Discriminating Sex

"In the late 1890s, San Francisco -- a town reputed to be "wide and open"--appeared to be a place where men and women could configure their intimate lives in ways not permissible in other parts of America. Conversations on high rates of divorce, an open rejection of marriage, mannish women, and extramarital sex proliferated throughout the local newspapers, magazines, and theaters without condemnation. Yet as white people in the city explored and enacted new norms of romance and womanhood, increasing freedoms would be less accessible for Asians in America. White writers, lyricists, illustrators, and other producers of leisure culture projected anxieties of their own middle class gender and sexuality upon specifically Chinese and Japanese in news reports, short stories, and musicals. These characterizations would then conflate Chinese and Japanese, previously perceived as two separate races, into a single group. Amy Sueyoshi details how middle class white expansion of their own gender and sexual norms marked the formation of the pan-Asian "Oriental," a deeply sexual racialized stereotype, more than a hundred years ago" --