Amy Sueyoshi, “Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American ‘Oriental'” (U Illinois Press, 2018)

New Books in Asian American Studies · Jun 1, 2018 · 1h 6m

In Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American ‘Oriental’ (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Amy Sueyoshi argues that Americans did not always regard Chinese and Japanese in the U.S. as pan-ethnic “Orientals” in ways that are familiar to Asian Americans today. Rather, this conflation occurred against a backdrop of troubling stereotypes that enabled white Americans in turn-of-the-century San Francisco to explore changing ideas and practices of gender and sexuality. Sueyoshi uses a wide variety of sources including newspapers and magazines, morgue and court records…