Asian Immigration & Eroticized Geography

I think Mandy brings up some very interesting points about the sexualization of Asian men in her post. In considering the questions that she raised, I’ve become increasingly interested in how both Asian/(American) bodies are objectified, and how space was simultaneously eroticized and raced. Geographical issues and metaphors are central to both Shah’s and Ngai’s work. In Contagious Divides, Shah outlines how public health sought to define and contain the sexual threat that was associated with both Chinese bodies and Chinese spaces in San Francisco. There are striking parallels between the diseased “dens, density, and . . . labyrinth” (Shah 18) of Chinatown and the bodies of the syphilitic “mercenary prostitute,” high opium addict, and (obviously) ill and “abject leper” (Shah 79). In Impossible Subjects, Ngai makes similar argument about the conflation/confluence of race, place, and sexuality when she discusses the taxi dance halls frequented by Filipino men. In both historians’ work, race is a critical component in the literal and metaphorical construction of the boundaries (i.e., space) of the modern-nation state.

Both Shah and Ngai clearly outline the relationship between Asian sexuality and Asian spaces, however, what both works fail to fully articulate is how white sexuality/white spaces are constructed in hierarchical opposition to other raced spaces. Because the West is the primary setting for both histories, I can’t help but think of how the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny sexualized the “virgin” territories of the West. I’m thinking of images like John Gast’s painting American Progress (circa 1874), which I’ve posted on the right. By examining how “American” space/boundaries were conceived of as both white and fertile in discourse, prior to the policies of both public health and the Johnson-Reed Act, I think that we can come to a fuller understanding of what was thought to be at stake, and how easily race, place, and sexuality were united in the racist rhetoric of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

I would be grateful if anyone else considered and posted on how the construction of whiteness and its relationship to other perceived racial and national identities operates, particularly as it relates to domesticity.