Crazy Rich Asians: Towards an Ornamental Feminist Account of Wealth and Desire

Abstract

Wealth is often seen as an object of desire. That is, it is what desire desires and it comes to represent desire. The accumulation of wealth is commonly considered excessive and coming at the cost of environmental and corporeal needs. Such an account of wealth follows an either/or logic that produces a set of oppositional terms such as nature or culture, desire or need, wealth or necessity, luxury or survival. This article explores questions of wealth and desire via the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians. It uses the lens of ornament to zoom in on how the film depicts the relationship between the natural and the artificial, winning and losing, and subject and object. It proposes a feminist ornamental approach to wealth and desire that reworks the either/or logic and the oppositional terms that undergird it. It argues that this approach allows for an analysis of the relation between race, gender, nature, style, wealth and desire beyond one of commodification or recognition, ownership or dispossession.