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Sexing the Sojourner: Imagining Nation/Writing Women in the Global Chinese Diaspora
University of Geneva, Switzerland
Correspondence: Deborah.Madsen@lettres.unige.ch
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This essay is concerned with issues of literary globalization, specifically in the community of women writers of Chinese descent. My focus, in the work of these writers who dominate a section of the emergent transnational literary marketplace, is the deployment of a rhetoric of embodied femininity that turns upon the racialization of Asian immigrant women through their sexuality.1 Female Chinese migrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century found both their bodies and their work circumscribed by patriarchal efforts at nation building exerted from both sides of the Pacific. On the one hand, when female immigrants began arriving in California only a few years after statehood had been granted, they became passive participants in political efforts to ensure that the West Coast be assimilated to the American nation. This meant that permanent settlers should be white, Christian, and European; temporary workers should be prevented from producing families in