‘Some Very Queer Couples’: Gender Migrants and Intimacy in Nineteenth-Century America

This article contends that the term gender migrant – which describes a person who changed gender on a long-term basis in their everyday life – offers a useful tool for grappling with the ambiguities of nineteenth-century transgender history. Examining four cases of gender change that circulated in the popular press between the antebellum era and the turn of the twentieth century, the article brings to light intimate relationships that do not fit within the categories of female husbands or sexual inverts that have become familiar to historians of sexuality. Some female-assigned gender migrants lived as men and sought same-gender intimacy in the company of other men. Reading ambiguous cases of love and marriage from multiple angles provides insight into the strategies that resourceful gender migrants used to legitimise their public gender identities.     

Femininities on transnational journeys and sexual health risk: experiences of Chinese immigrant women in Canada

Negotiations at work in a globalising China in regard to femininity, sexuality, and family relationships have been well documented from the 1990s. Nonetheless less is known about them in a transnational context, and femininities are far less explored than masculinities. Drawing on interview data from a larger research study of transnationalism and gendered HIV vulnerability, this article investigates the intersection of femininity, sexuality and sexual health risk through Chinese immigrant women’s narratives about their experiences in Canada. It examines to what extent these intimate negotiations within China are re-enacted through Chinese immigrant women’s transnational experiences in Canada. These women live ‘in-between’ China and Canada in terms of identity, space and time with their cross-cultural connections unveiling both virtual and actual relations. Gender norms and roles, intimate and sexual experience, and family relations are realigned in the transnational lives of these women and are impacted by both their home and host societies, as well as their past and present experience in China. Used in the article as a concept and an analytical lens, gender is acknowledged as a key organising principle in post-immigration individual and social experience.     

Performance and the politics of gender: transgender performance in contemporary Chinese films

This article focuses on two different genres of gender transitivity or impersonation. First, male actors who impersonate female characters. The two examples used to examine these impersonations are Chinese films Farewell My Concubine (Ba Wang Bie Ji 1993) and Forever Enthralled (Mei Lanfang 2009). Both films are based on the historical practice of dan in Peking Opera. Second, women who cross-dress as men for the sake of transgressing into the public sphere that had traditionally been forbidden for women. The main example of this is Hua Mulan (2009), a live action movie based on a Chinese legend of a female warrior called Hua Mulan, who disguises herself as a man to replace her father in the military service. Based on my close reading of the transgender performance in these Chinese films, the article will engage discussions of Western gender theories by Garber, Butler and Halberstam to examine the discourse and politics of gender and sexuality in contemporary China. To be more specific, a critical analysis will be carried out in the following three aspects: first, gender performativity is not necessarily subversive, but only suggests that heterosexual norms are arbitrary and unnatural. Second, rather than challenging heterosexism and gender binarism in contemporary China, the three films seem to support and consolidate the gender hierarchy. Thirdly, the category of transgender is intersected with art, identity and ideology in the specific social and historical settings. The contextualized analysis not only sheds new light on the implications of transgender in contemporary Chinese culture and politics but also questions the universalism of Western gender theories in cross-cultural contexts.     

Liberating sex, knowing desire: "scientia sexualis" and epistemic turning points in the history of sexuality

This study considers the role of epistemic turning points in the historiography of sexuality. Disentangling the historical complexity of "scientia sexualis," I argue that the late 19th century and the mid-20th century constitute two critical epistemic junctures in the genealogy of sexual liberation, as the notion of free love slowly gave way to the idea of sexual freedom in modern western society. I also explore the value of the Foucauldian approach for the study of the history of sexuality in non-western contexts. Drawing on examples from Republican China (1912-49), I propose that the Foucauldian insight concerning the emergence of a "homosexual identity" in the West can serve as a useful guide for thinking about similar issues in the history of sexuality and the historical epistemology of sexology in modern East Asia.     

Tourist,local, or other?: Greek Canadian women and the heritage fling in Greece

This article examines the romantic and sexual encounters between Greek men and Greek Canadian women vacationing in Greece and addresses how constructions of Greek Canadian female sexuality are related to foreign and local Greek conceptions of femininity during these ‘holiday flings’. Because of their Greek ancestry, Mediterranean ‘looks’, and familiarity with language and culture, Greek Canadian women exhibit ambiguous identities that uphold and cross boundaries between outsiders and insiders. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, I explore the conceptualizations of ancestral and national identity underpinning Greek women's erotic desires for Greek man who embody ethnic authenticity to them. Yet, Greek men thwart these desires when they subvert Canadian women's economic power through challenging their cultural literacy (such as a lack in language skills, etiquette, or sexual knowledge). This article addresses the question of how diasporic women's heterosexuality subjectivities – bound up with hybrid ethnic and national affiliations – take on different meanings across locales and times where transnational sex and romance are everyday occurrences.     

Exclusion through Inclusion: Female Asian migration in the making of Canada as a white settler nation

In this article I explore the ways in which concerns over nation, ‘race’, gender and sexuality shaped late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates on whether Canada should exclude or include female migrants from China, Japan and India in the emerging nation-state. In the late nineteenth century, Canadians began to debate whether to allow female migration from China, Japan and India. The vast majority of those who participated in the debate argued that female migrants from Asia should be excluded, as their exclusion would insure that male migrants from Asia would be rendered as temporary residents. On the other hand, there was a small but vocal minority who argued that female migrants from Asia should be allowed into Canada. As the presence of single male Asian residents raised the specter of inter-racial sexuality, these Canadians suggested that it would be prudent to include female migrants from Asia within the nation-state. These debates raise important questions for scholars who study the relationships between nation, ‘race’, gender and sexuality. First, they point once again to the importance of gender in constituting the racialized practices of the nation. Second, as most scholars have focused on the exclusionary aspects of nationalism, they complicate our understanding of race, gender and nation by illustrating that racialized politics of nation can lead to not only exclusionary but also inclusionary practices.     

‘My Body was Aflame with His Memory’: War,Gender and Colonial Ghosts in Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

This article argues that historicising the iconic 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour reveals a different set of meanings that most scholars have overlooked. As France found itself embroiled in the brutal and bloody Algerian War of Independence, many started reflecting on the meaning and aftereffects of the Second World War. Despite its anti‐colonial universalist humanism, Hiroshima remains haunted by colonial ghosts and fantasies of post‐war ‘Asia’ where Asian female bodies are passive and Asian male bodies only echo other European male bodies. Ultimately, sexual and racial differences organise the film's narrative of war and canonises a Eurocentric version of ‘history’. The film's melodramatic love story renders invisible the ways gender and sexuality shape understandings of violence, wars, and violated bodies. Against Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's intentions, the love story allows the remembering and forgetting of a (French) national history that only the female character embodies. Only the French woman stands in for subjectivity, memory and trauma, rendering everything else secondary. Once read as a historical text, the film illustrates the limits and ambivalences of post‐war anti‐colonial humanist political imagination.     

Spain violated: foreign men in Spain's heartland

The process of colonial expansion in the sixteenth century fundamentally changed Spanish culture. Along with race, religion, ethnicity, status and honour, definitions of proper gendered and sexual behaviour changed as well. This article argues that Spanish communities and institutions came to define foreign men as examples of a subordinate and dangerous masculinity. The threat that foreign male sexuality posed to Spanish women and thus Spanish patriarchy – not only in the colonies, but within Spain itself – led institutions to prosecute foreign men. This essay draws on the language used in Inquisition and ecclesiastical court cases against foreign men as well as in Spanish literature of the period.     

Gender,Power, and the Denial Of Intimacy in Chinese Studies and Beyond

This article identifies and critically examines four recurring concerns in writings on Chinese gender and sexuality: (1) Emphasis on extreme cases of women's suffering to produce a more dramatic effect. (2) Focus only one gender's perspective and disregard of the role of social class. (3) De-emphasis on men's place within the subjective domain and overlooking how emotional bonds unite couples. (4) Depiction of the erotic as simply the manifestation of prevailing sexual ideology, which encourages viewing male/female interaction as an exercise in power and dominance, and discourages interpretation of the erotic as an aesthetic experience.     

Virile Turks and Maiden Ireland: Gender and National Identity in Early Modern English Travel Literature

This article examines the role of gender in depictions of national identity in early modern English travel literature. I show that human sexual relationships were believed to be echoed in relations between territories, which were often represented as masculine or feminine. Travellers used metaphors representing marriage, seduction and rape to describe geopolitical relationships, including colonialism, tribute payments and rebellion. Representations of Ireland and the Irish, and the Ottoman Empire and the Turks are among the most revealing. I argue that such metaphors were especially favoured by travel writers because gender was believed to be inherently mutable, thus providing a variety of easily understood and mutually accepted narratives to describe international political relationships.     

Translation as techné: female sexuality and the science of social progress in colonial India

Abstract

In this article, I analyze processes of translation that shaped the science of sex in eastern India between the 1880s and the 1930s. I trace the impact of translation – the rendering of words between the language of English and Bengali as well as the travel and transformation of concepts – through close textual analysis of influential Bengali-language medical and scientific textbooks on nymphomania, female sexual excesses, and the evolution of Indian society. The translation of sexual categories was a techné by which Bengali intellectuals produced categories of social behavior and identity as equivalent and homogenous. Through claims of equivalence in translation, Bengali scientists argued for the commensurability of Indian social practices with universalist schemes of social evolution and civilizational progress. This process of exchange pivoted on the figure of the sexually deviant woman, who became a key site of translation and categorical equivalence. In thinking translation through techné, I foreground how a semiotics of female sexuality produced ‘the social’ as an object of inquiry in colonial India.     

Loyalist,patriot, or colonizer? The three faces of Zheng Chenggong in Meiji Japan and late Qing China

ABSTRACT

This article examines the transformation of Zheng Chenggong’s image in Meiji Japan and late Qing China. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Zheng Chenggong was often depicted as a Ming dynasty loyalist in Chinese narratives and as a Japanese hero adventuring in a foreign land in Japanese narratives. The two groups of narratives converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transforming Zheng Chenggong into a patriot, an anti-imperialist hero, and a conqueror and developer of Taiwan. Underlying the convergence of Chinese and Japanese narratives of Zheng Chenggong was surging nationalist sentiment in response to different forms of imperialism. This study aims to show how different nationalist agendas activated efforts to recreate Zheng Chenggong’s image in China and Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century.     

The Universal Principle of Grace: Feminism and Anti‐Calvinism in Two Seventeenth‐Century Women Writers

This article presents one of the theological contexts for early feminist thought in England in the late seventeenth century. It argues that an emerging universalist soteriology in Platonist and radical thought had a positive impact on discourses about sexual equality, and shows how two female writers (the Quaker Elizabeth Bathurst and the visionary M. Marsin) combined their critique of the doctrine of limited atonement – in other words, the idea of an exclusive elect – with a confident assertion of women's calling to preach and teach in the Church.     

GIs and “Jeep girls”: sex and American soldiers in wartime China

ABSTRACT

This article examines how sex affected the larger politics of the Sino–US alliance during World War II. By early 1945, Chinese from across the social spectrum resented the US military presence, but just one issue sparked a violent backlash: sexual relations between American soldiers (GIs) and Chinese women. Two interrelated, patriarchal narratives about sex emerged that spring. Starting in March, government-backed newspapers began criticizing “Jeep girls,” an epithet coined to describe the Chinese women who consorted with American servicemen. Rumors also circulated that GIs were using Jeeps to kidnap “respectable” women and rape them. Each narrative portrayed women’s bodies as territory to be recovered and inextricable from national sovereignty. These narratives resonated widely, turning Jeep girls into the catalyst through which all variables causing resentment against the US military presence intersected and converged. With Japan on the ropes, China’s allied friends now stood in the way of irreversibly consigning foreign imperialism to the past. Sexual relations were not the Sino–US alliance’s seedy underside, but the core site of its tensions.     

‘I Could Eat My Baby to Bits’; passion and desire in lesbian mother–children love

Mother–children love and adult–sexual love tend to be differentiated by the absence/presence of passion and desire. In the course of my research on lesbian parent families, the artificiality of this distinction has become transparent. In attempting to describe ‘mother love’ mothers said repeatedly they loved their children ‘to bits’, wanting to ‘eat them up’, feeling ‘utterly passionate’ towards them. This challenges the traditional sexual–sexless boundaries between parents and children. The intensity of ‘maternal love’ often means that mother–child intimacy becomes a site of delicate negotiations between desire and love. The legal–moral boundaries that are invoked prohibit intergenerational desire, upholding the incest taboos that dominate Western culture. However the construction of these boundaries neither stop adult–child ‘border skirmishes’ nor quash children's ‘natural’ exploration of their sexuality. I explore how bodies and bodily boundaries are used to manage sexuality and desire in families. I consider how mothers negotiate their way through the contradictions of mother–children love, incorporating the passion and desire of this love. I suggest mothers' acknowledgment of their passion does not mean that ‘maternal love’ is potentially sexual/incestuous, but instead questions its conceptual framing. I suggest that future research on mother–children love might usefully look outside the traditional discourses used to describe and delineate love, towards ones that incorporate non‐sexual desire.     

‘Pounding dirt all day’: labor,sexuality and gender in the British Columbia reforestation sector

In this article, I examine the relationship between sexuality, gender and labor in the context of the British Columbia, Canada, tree planting industry. I examine how sexuality and gender are central to how the labor process of planting trees is organized and ‘experienced’ by workers. I focus on how workers' productivity is managed through the regulation of sexuality while also interrogating the heteronormative character of this process. In addition, I examine the homosocial and homoerotic dimensions of tree planting labor in order to understand the fragile and tremulous nature of sexual boundaries, which, importantly, are bound up with questions of power and gender. My goal is to stimulate debate on the relationship between sexuality and labor, which is an understudied area compared to the attention that has been paid to the gendering of working life.     

Ardent Service: Female Eroticism and New Life Ethics in Gertrude Dix's The Image Breakers (1900)

Gertrude Dix's socialist-feminist novel, The Image Breakers (1895) has perplexed twentieth-century critics by its brief, short-circuited representation of homoerotic affection between the two female protagonists. In answer, this essay roots the women's relationship in the wider social, historical context of New Life politics and ethics in the 1890s. Members of the Fellowship of the New Life heralded not merely a variety of alternative lifestyles including vegetarianism and co-education, but also extensive discussion about sexual mindfulness and generosity. The charismatic seer and inspiration for the FNL, James Hinton, preached that utopia could be achieved by practicing an erotically-charged altruism. If, as Sharon Marcus has claimed, such female mutual devotion was common and perceived as normative, it was particularly affirmed by ethical-socialist culture. In the novel, Leslie Ardent's loving service to Rosalind is fuelled by her political mission and desire for self-realization. Through this female intimacy, Dix evokes the initial phase of New Life socialism as Hinton and his followers had espoused it. By contrast, the women's heterosexual relationships are more troubling, as male comrades pressure them respectively into heterosexual marriage and free love. In order to discredit heterosexual free love, Dix paints its proponent as a disturbed anarchist, rather than admit that historically some in ethical-socialist circles had advocated polyamoury. Nor does she acknowledge the philosophical convergences between collective anarchism and ethical socialism at the fin de siècle, though she herself was engaged in radical communities. Through her indictment of free love, Dix punctures the utopian vision of a pure, selfless, erotic affection flowing between individuals; figuratively, the novel re-enacts the collapse of Hinton's own reputation from seer to seducer. Echoing scenarios by other female ethical-socialist writers, the early intimacy between Rosalind and Leslie then serves the function of nostalgia, symbolizing a now-lost stage of New Life optimism and association.     

An Archive of Difference: Syrian Women,the Peddling Economy and US Social Welfare, 1880–1935

Historians have scrutinised the racial classifications of Arab immigrants in the census, in immigration documents and in early‐twentieth‐century naturalisation cases. However, recent scholarship has shown that other archives – ones that do not focus on interactions with the law – reveal a different process of Arab‐American racialisation. This article contends that looking in other archival spaces, specifically the US social welfare archive, shows how ideas about gender, sexual and class difference constituted early Arab‐American racialisation. Social welfare reformers in institutional settings, including the International Institute of Boston, the National Conference of Social Work and the pages of the social work periodical The Survey, systematically linked Syrian labouring practices with notions of dependency, sexual and gender deviance, and Orientalist difference. Syrian women were racialised through their participation in the peddling economy – a network of peddlers, suppliers and domestic labourers that sustained a widespread profession of the early Syrian American community. Syrian women's labouring practices conflicted with white middle‐class femininity and posed a threat to Syrian claims of whiteness. This analysis demonstrates the centrality of gender, sexuality and class to studies of early Arab America and demonstrates how Arab migrant women's labouring practices affected their communities’ standing in the American context.     

Erotics,love and violence: European women's travels in the northeast of Brazil

In this article I analyze the cross-border sexual and affective relationships women from diverse European countries form with local men in two coastal touristic villages of the state of Ceará, in the northeast of Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic research I consider how, in the frame of ambiguous sexual, economic, and affective exchanges, violence intertwines with erotics and with notions of love. I take the women's narratives as the central reference. My main argument is that the delight provoked by the transformation of their erotic subjectivities and the idea of rehearsing new forms of heterosexual relatedness, which involve what they consider unusual forms of love, feed the ambiguities pervading their relationships with local men, making these women unaware of the economic aspects involved in their relationships and of occasional hostility and subalternization to which they are subjected. Only in the frame of the acute increase in the tensions provoked by the change in these women's status from tourists to foreign residents, they label their partner's economic demands as exploitative and their actions as violence.     

Escape from the country: the gender politics of Chinese women in pursuit of transnational romance

This study focuses on two marginalized groups in Chinese society: 27-years old (or older) ‘left-over’ (never-married) women and divorced women. Both these kinds of women are subject to discrimination and ridicule by the mass media and even their own families. This essay argues that despite the economic prosperity China has enjoyed over the last thirty years, gender relations in the country are rooted in a patriarchal discourse that reveals a hybridity of old and new ideals – family responsibility and individual self-fulfillment – in which the pursuit of love and marital commitment cannot be divorced from larger social-cultural-economic structures that endorse intergenerational responsibility and obligation, as well as promote gender inequality in the home and workplace. For these two groups of ostracized women, romance with foreign men may seem an alternative to the constraints of this structural framework. Drawing from a pool of evidence, published interviews, media reports, and printed ethnographic studies, this study analyzes the predicaments of leftover and divorced women, the interactions between these women and foreign men, and what their experiences with these men say about gender and racial differences in relation to gender inequality.