On March 21, 2021, eight people were murdered as a man drove across the Atlanta metro area attacking massage parlors owned or operated by Asian people: Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Yaun, and Paul Michels. Notably, six of the eight murdered were Asian women. Happening as they did amidst an ongoing wave of anti-Asian violence in the United States, these murders prompted speculation about their links to anti-Asian racism. Much of the official response aimed to deflect these concerns by tying the shootings instead to a sexual motivation, citing the shooter’s “sexual addiction” as the real motivation for the violence. Many prominent Asian Americans responded by doubling down on the links to racism and turning away from the implication of sex work. Indeed, I was living in Atlanta at the time and was explicitly told by someone representing an Asian American non-profit that sex work shouldn’t be mentioned in any public remarks around the shootings. It seemed that one had to choose to either frame this through an ahistorical lens of sexual objectification or an ungendered lens of anti-Asian racism. Both these approaches fail to do justice to our histories and to the current moment.
The truth is that sex work is an indelible part of Asian American histories. Asian women enter into US law through the figure of the sex worker. As part of a comprehensive review of immigration policy, Congress passes the Page Act of 1875 (seven years before the more well-known Chinese Exclusion Act). The Page Act has two key components: (1) a ban on immigration for the purposes of maintaining “coolie” labor, and (2) a ban on immigration for the purposes of sex work, which effectively became a blanket ban on immigration by women of East Asian descent. While both components of the Page Act are important, I’ll focus here primarily on the latter one. Legal scholars tend to frame what the Page Act has to say about prostitution as characteristic of a moral panic over sex work. I don’t doubt this, but I want to focus on how the Act and the rhetoric surrounding it also construct Asian women. Section 3 of the Act says the following:
That the importation into the United States of women for the purposes of prostitution is hereby forbidden; and all contracts and agreements in relation thereto, made in advance or in pursuance of such illegal importation and purposes, are hereby declared void; and whoever shall knowingly and willfully import, or cause any importation of, women into the United States for the purposes of prostitution, or shall knowingly or willfully hold, or attempt to hold, any woman to such purposes, in pursuance of such illegal importation and contract or agreement, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be imprisoned not exceeding five years and pay a fine not exceeding five thousand dollars.
Asian women enter into US law as prostitutes and as therefore are excluded from the possibility of even actually entering the borders of the country. While this section of the text sounds like a broad-ranging policy, its being nested within the Page Act makes it clear that the only source of possible sex workers the US was actually concerned about are those coming from East Asia. Ulysses S. Grant, in a speech to Congress later that year makes it especially clear that Chinese women are themselves a particular threat to the social order: “While this is being done I invite the attention of Congress to another, though perhaps no less an evil—the importation of Chinese women, but few of whom are brought to our shores to pursue honorable or useful occupations.” Grant’s words extend the Page Act to apply to all Chinese women. In truth, his insistence that few Chinese women were coming to the US for any purpose other than prostitution was already common sentiment. Asian women were regularly denied entry into the US by immigration officers because they were suspected of being sex workers.
I want to highlight that word “importation” from Section 3 and turn our attention to Section 5 where it reappears: “That it shall be unlawful for aliens of the following classes to immigrate into the United States, namely, persons who are undergoing a sentence for conviction in their own country of felonious crimes other than political or growing out of or the result of such political offenses, or whose sentence has been remitted on condition of their emigration, and women ‘imported for the purposes of prostitution’” (emphasis mine). While import literally just means “to bring in,” the modern connotations of the word imply objects and not persons. We rarely tend to talk about people being imported unless we intend to convey that they are being treated like objects. It’s worth noting that import primarily appears in the text of the Page Act in connection to Asian women and prostitution. In the section I’ve quoted here, for example, persons convicted of crimes in their countries of origin are barred from immigrating to the US whereas women are barred from being imported. The gendered reading here is obvious: Asian women are denied the language of agency under the law and are rendered as objects like Oriental rugs or porcelain. Asian women are therefore cast as a fundamentally sexual threat to the US social order precisely because of our status as supposedly pure objects.
My use of the term Oriental is intentional here. Edward Said’s Orientalism gives us the language of Orientalism to describe how the Occident has constructed both itself and the Orient through processes of objectification, fetishization, and, interestingly, feminization of the Orient and the peoples within it. This final component is one to which Said makes only passing references but is indispensable to the process. As the term Oriental expanded and contracted to refer to people as diverse as those living in Palestine (which Said identifies as the starting point for his own work) to those living in Japan, its gendered components become increasingly obvious. In a 1915 essay entitled “The Woman Question in the Philippines” (I learned of the essay from Denise Cruz’s Transpacific Femininities) a white educator named Emma Sarepta Yule undertakes the task of defining the Filipino woman against her Oriental counterparts whom she variously describes as “dainty kimono maidens” (Japan), “lily-footed” (China), or as a “veiled lady” (India). In order to define the Filipina’s difference, Yule emphasizes the submissive and objectified nature of other Asian women as she understands this nature to have been correctly understood by observers in the United States and Europe. Orientalism’s language for Asian femininity is one of pure submission, servility, objectification, and ornamentalization.
Returning, then, to the present, is it any wonder that someone, nourished by centuries of Orientalist discourse and decades of US policy, might understand Asian women as purely sexual objects? The desire to separate the racial and sexual dynamics of anti-Asian violence generally and the violence of the Atlanta shootings specifically is a strategy that maintains the status of Asian women as pure objects while simultaneously disavowing the role of institutions like US immigration policy and policing in creating us as such in the first place. Elene Lam of Butterfly notes that it’s unsurprising to see the shootings cause people to turn to carceral policies as a source of redress even as we know these same institutions endanger Asian women, especially those who are actually engaged in sex work, in the name of “saving” them. In making these kinds of demands and in refusing to even address the entanglements of sex work and race, we risk distorting our own histories and actually supporting the very same mechanisms that enabled this violence in the first place. By excising sex work from Asian American advocacy, we simply make even more precarious the situations of vulnerable members of our communities.
Tamsin Kimoto
Tamsin Kimoto is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. They also have a courtesy appointment in Asian American Studies and American Culture Studies at WashU. Their research interests include queer and trans of color studies, prison abolition, Asian American feminisms, science and technology studies, and Continental philosophy.
