Title: Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown
Author: Nyan Shah
Year of Publication: 2001
Thesis:
Chinese Americans shifted from a perceived threat (as agents of corruption and disease) to a stratified society in which those who could outwardly display middle-class habits, hygiene, and nuclear familial arrangements were distanced from Chinese Americans who did not fit this rigid prescription. Public health simultaneously shifted from the 19th to 20th centuries, from a system emphasizing control to one of entitlement, and entitlement Chinese middle-class Americans were able to take part in.
Time: 1876-1950s (with an epilogue looping in the 1980s & AIDS activism)
Geography: San Francisco
Organization:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Public Health, Race, and Citizenship
- Chinese Americans and immigrants associated with disease
- Culture blamed for conditions that led to disease
- Goal of surrounding society was for Chinese peoples to adopt "Occidental" habits (2)
- Shift from "menace to model minority" (3)
- Public health seen as "civilizing" (3)
- Public health also useful as a tool of hte state for regulating property and behavior (3)
- Modernity - paradoxical in that it emphasizes universality yet dwells on difference (5)
- Shift from public health from regulation to entitlement (6)
- Racial ideology works in concert with accommodating difference through segregation (7)
- Self knowlege as a political claim - from other groups' imposed regulation to self regulation (8-9)
- Whiteness defines itself through creating difference (11)
- White people perceived Chinese peoples' behavior as a threat (11)
- Gender imbalance in Chinese communities was manufactured by racism and xenophobia (13)
- Some Chinese Americans choose to showcase middle-class respectability, emphasizing hygience. (15)
1. Public Health and the Mapping of Chinatown
2. Regulating Bodies and Space
3. Perversity, Contamination, and the Dangers of Queer Domesticity
- Essentially defines "queer domesticity," showing how it provided an alternative/alternative model to non-Chinese folks as well as Chinese Americans, especially compared to white, middle-class, heteronormative, and nuclear familial norms. Anything outside of this was seen as a threat to white culture.
4. White Women, Hygiene, and hte Struggle for Respectable Domesticity
5. Plague and Managing the Commercial City
6. White Labor and hte American Standard of Living
7. Making Medical Borders at Anglel Island
8. Helathy Spaces, Healthy Conduct
9. Reforming Chinatown
Conclusion: Norms as a Way of Life
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Fits in well with other works that combine citizenship and race at the turn of the 20th century; Julie Weise, Peggy Pascoe, Kelly Lytle Hernández.
Shah brings up the question of which historians interpret Chinese American history as one of contributionism or otherwise.
Keywords:
citizen-subject
modernity
Queer domesticity
"The analysis of 'queer domesticity' emphasizes the variety of erotic ties and social affiliations that counters normative expectations. Rather than viewing the term queer as a synonym for homosexual identity, I use it to question the formation of exlusionary norms of respectable middle-class, heterosexual marriage. The analytical category of queer upsets the strict gender roles, the firm divisions between public and private, and the implicit presumptions of self-sufficient economics and intimacy in the respectable domestic household." (13-14)
Themes:
modernity
heteronormativity / queer domesticity
citizen-subject
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
Notes:
Important to note the imposed gender imbalances - they seem to influence Shah's concept of queer domesticity.