Citizenship and the Immigrant Body

The question of citizenship and the manifold forms of violence experienced by the “noncitizen” remain important issues for feminist and race studies scholars. In a recent online essay, critic Lisa Lowe (2008) observes that there is currently proposed legislation that seeks to criminalize more than twelve million undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States. In the same vein, the emotional and often racially charged 2009 debates regarding Barack Obama’s controversial birth certificate—recently revived by Sarah Palin on a right-wing radio show (Gay 2004)—and the movement against health care reform attest to the lingering American fear of the noncitizen who “encroaches” on American soil and has come to “leech off” the resources of the country. In Immigrant Acts, Lowe writes that the question of citizenship, or the coming into being of an “abstract citizen” requires and is inaugurated by violence, in particular “the negation of a history of social relations that publicly racialized groups and successively constituted those groups as ‘nonwhites ineligible for citizenship’” (1996, 26–27). The abstract citizen of an American liberal democracy can thus only exist through the erasure and the institutionalized disavowal of the U.S. nation’s violent histories of race and racism. Another critic, Grace Kyungwon Hong, in her most recent work, The Ruptures of American Capital, notes that women of color feminism must attend to the contradictions of nationalism and citizenship, that is, “that the very rhetoric of inclusion and universality ensures racialized and gendered dispossession” (2006, xix). Hong adds that during the early 20th century, citizenship was the means by which the U.S. nation-state recruited and disciplined workers and facilitated “the hierarchization of workers and the extraction of capital” (xxiii).

Today, in the early twenty-first century, a new generation of U.S. feminist scholars engages with critiques of citizenship—as a disciplinary technology and as a foundational and violent logic of capital—in different ways. Citizenship and the “immigrant body” are the theoretical analytics of three new studies: Lynn Fujiwara’s sociological study of the aftereffects of three anti-immigrant policies, Sarah E. Chinn’s genealogy on the creation of modern adolescence in the early twentieth century, and Grace M. Cho’s interdisciplinary study of the Korean comfort woman as a figure of shame and the traumas of war for diasporic Koreans. All three authors approach the question of citizenship, gender, and immigrant identity in distinct ways, using diverse methodologies and archives. As such, I will address their work individually along with pedagogical suggestions for teaching these texts.

In Fujiwara’s Mothers Without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform, we return to the 1990s. More than a decade ago, a strong anti-immigrant movement, one that Fujiwara carefully traces in media, culture, and policy, culminated in three laws that continue to affect immigrants and communities of color to this day. We can thus consider Fujiwara’s work as an archaeology of the anti-Asian ideology and the xenophobia of current anti-immigrant and nativist movements. In 1996, under Democratic president William Jefferson Clinton, three anti-immigrant enactments were signed into law: the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), and the Antiterrorism Effective Death Penalty Act or Antiterrorism Act. Fujiwara argues that these laws were implemented haphazardly and caused panic and fear. Close to a half million “elderly, disabled and blind immigrants were expected to lose their Supplemental Security Income,” and “seventy-two percent” of those immigrants were women (xv). In fact nearly one million elderly and disabled immigrants lost their food stamp benefits (xv). Fujiwara sheds light on the impact of these laws on Asian immigrant women and their families—from poverty and foreigner...