The International within the National: American Studies and Asian American Critique

Abstract

ly; there is never a moment in which race exists simply as "race." Up until 1870, American citizenship was granted exclusively to white male persons; in 1870, men of African descent could become naturalized, but the bar to citizenship remained for Asian men until the repeal acts of 1943-52. Whereas the "masculinity" of the citizen was first inseparable from his "whiteness," as the state extended citizenship to nonwhite male persons, it formally designated these subjects "male" as well. The 1943 enfranchisement of the Chinese American into citizenship, for example, constituted the Chinese immigrant subject as male; in the 1946 modification of the Magnuson Act, the Chinese wives of U.S. citizens were exempted from the permitted annual quota; as the law changed to reclassify "Chinese immigrant" as eligible for naturalization and citizenship, female immigrants were not included in this reclassification but were in effect specified only in relation to the changed status of "the Chinese immigrant" who was legally presumed to be male. Thus, the administration of citizenship for Asians was simultaneously a "technology" of racialization and gendering. John Kuo Wei Tchen has demonstrated that from the late nineteenth-century until the 1940s, Chinese immigrant masculinity had been socially and institutionally marked as different from that of Angloand Euro-American "white" citizens owing to the forms of work and community that had been historically available to Chinese men as the result of the immigration laws restricting female immigration. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.120 on Wed, 14 Sep 2016 05:55:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms