The Case of 22 Lewd Chinese Women: An Archive Toward the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers

Supposedly “lewd and debauched” Chinese women arriving via the Pacific on the steamer Japan posed such a threat to heteronormative white American society that this incident begat the suspicious hermeneutics of US... [ view full abstract ]

Supposedly “lewd and debauched” Chinese women arriving via the Pacific on the steamer Japan posed such a threat to heteronormative white American society that this incident begat the suspicious hermeneutics of US Immigrations and Customs. As explored by Eithne Luibhéid and Sucheng Chan, the 1875 Chy Lung v. Freeman case established paranoid modes of reading bodies for deviance, leading to the Page Act, putting all Chinese women under suspicion of being sex workers, and then escalating to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The liberal defense of those questioned or denied entry tends to make recourse to the politics of respectability or the rhetoric of victimization. Through the lens of feminist and queer of color sex work advocacy, how might an alternate take on this disavowed history be weaponized toward an antiracist politics?

In 2013, Judge Denny Chin began historical re-enactments for the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, highlighting ongoing issues about due process and the surveillance of marginalized bodies at the border. Informed by Lisa Lowe’s work on transnational intimacies and Nayan Shah’s on the Chinese in nineteenth-century public health discourses, I intend to analyze modes of reading bodies in the documents surrounding the 1875 case as a formative moment in intersecting genealogies of racialization, border policing, and sex work. In my paper I hope to draw upon sex work advocacy, focused on the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers, to reconsider both the paranoid spectre of the sex worker at the border and the liberal turn to respectability.