This thesis analyses bodily and medical aesthetics and Taiwanese and Hong Kong literature and film form the 1990s and 2000s, with particular attention to the disruptions that the changing global economic order brought to bodily materiality within the territories. I engage with science fiction and horror, one genre closely associated with projected futures, and another associated with ghostly returns and commodified thrills, in order to track the connections between mapping the body and mapping the world. In my first chapter, I examine Membranes, a 1995 science fiction novella by queer Taiwanese writer and scholar Chi Ta-wei, alongside the post-martial law political and economic context in Taiwan and concerns about HIV/AIDS. Aspirational technologies that promise more, better life also map the geopolitically precarious Taiwan into a stable economic and political status, but suggest that this deferred thriving, both for queer people specifically and Taiwanese people more broadly, is a direct trade-off with projects that seek to imagine a radically different future. My second chapter analyzes two Hong Kong horror films, the Pang brothers’ The Eye (2002), and Fruit Chan’s Dumplings (2005). Chosen for their depiction of different forms of medical intervention, as well as for their association with the “Pan-Asian” Horror movement that hit its stride in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I argue that these films use medical treatments to restore the human body as a means of exploring different ways of cognitively and affectively mapping Hong Kong’s new position in the world system following the 1997 handover to mainland China. These two chapters together examine the political realities of global capitalism and the body as we materially experience it.