Discriminating Sex

Amy Sueyoshi has written an intriguing and nuanced study of how the gender and sexual discourse in turn-of-the-century San Francisco reflected and projected white anxieties onto Asian bodies. The title of her book, Discriminating Sex, foregrounds her argument “that exercises in gender and sexual freedom in fact clarify the ubiquity of white privilege and supremacy” (p. 12). The displacement of white sexual liberation and unease onto Chinese and Japanese bodies is argued through intriguing case studies, including pairing media interest in “the New Woman” with the fascination with Japanese geishas as the ultimate embodiments of female servitude; the fears of “white slavery” with a focus on Chinese prostitution; the negotiations of white middle-class masculinity between the poles of Chinese male savagery and Japanese male effetism; the celebration of cross-gender dressing with the suspicion of immigrants donning Western attire; and the Asian racialization of male homosexuality (pp. 55, 9). Sueyoshi makes these arguments through careful and comparative analyses of a variety of sources, most notably journalistic and literary writings and advertisements as well as theatrical performances, criminal and court records, and health records. She is careful to note how representations shifted over time. One of her main arguments is how the gendered and racialized distinctions between Chinese and Japanese merge into a confused, pan-ethnic “Oriental” representation. Another chronological argument that she advances is how large-scale amusement industries displaced the literary culture that she analyzes. Sueyoshi also contextualizes these cultural discourses in lived reality. She argues that the persistence and strength of white heteronormativity and patriarchy allowed literary and political leaders in San Francisco to project themselves as a “wide-open town” for gender and sexual experimentation (p. 31). She also emphasizes that the fascination and celebration surrounding aspects of Asian gender roles did not actually change the racialized restrictions experienced by Chinese and Japanese immigrants and their children

Argument (complex analysis · Masculinity · Race (biology · Racialization · Sociology · White (mutation · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture