Discriminating sex
Subtitle: white leisure and the making of the American "Oriental"
By: Amy Sueyoshi
Series: The Asian American Experience; Asian American experience
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 212
ISBN-13: 9780252041785; 9780252083259
Copyright date: 2018
Subjects: Sex role; Japanese Americans; Chinese Americans; Social Marginality; Leisure; History
Description: "In the late 1890s, San Francisco -- a town reputed to be "wide and open"--Appeared to be a place where men and women could configure their intimate lives in ways not permissible in other parts of America. Conversations on high rates of divorce, an open rejection of marriage, mannish women, and extramarital sex proliferated throughout the local newspapers, magazines, and theaters without condemnation. Yet as white people in the city explored and enacted new norms of romance and womanhood, increasing freedoms would be less accessible for Asians in America. White writers, lyricists, illustrators, and other producers of leisure culture projected anxieties of their own middle class gender and sexuality upon specifically Chinese and Japanese in news reports, short stories, and musicals. These characterizations would then conflate Chinese and Japanese, previously perceived as two separate races, into a single group. Amy Sueyoshi details how middle class white expansion of their own gender and sexual norms marked the formation of the pan-Asian "Oriental," a deeply sexual racialized stereotype, more than a hundred years ago"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: A peculiar obsession : the Chinese and Japanese problem in the "international city"; title: A wide-open town? White and heterosexual supremacy in permissive San Francisco; title: "Deliver me from the brainy woman" : the modern woman and the geisha; title: Prostitution proliferates : "Mrs. Flirty" and the willing Chinese slaves; title: Managing masculinity : the heathen, the samurai, and the "best Oriental"; title: Mindful masquerades: white privilege and the politics of dress; title: "Conscience aroused" : gender and sexual disinterest and the rise of the oriental; title: Epilogue : homosexuality as Asian.