future – which runs a smart home. While the company hasn’t said so directly, this device looks to take on already existing systems like Amazon Echo with Alexa and Google’s assistant in … Continue reading

The pilot episode of “Twin Peaks,” which aired in April 1990, begins with an image at once horrific and strangely compelling, disturbing yet deep-down familiar, the image of Laura Palmer’s washed-up dead body, sealed in a plastic bag. Her face is lifeless, her lips a grayish blue, and yet the blonde teenage girl retains her beauty, looking more like a washed up mermaid in need of a warm bath than a corpse that’s been decomposing underwater.

Before we even meet Laura Palmer, and long before we figure out who killed her, we know her type: The Pretty Dead Girl. In an article for Esquire, Anne T. Donahue recently argued that The Pretty Dead Girl trope, at least in pop culture, began with David Lynch’s cult series. However, our cultural obsession with lovely lady corpses probably began centuries earlier. 

Some very early examples of the widespread idolization of beautiful, inanimate women can be found in what are known as “Anatomical Venus” figures, idealized waxen sculptures tucked into glass cases, used in 18th-century Italy to teach doctors, artists and interested citizens about the human form. These figures were less aesthetically bland medical abstractions and more sumptuous, lifelike sculptures of women with golden curls, pearl necklaces and ample breasts ― who happened to have their innards exposed. In an interview with HuffPost, historian Joanna Ebenstein explained that the corresponding figures used to teach male anatomy hardly ever involved skin, let alone other accessories. The female sculptures, however, were painstakingly detailed, even sensual, prompting doctors and students to find pleasure in their dead forms. 

But one need not travel to a niche medical museum in Italy to see the Pretty Dead Girl motif in full view. Simply consider the Disney fairy tales so many young girls grow up with. Three of the original Disney princesses were Snow White, Cinderella and Aurora, the latter otherwise known as Sleeping Beauty. Of the three, two spend the majority of their narrative lives unconscious. Sure, they aren’t dead, but they would have been, had a handsome prince not kissed them back into life. 

In his 1846 “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allen Poe hammered the point home, asserting “the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” The theme appears again and again in his poems, most famously in the 1849 poem “Annabel Lee.” 

“And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side / Of my darling — my darling ― my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea — In her tomb by the sounding sea,” Poe writes. More times than not, when mentioned in the poem, Annabel Lee’s name is preceded by a simple description ― “beautiful.” 

The halls of art history, too, are littered with images of the lovely dead, perhaps none more famous than Sir John Everett Millais’ 19th-century “Ophelia.” The pre-Raphaelite painting depicts Ophelia, the character in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” who drowns herself after being driven mad by her lover’s violence. She wears a ballgown and clutches a string of flowers ― crow flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples ― her hair tangled up with surrounding weeds and brush.

For Surrealist and pre-Raphaelite artists, hers was an archetypal image of liminal sleep, a trance-like state between life and death, the natural and supernatural. All quite romantic, but, of course, extrapolated from a tale of anguish, mental illness and suicide, dressed up in a flowing gown and tousled red hair. There are countless other iconic portraits of women in various states of deep sleep ― Giorgione’s “Sleeping Venus,” Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare,” Sir Frederic Leighton’s “Flaming June,” the list goes on. 

Contemporary photographer Gloria Oyarzabal was horrified by the eerie misogyny embedded in this unseemly obsession, though a part of her was also entranced by the image. She worked through her feelings by drawing images of Ophelia, restoring some feminine agency to the lifeless muse. Eventually, representation was not sufficient. Oyarzabal took to embodying the character herself, documenting the act in a series of nude self-portraits. 

“I picked up my old Mamiya [camera] and got into nature, into places where I could ‘smell’ tension,” Oyarzabal told HuffPost. She tried to imbue her poses with strength, power and discomfort, rather than eternal rest. “It was like screaming silently,” she said. 

Another artist who repeatedly placed herself in the role of a dead woman, challenging anyone who dared look, was the late Cuban-born Ana Mendieta. In art school, Mendieta took to misogynist violence as a subject, blood as a medium, influenced in part by a rape and murder of a female university student that occurred on her campus.

For one piece, Mendieta tied herself to a table and didn’t move for hours, her naked body drenched with cow’s blood. She invited students and faculty to drop by without warning, turning them into witnesses to a “murder.” In a work titled “Clinton Piece, Dead on Street,” Mendieta, lay still in a pool of blood as a classmate stood over her taking photos of the carnage. In “Untitled (Rape Scene)” Mendieta was photographed lying motionless and blood-spattered at various spots across her university’s property.

The artist died in 1985 after falling from the window of her 34th floor apartment. Her husband, artist Carl Andre, was with her at the time; Mendieta was heard screaming “no, no, no, no” just before her body hit the ground. Andre was tried and acquitted for her murder, found not guilty on grounds of reasonable doubt. The defense argued Ana’s death was suicide, and used her haunting artwork to back up the claim. The tragedy was a horrific warning to women who dared to take ownership over images of their own death and destruction 

Of course, not all manifestations of The Pretty Dead Girl are fictional. One of the most notorious true crime cases of all time is the 1996 murder of 6-year-old beauty pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey, six years after “Twin Peaks” debuted. Just this year, Netflix released the documentary “Casting JonBenét,” examining the lasting imprint the grisly killing left on the nation’s collective psyche. 

“It was the imagery associated with it,” the film’s director Kitty Green told HuffPost, “which was all the pageants and crowns and the dress and the feather outfits that she was put in. I think those images were really haunting. So it was almost like this image of this pageant queen who almost seemed to have it all, but whose life went horribly wrong, or horrifically had it taken away from her.” 

Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson ― all are or were real-life women whose deaths were sensationalized in tabloids and on TV, in part because of their pretty faces. Their untimely ends became forms of entertainment, ghost stories disconnected from lived identities, not quite art or fiction but something close. 

Writer Maggie Nelson addresses the American-ness of murder ― particularly, the murder of young, white women, in her book The Red Parts, which chronicles the trial of a man accused of murdering Nelson’s aunt, Jane, a law student engaged to be married at the time in 1969. When recalling watching Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” in a UC Berkeley class, Nelson makes an even more disturbing realization: culture doesn’t just privilege its pretty dead girls. By denying female characters independence, nuance and vitality, so many forms of art and culture create women characters who, even while walking and talking, are virtually lifeless.

“I remember feeling disconcerted by the way Kim Novak’s character seems stranded between ghost and flesh,” she wrote, “whereas Jimmy Stewart’s seems the ‘real,’ incarnate. I wanted to ask my professor afterward whether women were somehow always already dead, or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist…”

Why is it that our cultural landscape is so fixated on unconscious female characters? Do we really privilege women most when they lack agency to such a degree that they lack a pulse? By perpetually returning to images of Pretty Dead Girls, are we accepting the prototype and the warning? A beauty ideal blemished by the violence women face on a daily basis, an advisory to those who still proceed with uninhibited independence?

Shows like “Twin Peaks” have provided depth, darkness and nuance to their Pretty Dead Girl leads, presenting Laura Palmer as a complex person rather than a random corpse that’s easy on the eyes. Yet most viewers, rather than recalling the fact that Palmer volunteered with Meals on Wheels or struggled with drugs, will remember a single, searing image: the first moment her face is revealed, lovely and docile and blue. 

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This week marks the end of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month.  First designated in 1978, this annual commemoration is a time to celebrate the proud legacy of the Asian American community and as importantly, to reflect on the important challenges ahead.

For the Trump administration, this month has passed with little fanfare.

The White House issued a bland proclamation to “recognize the achievements and contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders that enrich our Nation.” However, Donald Trump opted against a public event to mark the month. That’s not a bad thing. After all, at a February roundtable for African American History Month, Trump extolled the virtues of Frederick Douglass as if the abolitionist were still alive.

To fill the gap, Mike Pence spoke to a gathering of AAPI community leaders. Oddly, Pence was unable to express much personal connection to the community despite the 120,000 AAPIs in his state of Indiana. Instead, Pence recounted his recent trip to Asia and recited a series of platitudes about Asian Americans “contributing every day to everything that makes America thrive.”

Trump and Pence are right to appreciate the accomplishments of the Asian American community. These accomplishments are countless and worthy of celebration. However, by focusing only on the positive, the Trump administration ignores the serious challenges facing the AAPI community – and the federal role in addressing these challenges.

In contrast, the eight Heritage Month proclamations issued by Barack Obama acknowledged the discrimination and hardships faced by AAPIs. For instance, Obama recognized the “long history of injustice,” “persistent inequality and bigotry,” and “disparities in health care, education, and employment that keep [AAPIs] from getting ahead.”

On balance, it is true that Asian Americans are wealthier, more educated, more stable and more established than other groups. Yet, the AAPI community is not a monolithic one, and there continue to be great disparities among its subgroups. Consider just a few examples:

• The unemployment rate for Pacific Islanders is more than double the rate for Japanese Americans. As a group, AAPIs have one of the highest rates of long-term unemployment, with 41 percent of all unemployed Vietnamese Americans out of work for more than 27 weeks.  

• Southeast Asian Americans have some of the highest poverty rates in the country – 38 percent of Hmong and 30 percent of Cambodians.  In New York City, the overall Asian American poverty rate is the highest of any racial group.

• In the area of education, Chinese American have a higher percentage of high school dropouts than white Americans.  Among Southeast Asian Americans, the high school dropout rate is staggering:  34 percent of Laotians, 39 percent of Hmong, and 39 percent of Cambodians.

• With regard to health disparities, AAPIs make up less than 5 percent of the U.S. population but account for more than 50 percent of Americans living with chronic hepatitis B.  AAPIs also have the highest rate of undiagnosed HIV of any racial group.

When Mike Pence addressed AAPI leaders, he said: “[This President wants you and every American, no matter the background, to accomplish more, to climb higher, to make tomorrow even better than today.”

To the contrary, the Trump administration has advocated policies over the past four months that would exacerbate the problems affecting the Asian American community.

The administration has released a budget that drastically cuts critical programs – such as student loan forgiveness, disability benefits, affordable housing, and nursing home care – that benefit poor and working class AAPIs. By decreasing funding for food assistance programs, the Trump administration cuts an essential lifeline that feeds 1.3 million Asian Americans. The budget also slashes funding for job training programs that help AAPIs gain access to fast-growing, high-paying careers.

Asian American-owned businesses, which now number 1.9 million, also would suffer from the Trump budget.  Programs to educate and counsel entrepreneurs are cut by 21 percent.  And the Trump budget eliminates the Minority Business Development Agency, which last year helped AAPI businesses secure almost $900 million in contracts and capital, thus creating or retaining 2,800 jobs.

The administration’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) endangers over 2 million AAPIs who have obtained health care in recent years. Also impacted are 4.3 million other AAPIs who have greater access to preventive care, including cancer screenings, because of the ACA.

With regard to immigration, Trump’s divisive policies harken back to an era of discriminatory actions like the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment. Trump’s deportation agenda has created fear and anxiety among the 1.5 million undocumented Asian Americans, while his budget cuts to civil rights enforcement would leave the community vulnerable to discriminatory practices.

As troubling as the immigration policies is Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric that has contributed to a rise in hate crimes against Muslim and South Asian Americans. As ten AAPI civic leaders explained in their resignation from a White House commission in February: “[W]e object to your portrayal of immigrants, refugees, people of color and people of various faiths as untrustworthy, threatening, and a drain on our nation.”

In its successes and struggles, the Asian American community is a microcosm of the nation. Instead of recognizing the diversity of AAPI experiences, the Trump administration chooses to perpetuate the model minority stereotype and obscure the destructive nature of its policies.

Chris Lu served in the Obama administration as Deputy Secretary of Labor, White House Cabinet Secretary, and Co-Chair of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. He is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia Miller Center. You can follow him on Twitter at: @ChrisLu44.

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