Perverse Aliens: On Chinese Indentured Labour, Sodomy, and Canadian Nation-Building

Abstract

Although the socio-political histories of the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), Canadian Pacific Railway, and 1885 Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration have been studied, they have not often been interconnected. This article examines these socio-political histories at the intersection of sexual and race subject-making, alongside Canadian nation-building. I investigate Chinese coolie labour, the opium trade, and sexuality by analyzing historical records from both the British and Canadian Houses of Commons. The indexing of sodomy in the 1885 Royal Commission of Chinese Immigration: Report and Evidence illustrates the simultaneous racialization and sexualization of Chinese bachelor communities. I argue that the deeming of practices and desires as perverse was used to justify the alienation and exclusion of full citizen-subjects. In this examination of these histories of racialization, abstraction of labour, and the perverse alienation of bodies in settler colonial territory, I offer the term “perverse aliens” to nuance early Chinese migration.