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, .' p ,. p~''" ' , ' ,' ' , pp :~: ' , , , , , . KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION, POPULAR CULTURE AND VIOLENCE 322 . INVESTIGATING POWER: THE THIRD SEX: ASIAN-AMERICAN MEN IN POPULAR CULTURE African nativity or descent, ir was unwilling to abandon the principle of racial qualification for citizenship, , , , by the frontier ro a heterosexual culture represented by As the white VictOrian bourgeois family rook the VictOrian family. irs The urban revolUtion of the 1830s and 1840s had ...AMERICAN place as the social norm, the relations of desire with the Oriental (male or female) offered an brought aboUt an explosion of new sexual possibili- alternative TURE (albeit a tabooed one) to the social order ties. In the cities now burgeoning with immigrants represented free people of color by the racially exclusive, presumptively heterosexual , professional men, and dandies rory girls and working- , fac- nuclear family. Against an emergent heterosexual and class boys, no longer under the watchful eyes of parents and village dimorphic order, Oriental sexuality was constructed , entered into new DISCUSSION QUESTIONS as ambiguous social relations in the factory, dormitory, and boarding- , inscrutable, and hermaphroditic; the Oriental (male or female) was construCted as a " house, on the boulevard and boardwalk6 1. How did the vIsIon of the modefamil change in the nineteenth-century third sex Marjorie Garber In (Stephanie) COOntz s view, for the emergent mid- United States? Why) What differences'exlstey d b etween the East Coast and the s term for a gender of imagined sexual possibility.'" dle class of the nineteenth century, the private nuclear West Coast? Why? The dynamics of sexuality, gender family with the True Woman as its moral center was 2. Why were the Chinese immigrants portraye as a "thitd sex ) Why were they , class, and race char shaped the Victorian family were driven by changes imagined ro provide a haven from the alienation and seen as threatening? in the capiralist order, Sexuality, like race anomie of the new competitive and chaotic public 3, What do the shott sconesd' ISCU ssed , by Lee tevea out the interseCtions of , is a socially life. constructed category of power This construct granted women a monopoly of moral- gender, sexua ICY, race, class and Danon? , formed by the social and polirical relations of a given culture at a given moment. ity, sensibility, and nurture wirhin the feminine 4. Does this attic e s e l'Ig ht on the d'telanons IpS and interseCtions among t ese mys- Sexuality does the polirical work of defining and regu- tique of True Womanhood, while in fact freeing men variables coday) How ate they similar or If~ etent coday lating desire as well as the body, determining whose from such ethical burdens in the public sphere, Home was, however bodies and what body parts are eroricized; what acrivi- , only a remporary haven, a space in which ries are sexual and with whom; under what conditions men mighr restOre rheir mental and emorional strengrh those acrivities are acceptable; what privileges before returning ro battle in the marketplace, The skills It offers a vision of t e comp ie red nation as a family, , rewards THE PACIFIC RAILROAD and punishments accompany sexual behavior; and how and techniques of crafts and farming handed down from but one that is distUrbingly biracial. The wes~ c'; now COMPLETE the erotic may be distinguished from the father ro son were supplanted by rhe inculcation of val- be teprese ~:~:::;,a non-erotic. ues needed to negotiate and survive in the marketplace. ~~ ~~e ::rr~ag Articulated by systems of race and class, with the logics n une 1869 Harper s Weekly published a lithograph teprese~te The discipline of the home "I The Illus- ears ro cross class boundar- of national identiry, and with the organization of gen- , with mother at its center WI(' h. the title "Pacific Railroa omp ere, only IS IOterraCIal but was expected ro reinforce and encourage the develop- , weanng. iddle- m class der, sexuality is organized to produce and reproduce cranon ChineseS owe man , mustachioeda , WIth a less wella The white woman ment of the competitive values needed to succeed within he VictOrian familial cultUre the social relations of production, thickly braided queue hanging beneat ak sII u cap atnt. e represents , Ot the new capitalist order, female ublic sphere emetg- Nowhere was the capitalist transformation in mid- ressed 'n Ia baggy Chinese tUnic and rrousets, srandlOg and the autOnomous and late nineteenth-century America so powerfully class in in the nation s cities; the mustachioed Chmaman arm 10 arm WIt. a hw hire woman dressed in middle- felt as within the family, Structures and meanings of fanc hat and bustled dress, e coup e represents the new. I andraCIa sexual posslbllmes and raSlonwl f the "frontier kinship changed as extended households shrank into THE GEOGRAPHY OF SEX f the "church of St, ConfuclOus, SIC threats inherent in the IOcotporanon 0 IS pose 10' rontf 0 nuclear families, Gender roles were redefined as women a hic consolida- intO rhe narion, With its caption celebtatlOg the geogr P and men both left (or were As the imaginary "frontier War and f the forced from) hearth " of American culture, a space non 0f the nation the pictUre of the weddlOg 0fEast In rhe decades following rhe Civil , farm where male fantasies of sexual , the am- and workshop ro go into the factory. By , gender, racial, and class and West is an ironic visual representatIonf the 0 ,com comp f enonthe transcontinental 0 railroad 1870, cities aggression and transgression might find expression ainst which the populated by a new working class licated anxieties that nineteenth-century Amenc became the principal backgroun ag , by free people of , the color, and by immigrants West neatly reversed the realiry of the Eastern city, of nation an t elf ideolo y of cItIzenshIp wasd e b ate, d At the same nme , created new possibilities for had about the changlOg natUre encounters across class Ar the far edge of the pastoral farm homestead with its that women renewed t elr ema ndsfortevorean , racial, and sexual boundaries unimaginable a decade or two earlier. links to the communal village, the frontier was conceived families, ' h anon was lace WI The lithograph suggests that the cransconnnenta other rights of cinzens Ip, t en In the middle decades of the nineteenth of as savage, devoid both of comforting and constraining quesrion of cltIzensh' ' hts for nonwhItes.1869 n century, raIIoa d . ironically "completes" the geographIC con- the transformation of the precapitalist household into civilization and of the actually existing capitalist rela- Charles Sumner, wh Ipose r: dical a Republican faction so I anone nation but in doing so opens up a the nuclear family established polarized middle- rions of the burgeoning cities. The symbolic emptiness det and racial contra lerlons, Massachusetts supported rheboth demand for woman class new set 0 c ass, gen , gender roles and sexual behavior in what social hisrori- of the West allowed young men to flee both the civilizing suffrage and th eenfranchIsement ' f 0bl cks urged djsciplines of their families and ruthless capitalism and ans have called the Cult of Domesticity. ongress , ro eliminate the slOg e WOtd" hite " fromw the ' The triumph Rohert , Th Third Sex" from Orientals: As;an-Am,r;cal/J In of the bourgeois family transformed American Culture to recreate themselves not as victims bur as vanguard. ee,1999 bye Temple UnwerSlty ress, natural1zanon aw 0 0 Although Congress amende . h lid The cult of the Western masculine hero PoPlllar Clllfllrt, opyng r from a male-dominated homosocial culture represented , first embod- the statUte ro allow the natUralization of persons 0 Reprinred wirh the permission of Temple UOlVerSlty ress, ied in the figure of Davy Crockett, valorized untamed , , ' , , ", ' 124 INVESTIGATING POWER: KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION, POPULAR CULTURE, AND VIOLENCE THE 'CHIHO SEX: ASIAN-AMERICAN MEN IN POPUI.AH CUI.TUHE savagery in the young single male, in service ro an a mardegr adeder lower- class0 statUs, Chastity and THE SILENCED PRESENCE onward march of civilization. The frontIer provided moral order formed the ideal in WhICh VICrofIan ml , OF CHINESE WOMEN urgent concern, Chinese prostitUtes were said to co! ground for an anti-familial narratIve that reconfigured die-class women were to fulfill the true natUre of theIr stitute a particular threat to the physical and alienation and isolation as independence and self-suffi- The unbridled sexual energy of men, celebrated In During the middle and later decades of the nineteenth development of young white boys, In San Franciscomor: clency,on the frontier that loneliness could be the myth of the Western hero, was to be suW' Imate century, thousands of Chinese and later Japanese women Public Health Committee investigating conditions i hammered and honed into the "savage skill 0 competI- to the psychic demands of the marketplace or brought were brought to the U~ited States Chinatown in 1870 professed shock that boys as , often under brUtally tive individualism that was required for survIval and into the service of class reproduction WlthlO the ptlva- as ten could afford and did regularly use rhe serviceYOun, coercive conditions, to labor as prostitutes. In the 1870s success in the capitalist city. tized family, Sexuality was harnessed to reproductIOn; of the lowest level of Chinese prostitUtes, and '80s, the figure of the Chinese or Japanese prostitUte 16 In a Carroll Smith-Rosenberg nOtes that the mythIC fron- the pleasure