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1. Spectacles of Intimacy and the Aesthetics of Domestication
- Temple University Press
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1 spectacles of intimacy and the aesthetics of domestication R are is the person who is satisfied with her passport photo. instead, she may feel a sense of misrecognition1 and wonder whose face gazes unsmiling back at her. set against the requisite unflattering plain (“white or off-white”) background in accord with the strict regulations outlined by the passport office that also stipulate the precise dimensions of the holder’s face (“⅛ to ⅜ inches”) as well as the size of the portrait itself (“2 × 2 inches”), it nevertheless matters little if she recognizes herself, so long as border guards do.2 identifying the citizen with the photo she carries among her documents is a necessary condition for the smooth transit of bodies across national borders . The standardization of the passport photo is meant to ensure efficient verification of citizenship.3 Accordingly the principle of likeness that Alan Trachtenberg singles out as the underlying premise of the portrait also governs an increasingly bureaucratic process; the passport photograph is primarily concerned with this quality of resemblance.4 yet, as lily Cho astutely points out, the very rigidity of these regulations ironically betrays an anxiety about the representation of citizenship, suggesting perhaps that the state cannot wholly recognize its citizens.5 The rules that we take for granted arguably attest not to the state’s efficiency when it comes to identifying citizens and noncitizens but rather to its inefficiency. Although John Torpey argues that these rules were consolidated only recently in the mid-twentieth century as a means of compensating for this inefficiency,6 Anna Pegler-Gordon contends that 1930 marks the year when immigration officials first began standardizing the practice of collecting photographs.7 According to eithne luibhéid, however, these rules were first spectacles of intimacy and the Aesthetics of Domestication 27 formulated in the United states as early as the late nineteenth century, in response to epistemological crises posed by the bodies of Asian women.8 in the wake of the Page Act of 1875, barring “undesirables” from entry to the United states on the grounds that they excited men to “lewd and immoral acts,”9 immigration officials were charged with determining whether these women were wives with a legitimate claim of reuniting with their families, or prostitutes whose claim to entry was illegitimate. The inclusion of photographs within official files reveals, luibhéid contends, the centrality of the Asian female body for the establishment of an increasingly standardized process of identification. Just as important, intimacy was the foundation of this process. intimacy is evident here in two ways. not only were the photographs meant to disclose the bearer’s moral conduct in compliance with standards of propriety, but the prospective immigrant’s submission to the sentimental norms associated with the family was also a crucial qualification for entry. As lisa lowe argues in her analysis of the colonial archive, bourgeois intimacy “administered the enslaved and colonized and sought to indoctrinate the newly freed [indentured laborer] into forms of Christian marriage and family. The colonial management of sexuality , affect, marriage, and family among the colonized formed a central part of the microphysics of colonial rule.”10 moreover, this regulatory framework focused on the figure of the Chinese female—and, as we will shortly see, the Japanese female as well—for securing divisions between public and private spheres. These figures secure “civility” in imitation of the european bourgeois model, so that, as lowe observes, “this fantasy of Chinese family civility was a way of marking a racial difference between ‘Chinese free labor’ and ‘negro slaves,’ through imagining the Chinese as closer to liberal ideas of human person and society.”11 A densely layered analytic approach whose manifold theoretical valences (as spatial proximity, as haunting of empire, as the blurring of private and public spheres, among others) are still being unpacked,12 intimacy is a form of civility that functions as a means of regulating and restricting the movements of bodies, and for identifying citizens and noncitizens. Before the formal consolidation of passport photo regulations, bourgeois portraits of families and individuals—whose likenesses were exchanged as a way of facilitating the formation of bourgeois families—aptly helped enforce and navigate increasing immigration restrictions. These included (1) the Page law of 1875, which has the dubious distinction of being the first federally implemented immigration legislation and was, as noted earlier, effective in dramatically reducing the numbers of Asian women in the United states; (2) the Chinese exclusion Act of 1882, which, until its repeal...