Nayan Shah, author and an associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, will present a lecture, "Sexualized Bodies Through Law: Constructing Race and Gender in South Asian Migration in North America, 1910-1930," on Friday, Sept. 28, at 4:15 p.m. in the Red Pit, Kirner-Johnson building, Hamilton College. His appearance is sponsored by The Kirkland Project as part of its 2001-02 programming, "The Body in Question." The lecture is free and open to the public.
Shah is author of Contagious Divides: Epidemic Disease and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown, (University of California Press, September 2001). He is currently working on a second book titled, Sexual Aliens: South Asian Migrants, Law and Contested Citizenship.
Shah's talk examines the ways in which the law defined bodies--in relation to gender, sexuality and race--through its activities/practices. He will explore how legal discourses defined the bodies of Asian male migrants as sexually active (overly so) and aggressive, while simultaneously defining white male bodies as acted upon and passive. This is particularly interesting, Shah notes, because the literary representations of Asian male sexuality from this period (whether White or Asian) typically feminizes the Asian male body. He finds that American legal discourses on masculinity and boyhood in the early twentieth century assigned very peculiar relationships to the Asian body with regard to gender, sexuality and race, which have important implications for the histories of race, gender and sexuality in the United States.
The Kirkland Project is an on-campus organization committed to intellectual inquiry and social justice, focusing on issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and other facets of human diversity. Though educational programs, research and community outreach, the Kirkland Project seeks to build a community respectful of difference.
