Race-ing Sex

The history of sexuality in the United States is inextricably bound to the history of racialization. Conquest, slavery, voluntary migration, segregation, exclusion, stratification, detention, and civil rights struggles have shaped erotics, reproduction, identity, and kinship across four centuries. In the third edition of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman acknowledge in a new afterword entitled “Recent Historical Literature” that “attention to race difference and race relations is one of the most important ways in which history of sexuality has extended its scope.”¹ Attention to race both extends the history of sexuality’s scope and challenges its analysis.

Since its publication in 1988 Intimate Matters has offered a remarkably durable synthetic framework that shapes research investigations into the US history of sexuality, reproduction, and kinship. Freedman and D’Emilio present a three-pronged structure of historical analysis. The first tracks sexual meanings over time, geography, and social context. The second analyzes the continuities and changes in systems of sexual regulation in law, morality, and society that “channeled sexual desire and relations, criminalized and rendered some illegitimate and buttressed and enforced sexual norms by elites and experts.” The third details dynamics of sexual politics generated through “struggles among different classes, races and genders to contest sexual and social orders.”² This framework shaped my preparation for my PhD orals examination in US social history and the interpretive spine of the “race and sexual politics” and the “history of sexuality” courses I teach undergraduates.

Since the publication of Intimate Matters twenty-five years ago, among the dramatic developments in the field is the profusion of scholarship and research questions addressing race, sexuality, and gender. The tremendous growth in Asian American history is just one arena in which the process of racialization has unsettled both popular and scholarly assumptions about the shaping of sexual and social orders. In the original edition of Intimate Matters the handful of references to Asian American historical experience were limited to Chinese and Japanese female prostitution in the late nineteenth century and Chinese male bachelor society. Up until the 1980s Asian American history skirted a direct engagement with the questions and concerns of the history of sexuality. Likewise, history of sexuality scholars mirrored the approach of the social history of immigration, which viewed Asian American historical experience as curious and exceptional, but not a challenge to the field’s paradigms or analysis.

Since the 1990s Asian American studies scholars have analyzed and explained the combined racialization and sexualization of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans that have defined Asians persistently as irreducibly alien and inassimilable to the US nation-state and American culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Chinese and Japanese American men and women were depicted as depraved, immoral, and racially inassimilable to US society.³ US immigration restrictions, labor migration, and recruitment patterns contributed to predominantly male Chinese, South Asian, and Filipino migration. This “bachelor society,” with its lopsided gender ratios, has been cast as a tragedy of sexual and social alienation. Historians have critically interpreted the lurid and sensationalist imagery of Asian American bachelor vice to understand broader patterns of sexualized and gendered race-making that buttressed racial antipathy and segregation. The racial caricatures that circulate in the nineteenth-and twentieth-century media of effeminate men, treacherous women, and subservient women reinforced the perception of the “Oriental” race as gender atypical and sexually nonnormative, bereft of sexual agency.⁴

This new research that combines an attention to racialization and sexualization has transformed attention to racialized regimes of migration and transnational family formation; interracial socialization and erotics; the state management of heterosexuality through race; and the sexual agency, feeling, and politics of individual life stories and community struggles.

The concept of a “bachelor” society of single and independent men was a misnomer that ignored marriages and children in natal communities in Asia. Trans-Pacific migration separated families and reorganized kinship systems, and, as Jennifer Ting astutely recognized, narratives of family separation and reunification, managed by the state, became central to the history of sexuality from an Asian American perspective. The transformation of gender expression and roles and sexual...