Genders and Sexualities across the Asian North American West

Abstract

Mixing long-standing practices of sociological and materialist analysis of Asian American literary studies with elements of the field’s recent formalist turn, this chapter reads Asian North American cultural production for its mimetic references to Asian North American gender and sexual formation, as well as for the rhetorical, tropological, and compositional strategies that aesthetically register the historical pressures and forms of agency that have created those formations. In ways both obvious and oblique, Asian North American representations of gender and sexuality index the centrality of the Asian (North American) in the making of normatively white as well as other racialized genders and sexualities, and vice versa. In spite of their legal and cultural marginalization in the United States and Canada, Asian immigrants and Asian North Americans have long provided key “others” against which normatively white North American genders and sexualities have gained shape and coherence, particularly as that shape and coherence emerge out of frontier tropes associated with the North American West. This chapter includes sections on Asian North American bachelor societies, marriage, and domesticity in the time of Chinese Exclusion, Japanese internment genders and sexualities, and Asian American cowboys. Collectively, these sections provide a selective overview of literary, visual, and scholarly works that connect the formation of Asian (North American) genders and sexualities to the forces of North American capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism and other racial groups’ gender and sexual formations. The chapter’s discussions cohere around a Foucauldian understanding of sexuality as a domain that encompasses sex itself as well as the ensemble of discourses and institutions that channel subjectivities, bodies, and populations in directions suited to a biopolitics of racialized neglect and death.