Sartorialist – Nordic Couple in NY

My hair is as long as his! I should start wearing a little headband and Nordic sweaters to complete the look, I think.

Synthetic Essay 2 – Global-National Identity Politics WS399: “Sex and the State”

Nations encapsulate a multitude of people, identities and experiences, forming—both actively and passively—a greater, national identity. It shapes the citizen’s own identity and in turn, the citizens provide facets of their individual identities towards the omnipresent and fluid process of this ever-expanding and simultaneously contracting narrative of the Nation. The US laid the groundwork of this narrative identity by beginning a policy of exclusion that targeted Chinese women in an attempt to exclude prostitutes from entering the country. This bureaucratization of identity blossomed into a system that justified the forced sterilization of groups of people and invited government scrutiny into the sexual lives of its citizens.

Ultimately, these systems formed a dynamic US national identity that excludes through defining who it includes. The structure of American national identity uses myriad systems of inclusion and exclusion that seeks to actively form and dictate the identities of its citizens; compounding onto itself, it excludes, oppresses and attempts to actively silence and change ideas or individuals that do not adequately reflect the national regime’s constructed identity.

The Page Law of 1875 was the basis of a US formation of identity and policy founded upon exclusion and illustrated a selective enforcing of the law focused upon an “othered” group. The Page Law established for the first time, a prohibition of “the entry of undesirable immigrants” and while it defined undesirable to include “convicts, contract laborers and Asian women coming to participate in prostitution” only the latter group was met with a zealous amount of enforcement (Luibhéid 31). While convicts were visibly and legally deviant and criminal and contract laborers represented the most direct competition to American laborers, Asian prostitutes had not yet committed any crime nor were they taking legal jobs from American citizens. So while several groups of immigrants were seen as unacceptable to participate—as immigrants—in the American nation state, enforcement of the law fell to the most visibly other.

The underlying intention of such enforcement was not only to limit the amount of available, Asian “child bearing” individuals in the country but also to prevent a co-mingling of “racial blood” between Asian and white American. While the conception of American identity was admittedly young, the state showed, through this policy, that it knew—without question—what it was not. Laws targeting and excluding non-white prostitutes in San Francisco stemmed from concerns over the corruption of the white-male laborer, the then central figure of American identity (34-35). What’s more, according to dominant racial theorists, Chinese propagation represented a growth in a population that had an “inability to understand the very notion of democracy” (36). So not only were Chinese women responsible for the degradation of “whiteness” but also represented a direct threat to the founding principles of American representative government.

Fearing the supposed repercussions of an increased presence of immoral Chinese women, the US government developed a system of individual, institutional identification and established an exclusionary precedent barring the inclusion of those considered undesirable in the greater national identity. The procedure of identifying Chinese prostitutes “involved elicitation of biographical data, photography, and the creation of case files”; documentation of identity through a bureaucratized system invited the government into the lives of these women, fleshing out their intentions and morality to better decide how well they could function in society (43). These systems didn’t develop out of a void; America’s west-ward migration halted at its own natural borders. National identity had to shift from infinite expansion to a more concrete ethos. And that conception of self was forming in tandem with eugenic, racialized ideas of essential identity.

The perceived need for their exclusion fell solely on a judgment of these women’s intentions and whether or not they could adequately fit into, or at least not interrupt, the evolving narrative of national identity. Inviting such scrutiny into the goals of their immigration and a policing of intentionality represents a new national method available to control entry into its borders. Judgment was cast, not as a reflection of past actions or transgressions but, towards of any perceived potential for future wrongdoing or subversion of the nation’s law. And more important than a infraction of the law, it also sought to ensure there was no repeal or abuse of the identity the nation sought to maintain.

The national identity policy of exclusion, not content with denying entry, soon became an exclusion of its own citizens through forced sterilization of those deemed sufficiently feeble or deviant. Again, seeking to avoid the “degradation of the white race” US policy began excluding, through incarceration and sterilization those who had ‘inherited forms of ‘degeneracy’ including pauperism, criminality, feeblemindedness, insanity and homosexuality” (Stubblefield 162,164). Eugenic thinking dominated the paradigm of US policy at the time, inviting an even more restrictive crackdown on immigration through the Johnson-Reed act in 1924 (165). This line of thought again stemmed from the fear that these “lesser” people, left to their own devices, would out-breed or breed-into—and thus taint—the adopted US identity of the white family.

Focus of controlling this degeneration again fell onto women, as the culpable machinations of feebleminded breeding; “impoverished white women and off-white women were thereby unfit mothers: their children would not contribute to the progress of humanity” (176). Even when women passed or excelled on the standardized IQ tests, their involvement in prostitution was signifier enough that they were feebleminded (177). This manipulation of science and categories is a blatant attempt to police those deemed worthy of child-bearing by the state and—through that—control the ethos and narrative of the American people. Guided by the science of the time, state policy reflected thinking thought to be in the best interest of the state. Breeding an idealized race of able-minded, bodied and sexed citizens would foster the most able and strong nation state. Sterilization, typically only used as a method of reproductive prohibition on non-whites, became a tool to further define the idealized American identity, eliminating of the breeding capacity of non-desirable white women (178). A model of national excellence was only possible through the exclusion of those who threaten superiority.

Further policing of deviancy to maintain racial, social and class identity targeted migrant workers engaged in inter-racial same-sex relations—adding another layer of control and scrutiny and illustrating the levels of privacy and rights that certain identity categories were allowed or denied by the state. Citizenship and what it meant to be afforded rights as a citizen relied heavily upon the ability to belong within the national narrative. Public and private are both rights and concepts developed and provided by the state and its policy; “modern nationalist citizenship, entitlement, and valued public experience is contingent on the public performance of respectable domesticity and coupled, heterosexual intimacy” (Shah 281). As citizens that represented a direct contradiction of the idealized national identity of white, heterosexual normativity, the space migrant workers inhabited was not valued or regarded as equal to that of more naturalized citizens. This opened up their “private spaces” to government policing as a means of controlling their function within the state.

State control of private spaces manifested as an attempt to limit these new citizen’s role as an interruption of the infrastructure of national identity and privilege currently in place. As Nyan Shah contends, “in the early twentieth century it was impossible for migrant men to pursue ‘privacy’ or to enjoy freedom from state surveillance of spaces removed from the public view” (281). To maintain the ideal of the middle-class-white-family, workers willing to work for sub-standard wages needed to be brought into the fold of the national narrative. Their inclusion was a restrictive one though; migrant behavior—as deviant and that of a different race and lower class—demanded increased observation and policing from the state. Exclusion from the right to privacy belied an attempt at exclusion from a greater national identity. The the rights and identity acquired as an American citizen still functioned as a hierarchy.

Finally, the treatment of State Department workers accused of “homosexual behavior” during the McCarthy era cements the state as an active player in the politics of identity formation and illustrates the methods through which it is carried out. The McCarthy era, in general, is an appropriately grotesque metaphor for the power the state can hold over identity. Framed under the context of fear, the silencing of voices that seek to confront the national identity are thrown out as criminal and invalid and punished as such. The purge of homosexual State Department employees was framed under a similar context of security, however, “it reflected an underlying anxiety over the bureaucratization and urbanization of Washington” (Johnson 46). Scandalized and noticeably deviant, the homosexual provided an “other” the state could blame for its sickness of identity. Rectification and strengthening of the national identity against communism through persecution and exclusion of the “other”: the communist and the homosexual illustrates a state identity that builds itself upon the notion of exclusion.

The state maintains a National identity through machinations of inclusion and exclusion that act to control American citizen’s sexual and procreative behavior. Involving institutions ranging from immigration, to law-enforcement, to employment, the state exerts control in order to focus and propagate an idealized identity through its control of its own citizen’s identities. Influenced as much by individual citizen’s collective identity crises, the near constant other-ing and attempted rectification—through exclusionary rhetoric and policy—reinforces the National identity as structure of control over the narrative of what it means to be a citizen. Bred out of an era of eugenic science and conceptions, national identity is as much an anachronism as the concepts of essential “being” and nationhood. Often at the expense of the most disenfranchised citizens—or misunderstood non-citizens—national identity is a dangerous, oppressive and unwieldy power structure that propagates systems of inequality with the US nation state.