Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality
- The Sexuality of American History
- 1 Trans/Atlantic Origin Stories
- 2 Queering the Founding; Or, the Revolution in Sex
- 3 Whither the Queer History of Slavery?
- 4 Queering Immigration and the Social Body, 1875–1924
- 5 The Queerness of World War II
- 6 Queer Bonds of Cold War Sexuality
- 7 “The Dead Never Die”
- 8 Fiction in the Post–Lawrence v. Texas Era, or Inventing Heteronormative Queerness
- Queer Literary Movements
- Part II Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality
- Part III Queer Methods
- Index
4 - Queering Immigration and the Social Body, 1875–1924
from The Sexuality of American History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2024
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality
- The Sexuality of American History
- 1 Trans/Atlantic Origin Stories
- 2 Queering the Founding; Or, the Revolution in Sex
- 3 Whither the Queer History of Slavery?
- 4 Queering Immigration and the Social Body, 1875–1924
- 5 The Queerness of World War II
- 6 Queer Bonds of Cold War Sexuality
- 7 “The Dead Never Die”
- 8 Fiction in the Post–Lawrence v. Texas Era, or Inventing Heteronormative Queerness
- Queer Literary Movements
- Part II Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality
- Part III Queer Methods
- Index
Summary
Attending to the tropological imagination of Progressive Era U.S. immigration, this chapter maps what Michel Foucault calls “the organization of ‘erotic zones’ in the social body” to narrate a queer history of the social body itself. In so doing, the chapter animates a variety of period figurations of mass immigration—including racial indigestion and race suicide—to trace a new genealogy of the literary erotics of Asian, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, the ethnic groups that most threatened the whiteness of the social body. Reading across representations of immigration in the works of Henry James, Israel Zangwill, Charles Warren Stoddard, Yone Noguchi, Sui Sin Far, Jennie June, Emanuel Carnevali, and Emma Lazarus, this chapter shifts the history of sexuality from one located in individual bodies to theorize a sexuality of the population.
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- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature , pp. 89 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024