Notes
153 Introduction 1. Leti Volpp, “Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship Through Marriage,” UCLA Law Review 53, no. 2 (2005): 403‒483. The Chinese were not allowed to naturalize as U.S. citizens until United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which gave birthright citizenship to U.S.-born Chinese in 1898 (Volpp, 407). For a discussion of the impact of Chinese exclusion on U.S.-born Chinese, see Volpp, 412‒418. For the legal construction of whiteness in the United States, see Ian F. López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 2. Volpp, 407. Ng Fung Sing was born in October 1898, and taken by her parents to China at the age of five. She married at the age of twenty-two and decided to return to the United States two years after her husband died. Her denationalization was first based on the 1907 Expatriation Act, which stipulated that “any American woman who marries a foreigner shall take the nationality of her husband,” based on the doctrine of coverture; and later based on the Cable Act of 1922, according to which only those who were legally designated as white or black were allowed to naturalize. The first federal citizenship statue that the U.S. Congress passed in 1790 limited naturalization to “free white” aliens. In 1870, the racial bar was partially lifted to permit naturalization of “aliens of African nativity and . . . persons of African descent” (Volpp, 412‒413). For details of the Cable Act, see Volpp, 440–443. For the amendments, see Volpp, 443‒447; Nancy Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1469; Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 140‒141. 3. Volpp, 405. These cases have been largely overlooked, except in Asian American feminist scholarship. Though scholarly focus is on “white women,” technically it may also include women of African nativity or ancestry, for they were also allowed to naturalize as citizens based on the amendment to the 1790 citizenship statue in 1870. For examples, Notes 154 Notes see Volpp, 433. For the history of U.S. white women’s citizenship and marriage, see Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); Pamela Hagg, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Martha Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870‒1965 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). For a discussion of race, same-sex marriage, and citizenship, see Greg Robinson, “Frontiers of Citizenship: Race, Citizenship, and Same-Sex Marriage,” in Family, Community and Education, ed. Yuko Takahashi and Teruko Ishikawa (in Japanese) (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2011). 4. Kang, 193. 5. The Cable Act of 1922 also stipulated that “any woman citizen who marries an alien ineligible to citizenship shall cease to be a citizen of the United States,” as long as the marriage was intact. Furthermore, after the marriage terminated, women who resided outside of the United States during the marriage for a continuous two years in the husband’s country or a continuous five years anywhere outside the United States were presumed to have renounced their citizenship. See Volpp, 434. 6. In this case, the foreign nationals ineligible for citizenship would also include bigamists, polygamists, persons with “abnormal sexual instincts,” “moral imbeciles,” paupers, the insane, those with “a loathsome or dangerous disease,” anarchists, and so on. See Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 138; Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xii. Other categories for exclusion include “the moral imbeciles, the pathological liars, and swindlers, and defective delinquents [and] many of the vagrants and cranks.” See Luibhéid, “Introduction: Queering Migration and Citizenship ,” in Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, ed. Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xii. Both Kang and Volpp point out that Asians were the most prominent...
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