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Imperial injuries: race, disease, and disability in North American narratives of resistance, 1908-2006

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Imperial injuries: race, disease, and disability in North American narratives of resistance, 1908-2006

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IMPERIAL INJURIES:
RACE, DISEASE, AND DISABILITY IN NORTH AMERICAN NARRATIVES OF
RESISTANCE, 1908–2006

by

Jennifer Barager Sibara

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH AND GENDER STUDIES)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Jennifer Barager Sibara
i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Viet Thanh Nguyen at the University of Southern California deserves a thousand
thanks and more for his generous mentorship, patience, and faith in this project. He
continually inspires me with his intellectual vision, ethical and political commitments,
and the graceful clarity of his scholarship, and how he balances all this with creative
writing and dedication to teaching. Huge appreciation also goes to my dissertation and
qualifying examination committee members John Carlos Rowe, Kara Keeling, Karen
Tongson, and Tania Modleski for their wisdom and guidance throughout many years of
coursework, exams, and dissertation writing. In addition to their intellectual instruction
and advice, my committee members afforded me a great deal of space and freedom to
explore and develop this project, for which I am very appreciative. Thank you as well to
the many other professors who made such a difference in my graduate school
experience: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, J. Halberstam, William Handley, Carla Kaplan,
Anthony Kemp, and Fred Moten. John Holland and Jack Blum in the Writing Program
and Pennelope von Helmolt in the Thematic Option Program gave me opportunities to
try out my ideas in the classroom. Many students also inspired me with their insights
and stories and reminded me of why this work is important, including Alexis Harper,
Ruth Le, and Gloria Park.
My very first literature, theory, and film professor, Patricia White, gave me my
wings and helped me learn to fly. Her continued encouragement and advocacy of my
work nearly two decades after we first met at Swarthmore are the hallmarks of genuine
and generous mentorship. Professors Elizabeth Bolton, Carolyn Lesjak, Christopher
ii
Pavsek, and Philip Weinstein at turns challenged, inspired, and nurtured me in equal
measure. Carolyn Anderson always had her protective eye on me. Between college and
graduate school, a seminar with Rachel Adams at Columbia University introduced me to
American studies and disability studies and changed the entire direction of my future
graduate education.
This dissertation got off to a solid start with the support of a Merit Fellowship
from the USC English Department in 2010–2011, followed by a Donald and Marion
James Montgomery Endowed Scholarship in summer 2011 from the USC Dornsife
College of Arts and Sciences; and in the final stages, a Vice‐Provost Fellowship for
Dissertation Completion in 2012–2013. Conference travel awards from the English
Department, the Graduate School, and the Graduate and Professional Student Senate
made it possible for me to present portions of this project at the American Studies
Association, the Modern Language Association, the Association for the Study of
Literature and Environment, the Association for the Study of Multi‐Ethnic Literatures of
the United States, and the Society for Disability Studies.
A surprise appearance by filmmaker Vicky Funari at my Society for Disability
Studies presentation on her film Maquilapolis was an unexpected gift and inspiration.
Scholars outside USC including Susan Burch, Mel Chen, the late Paul Longmore, and
Helen Meekosha generously reviewed my work or shared critical resources that pushed
my research forward in exciting ways. Martha J. Cutter and the anonymous reviewers at
MELUS recommended changes that greatly enhanced Chapter 1, which will appear in
slightly different form in that journal in 2014. Respondents Jennifer James at the MLA
2013 conference and Gabriella Arredondo at the ASA 2010 conference provided critical
iii
feedback that improved Chapters 2 and 4, respectively. Sarah Jaquette Ray and Salma
Monani from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment have been
enormously helpful in connecting my work with environmental justice studies and
ecocinema studies.
Many others have provided practical support and resources: Flora Ruiz in USC’s
English Department has been unfailingly kind and generous with so many critical
details; and Sophia Lesinski and Gabe Vincent at USC’s Doheny Memorial Library
offered timely assistance with research and the logistics of long‐distance library access.
Melissa Treichel, Access Services Manager at the Mark O. Hatfield Library at Willamette
University in Salem, Oregon, gave me the gift of a Community Borrower’s Card and was
unfailingly generous and helpful; and the staff at the Southwest Harbor Public Library in
Maine fulfilled all my hopes and dreams for academic interlibrary loans. Richard and
Maria, as well as their stepparents Alex and Helena, provided a peaceful oasis and a
wonderful neighborly community for two years in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Heather
Warchocki and J. Patrick Mooney helped me find ways to improve my focus and
reminded me that everyone struggles with the dissertation, not just those of us with
ADHD. From my New York days, I thank Jennifer Crewe and Patricia Moran for
continued professional mentoring.
I was lucky to spend significant time during the dissertation at two gorgeous
writing residencies in Oregon: the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Residency for
Writers on the Rogue River in southern Oregon, where I spent summer and fall 2011;
and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast, which hosted me as a
Research Assistant for a portion of the 2011–2012 academic year, and as an Affiliate
iv
Scholar for a significant portion of the 2012–2013 academic year. The Boyden residency
allowed me to work on the dissertation removed from the common technological
disruptions of modern life, in exchange for the more dramatic but less frequent
distractions of bears breaking into the garden and a cougar stalking by my cabin
window. The Sitka Center provided space, time, and resources for writing and research,
as well as opportunities to exchange work‐in‐progress with an interdisciplinary
community of artists, writers, and environmental scientists.
The love, support, enthusiasm, and curiosity of friends have been instrumental in
my writing the dissertation and completing the doctoral degree. Many colleagues at USC
offered friendship and intellectual community over the years, as well as insightful and
encouraging feedback on drafts, including Deborah Al‐Najjar, Jennifer Ansley, Thang
Dao, Mary Ann Davis, Laura Sachiko Fugikawa, Yetta Howard, Shayna Kessel, Alexis
Lothian, and Adrienne Walser. Colleagues Jen Ansley, Mike Cucher, Laura Fugikawa,
Raeanna Gleason, Jean Neely, and Robert Stefanek inspired me with their dedication to
activism in and outside the academy.
Beloved friends beyond the USC community have also sustained me through this
project: Mindy Chaffin and Taylor Grenfell, Vivian Ducat and Ray Segal and their
children Oscar and Hugo, Anna Johnson, Miriam Schmidt and Jeremy Blythe and their
children Ursula and Esme, Heather Schwartz and Tom Albrecht, Benjamin Shockey, Eve
Sorum and John Fulton, the Stevasons, Emily Topper, and Karen Waldron. Though I
have long since lost touch with them, Tanya Brame and Bridget Smith are perched on
pedestals for having encouraged my readerly and writerly selves, as are Jeannette
Swenson and Sally Scholz for honing my intellectual chops at an early age.
v
My many uncles in the Barager and Stenberg families offered steady
encouragement. Rhona Klein, my honorary aunt, provided a much‐needed dose of
Brooklyn on each visit home. My stepmother Ellen Ostern, has remained a close
connection over the decades. My in‐laws, the Siglers, have generously welcomed me
into their family and fed me homegrown kale during many periods of writing. Emanuel
Powell III is a treasured member of my chosen family.
My mother, Anne Marie Claire, did everything a single, working mom could do and
more to encourage my path toward higher education. During my five‐month residency
on the Rogue River, she also took on the responsibility of being my link to the outside
world and offered critical research and administrative support. Thank you, for your
generous spirit, your confidence in me, and for putting up with so many working
holidays and vacations. My father, Richard Barager, showed me that alternative paths
and paces were OK too. I am grateful for the sweet way you listened; I wish you were
here to see this moment.
To my partner, Josie Sigler Sibara, co‐conspirator, fellow dreamer and traveler:
Thank you for believing in me and inspiring me to do “Great Work,” for reading every
word and discussing every idea of this manuscript twice or more, and for letting me
know when “Good” was enough.

Jennifer Barager Sibara
June 2013

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................................i
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………………vii
Introduction: A Theory of Imperial Injury......................................................................................1
Chapter 1. Disease, Disability and the Alien Body in the Literature of Sui Sin Far........43
Chapter 2. Disabled Bodies as Dissenting Bodies in Ann Petry’s The Street.....................79
Chapter 3. After the Bomb: U.S. Scientific Imperialism, Media Censorship,
and the Hiroshima Maidens Project...................................................................................118
Chapter 4. Maquilapolis: Mobilizing Resistance to Global Capitalist Violence
in the Global South.....................................................................................................................172
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………..202

vii
ABSTRACT
Imperial Injuries: Race, Disease, and Disability
in North American Narratives of Resistance, 1908–2006
This project situates disability at the heart of transnational American studies,
while also charting a new direction for disability studies, remediating that field’s
neglect of the histories and cultural productions of people of color. Although
people of color, and women of color especially, have faced the greatest risk of
becoming disabled because of their vulnerability to labor exploitation,
environmental devastation, warfare, and medical experimentation, their
experiences and perspectives have been the least likely to be theorized in
disability studies. Synthesizing histories of race, gender, public health, medicine,
slavery, immigration, and military violence, I offer an alternative history of
disability that traces the impact of U.S. and Canadian imperial policies on the
health of people of color domestically and abroad from the era of American
slavery to the rise of global capitalism. This alternative history necessitates an
analysis of disability narratives that have been overlooked by many scholars of
disability, and which have not often been recognized as disability narratives by
scholars of American literature, media, and film. I argue that these “narratives of
resistance”—including the short fiction and journalism of Sui Sin Far, Ann
Petry’s novel The Street, and Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre’s documentary
Maquilapolis—reveal and condemn the endangerment of health that results
from structural racism, sexism, and imperial violence.

1
INTRODUCTION
A Theory of Imperial Injury

At the American Studies Association conference this past November, a disability
studies scholar complained to me about the split in her program between the health
disparities people and the disability studies people. Although I was familiar with
academic tensions between disability studies and the applied disability professions
such as audiology and occupational therapy, I had not heard of this particular division
before, so the scholar’s comment left me feeling puzzled and somehow rebuked, though
I wasn’t sure why in the moment.
Traveling back to my hotel, reflecting on the location of our conversation—
Puerto Rico, a colonized space of U.S. empire—I was reminded of the stakes of this
seemingly methodological conflict. Before arriving at the ASA conference in San Juan, I
had spent a week on Vieques Island, talking with one of the activists who helped oust
the U.S. Navy from the island in 2003. He mentioned in passing that he did time in
prison for his civil disobedience; now, like many long‐time residents, he does time at the
hospital, getting treated for cancer. Cancer rates on Vieques have risen steadily since
the 1970s, reaching a rate 30 percent higher than on the main island of Puerto Rico. It
was this sudden rise in illness, combined with residents’ “embodied understandings of
the relationship between environment and disease” (Torres‐Vélez, Abstract), and the
subsequent discovery that the Navy had stored carcinogenic weapons materials on the
island for decades, that helped galvanize a local and international activist movement in
the early 2000s. This movement finally led to the Navy’s retreat from the island in 2003.
2
In other words, the discovery and documentation of disparities in health between
Viequenses and non‐Viequenses were crucial steps in what would become a
momentous anti‐imperialist social movement, framed as a movement for environmental
justice and health equity. Further, disparities such as these help to explain why Puerto
Rico has the highest percentage of people receiving Social Security Disability Income, in
any U.S. state or territory (Paletta 2011). Reflecting on this situation and the ASA
scholar’s comment, I realized: How can I, as a scholar of race, empire, and disability, not
be concerned with health disparities, when such disparities so often correspond with
racism, sexism, and imperialism? In fact, the work I do as a humanities‐based scholar of
disability is very much informed by the social scientific studies of health disparities this
scholar delineated as being outside the boundaries of contemporary disability studies.
The hazard of many social science studies of health disparities, this scholar
might respond, is that they tend to perpetuate the notion that illness and disability are
primarily and only burdensome and tragic, qualities that disability activists and
humanities‐based scholars in disability studies have valiantly sought to dismantle. Thus,
health disparity studies can be said to reflect a bias against disease and disability and by
extension against people with disabilities. Further, social scientists often rely on and
reify contemporary diagnostic definitions of ability and disability, health and illness,
which humanities‐based disability scholars have shown are influenced and/or
determined by ideologies that serve the interests of capitalism, imperialism, racism, and
sexism. As Helen Meekosha explains, “those impairments judged as the most ‘severe’
are those that apparently limit the economic participation of their bearers” (2006, 164).
Finally, studies of health disparities vary in their speculations about the causes of such
3
disparities; while some studies pinpoint structural racism as a significant factor,
others—such as those sponsored by government agencies and corporations seeking to
avoid culpability—focus on constituents’ “lifestyles” such as smoking and drinking to
explain such disparities.
1 ⁠
Despite all these hazards, I have learned something critically important from
scholars of health disparities, as well as from activists and scholars in the areas of
American studies, education, environmental justice, gender studies, labor, medical
anthropology, and comparative studies of race and ethnicity, which is that people of
color and women of color especially are more likely to become ill or disabled than white
people.
2 ⁠ This trend prevails both within the United States and worldwide; it is
estimated that, of the more than half billion people with disabilities in the world, 80
percent live in the global South (Davidson 2006, 117; Coppin 2004, 166). Further,
women are the primary caregivers for people with disabilities in the global South
(Erevelles 2011, 132). Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers a chilling but compelling
explanation for why such disparities exist when she defines racism as “the state‐
sanctioned and/or extra‐legal production and exploitation of group‐differentiated
vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political
geographies” (2007, 247). While Gilmore’s definition emphasizes death, it implies

1
See, for example, Nelta Edwards (2002) and Víctor Torres‐Vélez (2007, 67).
2
See, for example, Carlos Mendes de Leon et al. (2005); as well as statistical analyses of US Census
data, which indicate that women (all races and ethnicities combined) have a slightly higher rate of
disability than men; meanwhile, Native Americans and African Americans have the highest rates of
disability, respectively while white and Hispanic/Latina/o respondents appear to have comparable
rates, and Asian Americans the lowest. However, given the difficulties of gathering census data on
undocumented immigrant communities, it seems possible that rates of disability could be higher
among Latina/os and Asian Americans than current data reveals (Brault 2012, 6‐8; Governor’s
Council for People with Disabilities 2013).
4
vulnerability to premature disability as well, resulting from environmental devastation,
labor exploitation, biomedical research, police brutality, sexual violence, warfare, and
lack of access to adequate food, safe drinking water, education, and health care.

Imperial Injury
This dissertation foregrounds the kinds of “premature” illnesses and disabilities implied
by Gilmore’s definition of racism, which I propose to call imperial injuries. Why call
these injuries imperial rather than racist or capitalist? In the case of U.S. empire, race
and capitalist political economy have been hinged in the service of an imperialist
ideology that, in John Carlos Rowe’s words, “has primarily been as intent on commercial,
technological, and human as on territorial control” (2000, 9). This ideology relies on
“hierarchies of race, class, and gender to do the work of subjugation and domination”
within its territories as well as to justify the further expropriation of, military
intervention into, and economic and political influence over foreign territories (2000, 7,
9, 11). It also relies on sophisticated systems of racial triangulation to create
competition among racially marginalized groups for resources (De Genova 2006) and to
enable the U.S. government to recruit one group to participate in the subjugation of
another, such as when young people of color are recruited or drafted to fight U.S.
military battles abroad.
Meanwhile, global capitalism has proven inseparable from the ambitions of U.S.
imperialism, encompassing, to borrow a chronology from Stuart Hall, “the many epochs
of conquest, colonization, and mercantilist domination” to the current “‘unequal
exchanges’ which characterize the economic relations between developed
5
metropolitical and ‘underdeveloped’ satellite economic regions of the world economy”
(1980, 308). As Nirmala Erevelles explains, “the social, political, and economic
conditions of global capitalism”—which rely on and reinforce the hierarchies of race,
class, and gender Rowe analyzes—“produce spaces of extreme exploitation and
oppression in both the imperialist states and their former colonies” (2011, 122). “In the
imperialist states,” Erevelles continues, “this exploitation is usually witnessed in zoned‐
off communities, sometimes densely populated areas commonly referred to as ghettos,
inner cities, barrios, and reservations, forming what Frantz Fanon (2011, 1965) called
‘internal colonies’” (2011, 122). Thus, as Erevelles delineates, racism and global
capitalism do the work of empire both domestically and globally, leading to the creation
of zones of “exploitation and oppression” on either side of the imperial nation’s
borders.
⁠3

Gilmore’s definition of race, Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s theory of racial
formation, and Hall’s theory of articulation all indicate that race itself is one of
imperialism’s injuries, a discursive formation that has material consequences including
but not limited to disease, disability, and premature death. Hall argues that, in “societies
structured in dominance,” race is “the modality through which class ‘is lived,’ the
medium through which class relations are experienced, through which it is
appropriated and ‘fought through’” (1980, 341). Likewise, I argue that disease and
disability are modes through which race, class, gender, sexuality, and national identity

3
However, this project has implications for non‐capitalist empires, most notably the former Soviet
Union, which endangered its subjects through forced labor, imprisonment, and reckless
environmental policies that resulted in the Chernobyl disaster, in the service of a socialistic ideology
and mode of production. Thus, I contend that imperial may be the more useful and universal term for
representing the types of injuries at the center of this dissertation.
6
are lived. In addition to contributing to the premature disablement of racially
marginalized peoples, the process Omi and Winant refer to as “racial formation” leads to
disproportionate diagnoses of intellectual disabilities among students of color, who are
then assigned to special education classrooms, thus maintaining white supremacy
through de facto segregation of American public schools (Omi and Winant 1994; Ferri
and Connor 2005). A skeptic might say that my claim about disproportionate diagnosis
contradicts the previous claim that people of color are more likely to become disabled.
Yet, even if the subset of disability evaluations and diagnoses occurring in the context of
public education could account for the 5–7 percent differences in disability between
whites and other groups (African Americans and Native Americans, respectively), the
differences in causation and timing of illness and injury would still support a theory of
imperial injury.
Further, once people (of color or white) have been diagnosed as diseased or
disabled, they become vulnerable to discriminatory and violent treatment, which has
included segregation in “prison‐like complexes such as special classrooms, sheltered
workshops, nursing homes, and state institutions” (Erevelles 2011, 122), as well as
sterilization, biomedical research, medical regulation, and barriers to accessing work
and public spaces. These factors help to explain why people with disabilities have the
highest rates of unemployment, underemployment, and poverty in the United States (US
Census Bureau 2012, 2). Thus, I argue that the premature disablement of people of color,
the disproportionate diagnosis of certain types of disabilities among people of color,
and the discriminatory and violent treatment of people who are diagnosed as diseased
or disabled all represent what Omi and Winant call “racial projects” that serve the larger
7
interests of U.S. imperialism. The state‐sanctioned and extra‐legal suppression or
distortion of information regarding these racial projects has further facilitated U.S.
imperialism, allowing it to conceal its ambitions and methods.
By focusing on narratives that represent imperial injuries, I thus draw attention
to the global extent of illnesses and disabilities engendered by U.S. imperialism. For
every person rendered sick or disabled in the United States by imperialism’s “racial
hierarchies,” there are thousands more beyond its borders who have been similarly
impacted yet who may possess even fewer resources for survival and accommodation.
Disabled survivors of the U.S. military’s use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia, for example, have never received reparations from the United States, nor are
they eligible for disability “benefits.” In contrast, American veterans of the Vietnam War,
after many years of petitioning, won “the possibility of aid from Congress,” explains
reporter Peter Slavin (2012, 27). “Any Vietnam veteran who later developed any of 14
diseases and conditions [linked to Agent Orange] is entitled to disability compensation,
expected to total $42 billion by 2022. By contrast,” Slavin continues, “the United States
offered Vietnam no help in dealing with Agent Orange until a few years ago,” and then,
only $60 million (2012, 27, 28). This has left the government of Vietnam with the
responsibility of providing $50 million per year “in small monthly allowances for [the
millions of] people with disabilities believed caused by Agent Orange/dioxin,” as well as
raising funds to contain and clean up the contaminated sites (Slavin 2012, 28).
By focusing on imperial injury, I thus foreground those who are often rendered
secondary or marginal in scholarly and activist accounts of genocide, imperial warfare,
and labor and environmental disasters. The survivors of such disasters have both
8
wounds and wisdom that tend to be neglected in favor of the more dramatic and
disturbing accountings of how many deaths, by what means. The experiences and
perspectives of such survivors are also neglected in most humanities‐based scholarship
on disability, which, in Michael Davidson’s assessment, “has focused much of its
attention on the role of stigma and social marginalization” (2006, 121). What this means
is that disability studies scholars have focused on the already‐disabled body or mind (or
the body/mind that is socially constructed as disabled) and the prejudice, exclusions,
and violence it endures, as opposed to the material act of disablement itself. Focusing on
disablement runs the risk of generating a more ambivalent theorization of disability that
appears to be at odds with the affirmative goals of disability studies and activism.
Indeed, Meekosha points out that the “experience of colonisation and
colonialism in the global South was both disabling and devastating for the
inhabitants. . . . Yet the agendas of disability pride and celebration in the metropole may
appear to stand in stark contrast to the need to prevent mass impairments in the global
South” (2011, 667). Similarly, Erevelles asks, “how can acquiring a disability be
celebrated as ‘the most universal of human conditions,’ if it is acquired under the
oppressive conditions of poverty, economic exploitation, police brutality, neocolonial
violence, and lack of access to adequate health care and education?” (2011, 130).

Literature Review
Disability studies scholars have primarily focused on the discursive act of disablement,
in other words, the imperialist process of sorting and labeling some bodies and minds
as inferior and unfit, which then renders such individuals vulnerable to the subsequent
9
material violence of medical correction and research, segregation or exclusion, lack of
access to educational and work spaces, and stigma. Focusing on this originary act of
discursive disablement, historians of disability have argued that the able/disabled
divide is an arbitrary and a historically shifting distinction among bodies across a broad
spectrum of physical and mental variation. Lennard J. Davis explains that the modern
notion of “disability” (as opposed to earlier discourses of monstrosity) emerged in the
19th century with the rise of industrialization, nationalism, and the consolidation of
bourgeois power (2006, 9). Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson further explains that
“[m]echanized practices such as standardization, mass production, and interchangeable
parts promoted sameness of form as a cultural value and made singularity in both
products and bodies seem deviant” (1997, 11). Thus, Davis continues, it is important to
keep in mind that “the ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the
way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (2006,
10).
As the emphasis on discourse and normalcy suggest, disability studies scholars
have been significantly influenced by the work of Michel Foucault (e.g., Garland
Thomson 1997, 38–41; Tremain 2006; Tremain, ed. 2005). This is not surprising, given
that disability (even if not named as such) has figured centrally in the development of
Foucault’s ideas on power and knowledge as far back as The Birth of the Clinic (1994),
originally published in France in 1963. In this work, Foucault argues that the guiding
theories and practices of modern medicine can be traced to the founding of medical
clinics in 18th‐century France and the display and examination of diseased bodies
within them (1994, 3). Foucault argues that these practices transformed the gaze into a
10
strategy of power: “the gaze that sees is a gaze that dominates; and although it also
knows how to subject itself, it dominates its masters” (1994, 38–39). This articulation of
the role of the gaze in domination informs what Garland‐Thomson describes as the
experience of “visual conspicuousness” for many people with disabilities: “The history
of disabled people in the Western world is in part the history of being on display . . .
while politically and socially erased. . . . Disabled people have variously been objects of
awe, scorn, terror, delight, inspiration, pity, laughter, or fascination—but they have
always been stared at” (2002, 56). The hypervisibility that Garland‐Thomson links to the
political and social invisibility experienced by people with disabilities functions similarly
to Audre Lorde’s theorization of gendered racialization, when she argues that “black
women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have
been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism” (1980, 21). Thus,
though Foucault doesn’t claim this, his work suggests that a technology of power honed
through the examination of diseased and disabled bodies has in turn functioned as a
technology for gendered racialization.
Along with the gaze, Foucault identifies normalization as an important technique
of modern power, which subsequent scholars have in turn connected to both disability
and racial formation. In a series of lectures on “abnormality,” delivered at the Collège de
France in 1975, Foucault analyzes the emergence of this new technique of power in the
late 18th and 19th centuries. He traces it back to the criminal justice system in Western
Europe, arguing that during this period judges began to focus on the character and
motive of defendants as well as proof of the crime to determine verdicts and sentences
(2003b, 15). Judicial power and medical knowledge merged, leading to a third discourse
11
in the form of the “expert opinion” or “psychiatric evaluation.” This new type of
discourse endeavors to “show how the individual already resembles his crime before he
has committed it” (2003b, 19), and considers “abnormality” rather than evil the root of
criminal behavior. Foucault argues that three separate figures—the human monster, the
individual to be corrected, and the masturbating child—converged in Western
European legal discourse to constitute the features of the “abnormal” individual (2003b,
55). The alignment of these three figures into the notion of the “abnormal” inspired a
new “technique of normalization” that assumes “responsibility for the delinquent
individual” (2003b, 25). The power of the norm, Foucault explains, does not lie in
repression or exclusion: “Rather, it is always linked to a positive technique of
intervention and transformation, to a sort of normative project” (2003b, 50). This
technique paradoxically suggests that normalcy—rather than abnormality—is the
exception that requires numerous disciplinary interventions to be achieved.
The “technique of normalization” (among many other forms of disciplinary
power) identified by Foucault undergirds the mainstream medical model of disability,
which treats each disability as a problem to be corrected in order to help individuals
conform as closely as possible to the able‐bodied norm. As Simi Linton explains, the
“medicalization of disability” has led to the development of “medical treatments that
have increased the well‐being and vitality of many disabled people,” yet this trend has
also negatively characterized “human variation as deviance from the norm, as
pathological condition, as deficit, and significantly, as an individual burden and personal
tragedy” (2006, 162). Further, it has given rise to the many disability “helping”
professions, ranging from audiology to physical and occupational therapy, whose
12
mission is to help the disabled individual adapt to and function in “normal” society. The
values of “normal society” are reflected in the very architecture and policies of
educational institutions, workplaces, residences, and public spaces, which have all been
designed to accommodate a “standard” body and mind. This standard individual is
imagined not only to be white, male, and heterosexual, but also ambulatory, seeing,
hearing, speaking, literate in the dominant language, mentally “stable,” physically fit,
sociable but not excitable, and violent only when such violence serves the interests of
U.S. imperialism.
While this standardized body and mind is assumed to belong to the majority of
Americans, disability studies scholars point out that it actually represents the
minority—a “norm” that is exceptional and thus difficult for all but a privileged
minority to approximate and/or retain. For instance, U.S. Census data suggests that 1 in
5 Americans has a disability, and that 50 percent of elderly people have disabilities (US
Census Bureau 2012, 1). Tobin Siebers adds that “[o]nly 15% of people with disabilities
are born with their impairments,” a reminder that most people with disabilities become
disabled at some point after birth or gradually over the course of their lives (2006, 176).
Influenced by such statistics, many disability activists and scholars have adopted the
slogan that “everyone will become disabled someday,” characterizing disability as
“perhaps the most universal of human conditions” (Garland‐Thomson 2005b, 1568).
The perception that the disabled body or mind is the “exception,” they argue, would be
undermined if architects, educators, city planners, and employers adopted “universal‐
design” principles that accommodate multiple learning styles, modes of perception, and
modes of locomotion (more than just the obligatory ramps that have been instituted in
13
the wake of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990). Then those individuals who
are typically singled out as the problem—the paraplegic patron, the chemically sensitive
worker, the vision‐impaired student—might no longer have to consider themselves, or
be considered by others as disabled.
⁠4

As Siebers explains, a social‐constructionist theory of disability “makes it
possible to see disability as the effect of an environment hostile to some bodies and not
to others, requiring advances in social justice rather than medicine” (2006, 173).
Rejecting the medical model of disability, some disability studies scholars suggest that
impairments should be considered as differences or distinctions rather than as
disabilities, and thus should be added to the list of variations in human appearance,
cognition, and behavior such as skin color and sexual orientation that have been de‐
pathologized, at least to some extent, over the past century. Garland‐Thomson, for
example, writes of her need, as a woman with a physical and visibly detectable disability,
to “enlist both theory and models in order to imagine a narrative of corporeal
particularity as marking eminence rather than deviance, of bodily difference as
distinction rather than as abnormality” (1995, 602). She thus introduces the idea that
there are two aspects to disability experience—the functional and the formal. “The
functional element of disability revolves around either a change or difference in the way
one accomplishes life activities” (1995, 602). This “change or difference” may involve
ongoing pain management and therapy as well as the use of assistive devices,

4
“Universal design” is by no means a simple or straightforward goal, given the diversity of physical,
cognitive, sensory, and intellectual differences that need to be accommodated. It is also possible that
an element of architectural or instructional design that accommodates people with one kind of
difference will create an access barrier for people with other types of differences (Shakespeare 2006,
201‐202).
14
technologies, and services. In contrast, Garland‐Thomson defines the formal aspect of
disability as “its perception by others, and the results of that perception” (1995, 603).
Scholars subscribing to the British social model of disability have used impairment and
disability, respectively, to refer to the aspects Garland‐Thomson defines as functional
and formal. Still others, however, influenced by the Foucauldian claim that “there is no
such thing as ‘sex’ prior to its circulation in discourse,” suggest that impairment is as
much an arbitrary construction of culture as is disability, analogous to Judith Butler’s
argument in Gender Trouble (1990) regarding the relationship between sex and gender
(e.g., Tremain 2006, 188–192).
Examples of gender and sexual differences that have been pathologized as
“disorders” support this theorization of disability and impairment as socially
constructed. Beginning with Freudian psychoanalysis, nonheteronormative sexual and
gender practices have been pathologized as psychological abnormalities, particularly
among whites, or as symptoms of social disorder among racially marginalized groups
(Ferguson 2004, x). Although the American Psychiatric Association removed
homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, transgenderism, transsexuality,
and intersexuality continue to be pathologized by the U.S. medical establishment as
physical or mental abnormalities. In “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and
Allegories of Transsexuality,” Butler analyzes the predicament experienced by trans
individuals seeking sex‐reassignment surgeries; in order to have such procedures
possibly covered by medical insurance, a trans‐identified individual must be diagnosed
as having a “gender identity disorder” (2004, 12). While an individual might approach
the diagnosis as a practical means toward the end of sex reassignment, Butler bemoans
15
the inherent risk that an individual will internalize the diagnostic evaluation of hir
choice. Intersexuality, to take another example, is currently regarded by the medical
establishment and a majority of parents as a congenital birth defect requiring early
surgical correction and hormonal regulation. On the opposing side, intersex advocates
argue that intersexuality should be regarded as a neutral human variation and that
children should be allowed to make their own decisions regarding gender reassignment
(Intersex Society of North America 2010). These examples demonstrate that the
dominant society is still inclined to interpret gender and sexual differences through the
lens of “disorder” and disability.
Though these examples demonstrate the intersection of gender and disability in
ways that support a social constructionist understanding of disability, the move to
classify disability as difference or distinction is by no means a universally shared
position even among those who would be described by the dominant culture as disabled.
Siebers, for example, argues that it is important not to forget that certain conditions
currently classified as physical disabilities involve daily pain and discomfort—bodily
experiences that will not necessarily disappear if they are labeled something other than
impairment or disability. For this reason, he advocates a “new realism of the body” that
recognizes the physical pain that many people with disabilities experience in addition to
the psychic pain caused by discrimination and normalization (Siebers 2006, 173, 177).
Further, in “Construction of Deafness,” Harlan Lane points out that “hearing adults” who
“become deaf from illness or aging” are more likely to consider their deafness as a
disability requiring accommodation than those who are born Deaf or become Deaf at a
very young age and who learn sign language as their first tongue (2006, 80). Some Deaf
16
advocates assert that, as manual speakers of sign language, such individuals are not
disabled at all but members of a linguistic and cultural minority, which is why they
prefer to capitalize the word Deaf (2006, 80). Both groups unite around the shared
conviction that Deaf/deaf people should not be stigmatized for their difference,
however it is labeled.
The division between Deafness as cultural/linguistic identity and deafness as
disability raises the tricky and perplexing issue of disability and identity. If, as Garland‐
Thomson has argued, disability “unites a highly marked, heterogeneous group whose
only commonality is being considered abnormal” (1997, 24), then what does this say
about the possibilities for a shared but distinct disability identity? Disability studies
scholars Susan Snyder and David T. Mitchell advocate a “cultural model” of disability
“that recognizes one aspect of disability as a politicized self‐naming strategy that
distances people with disabilities from dominant definitions of incapacity and
dysfunction” (2006, 9). Thus, they argue, the “term disability recognizes that there exists
a necessary distance between dominant cultural perspectives of disability (sometimes
signified as ‘handicap’) as tragic embodiment and a politically informed disability‐
subculture perspective that seeks to define itself against devaluing mainstream views of
disability” (2006, 9). The cultural model, therefore, allows for an “understanding that
impairment is both human variation encountering environmental obstacles and socially
mediated difference that lends group identity and phenomenological perspective”
(2006, 10). Recognizing that disability can be a “source of embodied revelation” or
“phenomenological perspective” (2006, 10) suggests that having blindness or
paraplegia, for example, gives one a unique and valuable alternative perspective on the
17
dominant culture, a perspective grounded in the material experience of that particular
disability as well as in the shared experience of disability discrimination.
While I find much in Snyder and Mitchell’s cultural model of disability
compelling, particularly with respect to the claim of “phenomenological perspective,”
their emphasis on “group identity” raises the question of membership and belonging in
the group. Identification with the “group” or “subculture” of “people with disabilities”
may come most immediately to those for whom disability is the primary or sole
experience of “socially mediated difference”—leading to a group identification that
marginalizes those whose lives are shaped by multiple, intersecting forms of difference
including race, class, gender, sexuality, national identity, and immigration status
(Crenshaw 1994; Laura Fugikawa, pers. comm.). Further, it reflects “an implicit
assumption that the acquisition of a disabled identity always occurs outside of historical,
social, and economic contexts,” as Erevelles argues (2011, 130).
“Growing up Fat Black Female and almost blind in america requires so much
surviving that you have to learn from it or die,” Audre Lorde insists in The Cancer
Journals (1980, 40). In narratives of imperial injury, I have found representations of
people with disabilities like Audre Lorde identifying not only as “blind” or as a person
with a disability, but also as an injured worker, a survivor of war or environmental
injustice, a member of a racially marginalized group, a woman and/or queer person of
color. In a world shaped by imperialism, racism, and global capitalism, such individuals
are likely to experience their disability status differently from those who are privileged
with respect to race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or citizenship status. For example, the
activists portrayed in the film Maquilapolis are rendered vulnerable to imperial injury
18
precisely because of their status as women of color living in the global South—valued
for their supposedly smaller hands and nimbler fingers and presumed docility; likewise,
after becoming chronically ill or injured, they have fewer resources available to them
than many injured workers on the other side of the U.S.‐Mexico border.
In some cases, the individuals represented in the narratives of imperial injury I
analyze do not espouse disability identification at all. Does this mean they are
extraneous to disability studies? No. Does this mean they do not face discrimination on
the basis of disabilities? No. Does this mean they do not develop phenomenological
insights from their experiences of illness and injury? No. Does this mean, as one
American studies critic asserted, that disability is an inappropriate lens through which
to interpret the situation of maquiladora workers who become ill or injured, that human
rights would be more appropriate? Why aren’t both relevant? I ask in return. I intend no
disrespect by invoking disability in relation to people who might not use that label to
describe their chronic illnesses and long‐term injuries, nor do I seek imperialistically to
expand the “territory” of disability studies, having exhausted the “resources” of white,
middle‐class narratives and theories of disability.
My goal, shared with other antiracist scholars and activists, is to bring about a
paradigm shift within disability studies that will connect its scholarship and activism to
the work of anti‐racist and anti‐imperialist activism and scholarship.
⁠5
My hope is that
this paradigm shift will engender a disability studies (which might end up being called
something else) that is inclusive and hospitable to all who might need or want such an

5
At the 2012 ASA’s conference, I attended presentations by scholars raising concerns with disability,
race, and imperialism, including Susan Burch, Mel Chen, Heather Lukes, and Jasbir Puar.
19
affiliation or community, regardless of how ambivalent they feel about having acquired
a disability, and without insisting that any particular individual should identify as
disabled or should want to belong to such a community. As long as people continue to
face discrimination for being disabled, and continue to face access barriers to
participating in education, workplaces, and public spaces, they may need or want to
form alliances with other people with disabilities, even if disability is not the primary or
single focal point of their identities. Along the way, they may discover that disability
opens unexpected doors, offers a rewarding “phenomenological perspective,” but if it
doesn’t, I would like to see room for ambivalence and ambiguity within disability
activism and disability studies scholarship.
Wendy Brown asks:
What if it were possible to incite a slight shift in the character of political
expression and political claims common to much politicized identity? What if we
sought to supplant the language of ‘I am’—with its defensive closure on identity,
its insistence on the fixity of position, its equation of social with moral
positioning—with the language of ‘I want this for us’? (1995, 75)
I don’t know that I feel comfortable speaking for an “us,” but what I do know is that I
want an end to imperialism and all the ‐isms that support and justify it. Taking those
lofty goals down a few steps, I want an end to discrimination against people with
disabilities, and the regulation, segregation, and exclusions that often follow a diagnosis
of disability, but I also want an end to the imperialist violence that creates new illnesses
and disabilities. Disability is an unavoidable fact of human existence, one that I wish we
would welcome and respect instead of fearing, but we don’t need to go out of our way to
20
disable people in the service of American or any other empire. I want for it to be OK to
hold these two seemingly contradictory goals at once.

Critiques and Alternative Directions
The impetus for this paradigm shift, for me, begins with Lorde, who opens The Cancer
Journals with a challenge to her audience: “I am myself, a black woman warrior poet
doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?” (1980, 21). I hear Lorde’s
question—then directed at feminists—echoed in the work of Chris Bell and members of
the People of Color Caucus of the Society for Disability Studies, who have over the past
decade criticized disability studies for its narrow focus on the experiences of white
subjects with disabilities. Bell contends that the field “has a tenuous relationship to race
and ethnicity: while [it] readily acknowledges its debt to and inspiration by inquiries
such as Black Studies, its efforts at addressing intersections between disability, race,
and ethnicity are, at best, wanting” (2006, 278). He stresses that, when examining “the
vast number of disabled people, . . . the form that representation takes is, far too often, a
white one. This is by no means a sporadic occurrence,” he points out (2006, 278). “If
Disability Studies as a field had taken a reflexive look at itself at some point,” he argues,
“particularly with regard to its failings in examining issues of race and ethnicity, there
might not be such a glaring dearth of disability‐related scholarship by and about people
of color” (2006, 278). Without such “reflexive” investigations and conversations,
“disability studies” as a stand‐alone academic enterprise has begun to institutionalize
disability as a subject position linked with whiteness. For this reason, Bell refers to the
current configuration of the field as White Disability Studies (2006, 275).
21
Responding to the “well‐intentioned individuals who are inclined to ask what can
be done to ‘make things more diverse,’” Bell reflects on “how presumptuous it is to
position the subaltern as the all‐knowing savant . . . when the answers might best come
from within, following an extended period of rumination” (2006, 278). This project
represents my “extended period of rumination,” as an antiracist white person with a
disability who arrived at the field in the midst of these debates and discussions. Like
Bell and others, I find myself disappointed and angered that the field has largely
neglected to examine intersections with race, sexuality, and imperialism. In addition to
the many examples Bell presents, further evidence can be found, for example, in the
opening essay of Gendering Disability (Smith and Hutchison, eds. 2004), an anthology
devoted to exploring connections between feminist and disability studies. While the
first paper is promisingly entitled “Critical Race Theory, Feminism, and Disability:
Reflections on Social Justice and Personal Identity,” the author limits her exploration to
what theoretical insights and models can be applied analogously from critical race
theory to the pursuit of social justice for people with disabilities (Asch 2004, 9–10).
Pivotal anthologies, such as The Disability Studies Reader (Davis, ed. 1997; Davis, ed.
2006), New Disability History: American Perspectives (Longmore and Umansky, eds.
2001), and Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (Snyder, Brueggemann, and
Garland‐Thomson, eds. 2002) collectively dedicate a handful of chapters to the
experiences of people of color with disabilities and/or links between processes of racial
and disability‐identity formation. While the Disability Studies Reader, now in its 4th
edition (Davis, ed. 2013), has increased its coverage of these intersections, its earlier
editions have had a powerful influence on teaching and scholarship in the field: When I
22
sample disability studies syllabi in colleges and universities across the country, I
typically find that the first generation of disability studies scholarship still defines the
field’s parameters and who it represents, which is primarily white people with
disabilities.
The collective works of Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson illustrate both the profound
potentials and frustrating pitfalls of disability studies scholarship with regard to race
and imperialism. Garland‐Thomson has made enormous and generous contributions to
the field, for example, through her anthology Freakery (1996), in which she introduces
and assembles a wide range of essays that demonstrate the many and disturbing ways
that people of color and people with disabilities were linked and exhibited in the
nineteenth and early 20th centuries under the title freak, thus bolstering white privilege
and American empire. In Extraordinary Bodies (1997), her book‐length analysis of
disability in U.S. literature and popular culture, she investigates similar connections in
the early chapters and culminates with a final chapter examining disability in
contemporary African American women’s literature, arguing that disabled women
appear as powerful figures, in contrast to the representation of disabled women in
white women’s sentimental novels of the 19th century as weak and in need of rescue.
Freakery (1996) and Extraordinary Bodies (1997) by Garland‐Thomson have provided
an important foundation and launching‐off point for my own scholarly inquiries into
race, empire, and disability, and have likewise inspired Rachel Adams’s Sideshow U.S.A.
(2001), which traces the figure of the freak in photography, film, literature, and
performance art from the 19th century to the late 20th century. Adams argues that the
content of this elastic category has shifted depending on the historical moment,
23
referring in the 19th century to racial and corporeal difference, and in contemporary
times to gender and sexual deviance. Adams’s text, like Garland‐Thomson’s anthology
Freakery (2006), is not solely a disability studies work, but one informed by disability’s
relationship to popular conceptualizations of freakery.
Methodologically, Garland‐Thomson and Adams share a genealogical impulse,
reflecting a larger tendency among scholars to focus on the freak show as an origin
point for disability studies. This concentration typically foregrounds connections
between disability and racial formation within the paradigm of biological racism
dominant at the time, as reflected in discourses of public health, immigration, and
freakishness. However, most disability studies scholars regrettably drop race once their
analyses shift into the 20th century, when civil rights and medical discourses officially
disaligned racial and disability formation. Adams avoids this pitfall; informed equally by
contemporary scholars of race and gender, including Saidiya Hartman (1997) and David
Eng (2001), she consistently considers how racialization is implicated in notions of
freakery and how writers of color including Toni Morrison have reinterpreted
freakishness. Thus, Adams attends carefully to intersections among disability, gender,
and race in both historical and contemporary situations.
Garland‐Thomson’s article “The Politics of Staring” (2002), in contrast, barely
mentions race even when discussing the “exotic,” a visual mode of representation that
originates with racist depictions of non‐white and non‐Western peoples as primitive
and savage. In this essay, Garland‐Thomson establishes a central focus of disability
studies—visual representation. She argues that “the history of disabled people in the
Western world is in part the history of being on display, of being visually conspicuous
24
while politically and socially erased” (2002, 56). She identifies four “visual rhetorics” in
contemporary popular photographic representations of people with disabilities—the
wondrous, the sentimental, the exotic, and the ordinary—each of which has its origins
in earlier modes of disability representation such as the freak show and charity
telethons. Although the framework she introduces is incredibly useful for analyzing
dominant cultural visual media representations of disability, she neglects to discuss or
theorize the implications that all her photographic examples depict white subjects; she
thus leaves unexamined the dominant culture’s tendency, after the era of the freak show,
to portray disability as a form of difference within whiteness (Viet Thanh Nguyen, pers.
comm.). This tendency may account for the emergence of the wondrous and
sentimental rhetorics, which seem more humane and affirming than the exotic mode,
though they cultivate feelings of pity and awe in spectators.
After criticizing the wondrous, the sentimental, and the exotic “rhetorics,”
Garland‐Thomson concludes with an appraising analysis of the “ordinary” as a rhetoric
in visual representation (2002, 72–74). The official U.S. government portrait she holds
as exemplary of this rhetoric depicts a smiling white woman seated in her wheelchair,
in the foreground of an office, with the American flag and the Department of Education
banner in the background. Garland‐Thomson applauds the photo, suggesting that, “[i]n
its ordinariness, the photo discourages staring without prohibiting it” (2002, 73).
Further, she argues, the photograph seems to demonstrate that people with disabilities
are capable of governance (2002, 73). Though Garland‐Thomson references the “tint of
her skin,” she does not discuss how the subject’s apparent whiteness contributes to her
ability to be assimilated as a representative of U.S. leadership. Further, Garland‐
25
Thomson’s perspective on the photograph as a positive representation reflects an
assimilationist yearning aligned with the rhetoric of the Americans with Disabilities Act
(1990), which emphasizes inclusion and participation in liberal capitalist society as the
legislation’s goal. This emphasis marks a crucial divergence from queer theorists such
as Lauren Berlant and Martin Warner, who in the essay “Sex in Public” argue against an
embrace of the ordinary, closely linked with heteronormativity (1998). Heterosexuality,
they explain, “involves so many practices that are not sex, including paying taxes, being
disgusted, philandering, bequeathing, celebrating a holiday, investing for the future,
teaching, disposing of a corpse, carrying wallet photos, . . . or owning anything ‘His or
Hers,’” all of which fall under the category “ordinary” (1998, 319). These practices
therefore contribute to what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling” (1977) that
pathologizes queer sexual practices as being out of the ordinary and that links
heteronormativity to the everyday functioning of U.S. empire. However, Garland‐
Thomson’s insistence on the value of the ordinary, despite being out of step with some
radical queer theorists, reminds us of the differing investments in an “ordinary”
existence for those—particularly racialized and disabled subjects—whose bodies have
always been deemed “extraordinary” by normative white society. Further, her
argument inspires an important consideration of the possibility that some socially
marginalized people practice and reinterpret the “ordinary” in counter‐hegemonic ways,
as theorist of “everyday life” Michel de Certeau might contend (1984).
Meanwhile, a second, earlier article by Garland‐Thomson reveals the risks
inherent in analyzing a work of literature by a nonwhite author through the lens of pre‐
existing frameworks in feminist and disability studies that have been designed around
26
the figure of the white woman and/or white person with a disability. In “Ann Petry’s
Mrs. Hedges and the Evil, One‐Eyed Girl: A Feminist Exploration of the Physically
Disabled Female Subject” (1995), Garland‐Thomson seeks, in her words, to
“appropriate” the character Mrs. Hedges, a Black woman who is disfigured during a
tenement file, as a role model for all women with disabilities (1995, 608). Interpreting
Mrs. Hedges through the lens of white feminist critiques of normative femininity,
Garland‐Thomson esteems Mrs. Hedges for possessing “both the gaze and a voice, the
personally empowering elements of subjective agency that culture has consistently
denied women” (1995, 611). Then interpreting Mrs. Hedges through the lens of
disability studies, Garland‐Thomson argues that this character “also refuses the position
of the spectacle—the passive, “cripple role”—into which disabled people are often cast”
(1995, 611). Garland‐Thomson’s effort to claim Mrs. Hedges as a disabled female
heroine, however, disregards the fact that even able‐bodied Black women are held out
from the definition of “normative femininity” (Ferguson 2004, 42). In the novel, no
matter how hard the able‐bodied character Lutie attempts to conform to the dictates of
“conventional femininity,” she is regarded by whites and even some Black men as a
“whore.” Lutie may be entrapped by her beauty in ways Mrs. Hedges is not, as Garland‐
Thomson notes, but she is also denied the protections offered to white women as a
reward for performing “conventional femininity.” This facet of gendered racialization
not only undermines Garland‐Thomson’s argument, but also highlights the ethical risks
of a scholar “making use of . . . [the] materiality” (Brooks 2006, 8) of Black female bodies
to promote a model of disability identity and justice that does not necessarily reflect or
serve Black women with disabilities.
27
Audre Lorde’s theoretical insights in The Cancer Journals, based on her
experience of the pain of breast cancer and mastectomy, provide an alternative
direction for disability studies scholarship that remedies the field’s inconsistent
attempts to deal with race. Asking the question, “How do my experiences with cancer fit
into the larger tapestry of my work as a Black woman, into the history of all women?”
(1980, 16–17), Lorde models intersectional inquiry and reminds readers that for many
women of color, disability may occur within (and sometimes as a result of) a larger
history of racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of violence and oppression. Further,
Lorde presents an embodied scholarship—emphasizing her experiences of pain and
erotic pleasure—that challenges the conventions of academic discourse:
On the morning of the third day, the pain returned home bringing all its kinfolk.
Not that any single one of them was overwhelming, but just that all in concert, or
even in small repertory groups, they were excruciating. There were constant
ones and intermittent ones. There were short sharp and long dull and various
combinations of the same ones (Lorde 1980, 38).
Lorde characterizes pain as familiar and familial, like a distant relation who drops in
every once in awhile and always with others along. She begrudgingly welcomes this
gathering of “kinfolk,” whose choir of pain offers enchanting yet excruciating variations
in rhythm and intensity (1980, 38). The musicality of pain and its sociality perhaps
emphasize two of the resources Lorde relies on during her recovery—poetry, and the
community of friends and family who support her. “I say the love of women healed me”
(1980, 39), Lorde writes, emphasizing not just platonic love but also the erotic passion
of her partner and the self‐love manifested in her scenes of masturbation, which defy
28
the “erotically blank environment” of the hospital (1980, 46). Finally there is anger,
expressed in the “screech” of her muscles, essential to her endurance and survival
(1980, 38).
Lorde powerfully claims that her theory of survival from cancer is grounded in
her bodily experiences of pain and pleasure. “I would willingly pay whatever price in
pain was needed” to be filled “with experience—knowledge, direct and different from
all other certainties” (1980, 24).
6 ⁠ Lorde’s reclamation of her body as an epistemological
site belongs to a larger tradition within women‐of‐color feminism and ethnic studies
scholarship. Daphne Brooks discusses how “black feminist theorists . . . have opened up
new ways of considering the representational politics of the black body in the cultural
imaginary” (2006, 7). On the one hand, she explains, these theorists have highlighted
the ways in which “black women’s bodies continue to bear the gross insult and burden
of spectacular (representational) exploitation in transatlantic culture” (2006, 7). On the
other hand, Brooks contends that
black feminist scholarship has demonstrated the viability of black women
making use of their own materiality within narratives in which they are the
subjects. . . . Such figures invent ways to maintain the integrity of black female
bodies as sites of intellectual knowledge, philosophical vision, and aesthetic
worth (2006, 8).
This valorization of the body as a site of intellectual knowledge extends to other

6
Lorde’s appreciation for the knowledge generated from her bodily experience counters Joan Scott’s
skepticism toward “the evidence of experience,” which she argues “reproduces rather than contests
given ideological systems—those that assume the facts of history speak for themselves” (25). Lorde,
however, insists that “I am who the world and I have never seen before”

(48), defying the
presumption that subjugated knowledges and alternative “ways of living” (Keeling 1) are entirely or
only ideologically complicit.
29
women‐of‐color feminists, including Gloria Anzaldúa, who in Borderlands/La Frontera
writes that “We are taught that the body is an animal; intelligence dwells only in the
head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli
from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it
does to ‘real’ events” (1999, 59–60). She contests the mind/body split of Western
European philosophy and urges her readers to consider the “intelligence” that stems
from bodily experience.
These themes carry over from women‐of‐color feminism to other studies of race
and ethnicity, including Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967), in which he
challenges the ascription by a white racist world of animality onto Black men and
people of color more generally. Despite white society’s valuation of the cerebral, Fanon
insists on the importance of his corporeality: “O my body, make of me always a man
who questions” (1967, 232), highlighting the body’s knowledge as an inspiration for
political questioning and action. This aspect of Fanon’s work has been under‐
appreciated by Anglo‐European theorists, as Kara Keeling explains in The Witch’s Flight,
arguing that film theorists in particular have “fail[ed] to grasp the degree to which
[Fanon’s] thinking provides a series of suggestive ruminations about the existence of
the Black, the status of the Black’s body, and the Black’s experience of his body” (2007,
28). Viet Thanh Nguyen argues in Race and Resistance that the body is “invested with
both symbolic and economic capital” in Asian American culture (2002). He explains that
“bodies in Asian American literature are never just individually significant but point
instead to the intersecting relationships of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (2002, 17).
His use of the term “body politic” as a reference to the “vast formal entity that arises . . .
30
when authors use the bodies of their narrators or characters to represent Asian
Americans and their collective relationship to both nation and capital” (2002, 17)
guides my own assessment of the interrelation between cultural representations of the
body and larger trends of racism, capitalism, and imperialism.
Finally, Roderick Ferguson’s queer of color analysis in Aberrations in Black
(2004) provides an incredibly useful model for my own work in terms of linking
disability with nonheteronormativity, race, and capitalist political economy. Ferguson
explains that the newly emerging practice of queer of color critique “locates itself within
the mode of critique known as historical materialism,” yet revises that mode insofar as
it “has traditionally privileged class over other social formations” including race, gender,
and sexuality (2004, 4, 6). Ferguson explains the implications of this silence:
historical materialism, along with liberal ideology, took normative
heterosexuality as the emblem of order, nature, and universality, making that
which deviated from heteropatriarchal ideals the sign of disorder. In doing so,
marxism thought in continuity with bourgeois definitions of ‘Civilization.’ . . . the
distinction between normative heterosexuality (as the evidence of progress and
development) and nonnormative gender and sexual practices and identities (as
the woeful signs of social lag and dysfunction) has emerged historically from the
field of racialized discourse. Put plainly, racialization has helped to articulate
heteropatriarchy as universal (Ferguson 2004, 6).
I extend Ferguson’s argument to encompass health and disability, arguing that
racialization has also helped to articulate able‐bodiedness alongside heteropatriarchy
and whiteness as universal. In making this claim, I draw on the insights of historians of
31
racialization Nayan Shah (2001; 2011), Erika Lee (2003), and Natalia Molina (2006a;
2006b), among others, who have demonstrated the influence of discourses including
biological racism and public health on racialization in the United States; these
discourses have insidiously and powerfully linked racial otherness and disability, on the
one hand, and whiteness and able‐bodiedness, on the other, in the service of U.S.
imperialism.
Within historical materialism, this linkage is similarly reflected in a passage
Ferguson quotes from Marx’s The German Ideology; Marx argues that “production does
not simply produce man as a commodity, . . . it produces him in keeping with this role as
a mentally and physically dehumanized being—Immorality, deformity, and dulling of the
workers and the capitalists” (qtd. in Ferguson 2004, 7). Marx’s use of “deformity” to
describe the effects of the capitalist mode of production suggests that the worker is not
only feminized, as Ferguson contends (2004, 8, 43), but also “deformed” in the process
of becoming a commodity. Thus, disability joins nonheteronormativity as a “woeful sign
of dysfunction” brought about “under capitalist relations of production” (Ferguson 2004,
8). The implications of this metaphor are extended when one considers the
literal/material disabling effects of capitalist labor—the limbs severed by machines, the
eyes blinded by chemical spills, the ears deafened by the roar of the factory, the lungs
destroyed by asbestos.
Ferguson and other queer‐of‐color theorists argue that capitalist political
economy fosters the emergence of nonheteronormative practices and identities within
racialized communities (2004, x); through different means, it also produces disability as
a symptom of capitalist “social disorder.” In turn, the same liberal ideology that has
32
pathologized racialized communities for their nonheteronormative gender and sexual
formations (Ferguson 2004, x) has also pathologized these communities for their
purported lack of health and ability—framed at times in biological terms, at other times
in cultural terms. Ferguson’s assessment of how liberal ideology interprets figures such
as the Black drag‐queen prostitute in Tongues Untied also describes how liberal
ideology interprets racialized subjects with disabilities. He writes: “Conceding to the
meanness of life, probably for her, is a far cry from assuming that her gender and sexual
difference are the reason for her poverty and that who she is attests to the absence of
agency” (2004, 1). Here Ferguson summarizes the way in which liberal ideology
interprets poverty as a consequence of nonheteronormativity, leading to social reform
agendas that link economic advancement to gender and sexual conformity, agendas
contradicted by capitalist pressures toward gender and sexual nonconformity in
racialized communities (for example, a shortage of labor options for men of color
leading to women becoming heads of household). Similarly, liberal ideology assumes
that racialized subjects are prone to poverty because they are intellectually disabled, an
idea implied by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve (1994),
whereas poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of
prejudice arguably render racialized subjects vulnerable to disability, and limit their
access to health resources and disability accommodations.
Ferguson argues that “the contradictory formations of African American
literature—as both within and outside of canonical genealogy—means that we can
exploit its alienation from canonical presumptions of universality and normativity to
provide a critique of the ways in which African Americans have been racialized as
33
pathologically nonheteronormative” (2004, 24). Tracing those “contradictory
formations,” Ferguson argues that his book “tries to present another story—one in
which the people that presumably evince the dysfunctions of capitalism are revised as
sites that possibly critique state, capital, and social science” (2004, ix). Likewise, in the
literature of Sui Sin Far and Ann Petry, disability doesn’t appear only as a tragedy, but
often also as a condition of possibility for alternative modes of subjectivity and kinship
that challenge the racist and heteronormative status quo. Similarly, Torres‐Vélez
contends that “the experience of disease can, instead of victimizing, be empowering for
it forces the subject into a re‐evaluation of his/her place in the social scheme that in
most cases is political” (2007, 6), an insight that pertains most centrally to the activists
profiled in the documentary film Maquilapolis (2006). Thus, in drawing this
Introduction to a close, I return to ambivalence as a critical practice, reminding readers
that, alongside my condemnation of imperial injury, I celebrate survivors’ acts of agency
and resistance, as well as the unexpected openings and opportunities that arise in their
lives after imperial injury.

Methodology
This project is deliberately broad in historical and generic scope so as to establish the
parameters of an expansive field of inquiry with multiple possibilities for further, more
focused research. I offer an alternative history of disability that synthesizes historical
studies on race, gender, public health, medicine, biomedical research, immigration,
slavery, atomic testing and warfare, and economic globalization. From these sources, I
have compiled information—sometimes no more than a footnote or passing
34
reference—about disease and disability in order to construct a history of imperial
injury that moves disease and disability from the peripheries of those studies to the
center of this one. This alternative history, presented incrementally throughout the
chapters, does not provide an exhaustive chronological account of every imperial injury
or major development in U.S. imperial history. Instead, it foregrounds several significant
racial projects in U.S. imperial history that relate significantly to health and disability.
This historical overview provides context for my close readings of North
American “narratives of resistance” in each of the chapters. These narratives represent,
respond to, and seek to disrupt or impede imperialism’s injurious progress. My analyses
of these narratives, performed in the contrapuntal style advocated by Edward Said in
Culture and Imperialism (1994), are theoretically influenced by women‐of‐color
feminism, queer of color critique, comparative studies of race and ethnicity, disability
studies, empire studies, and geography. Extrapolating from Barbara Christian’s claim
that Black women writers have used the novel as a vehicle for theorizing (1987), I
approach the literature of Sui Sin Far and Ann Petry, as well as the collaborative
documentary film Maquilapolis, as works of theory that offer alternative models for
disability identity and activism that may help to recreate an antiracist, anti‐imperialist
field of disability studies.
My focus on literature, media, and film is motivated by a few concerns. Disability
studies scholars and activists alike have argued that visual representations—in
photography, film, and television—have played a powerful role in shaping public
perceptions of people with disabilities. Thus, a book‐length study of disability that
ignores the visual would obscure an important facet of disability formation. However, a
35
study limited only to visual representations of disability would become a study
primarily of works that perpetuate dominant cultural assumptions about disability,
such as in the case of the media coverage of the “Hiroshima Maidens Project” analyzed
in Chapter 3. Other scholars, including Martin Norden (1994), have examined this canon
in depth. To find potentially counter‐hegemonic narratives of disability, including those
created by people of color and queers, it is necessary to turn to literature and
independent cinema.
This does not mean, however, that I assume literary works or independent
documentaries are somehow free of hegemonic discourses and representational
strategies. Dominika Ferens argues that “there is no uncompromised space outside
discourse from which to contest it” (2002, 1–2). Nguyen likewise warns of the risk of
interpreting Asian American literary productions exclusively through the binary
hierarchy of resistance/accommodation, in which resistance is valorized and
accommodation is critiqued (2002). These “limited, polarizing options,” he writes, “do
not sufficiently demonstrate the flexible strategies often chosen by authors and
characters to navigate political and ethical situations” (2002, 4). As Colleen Lye
contends, “there is no easy escape” from “the workings of representation” (2005, 3).

Why These Narratives?
Each primary text introduces a significant historical configuration of race, disability,
capitalist political economy, and American imperialism, which I call a mode of imperial
injury. Each mode is dense enough, sometimes synthesizing multiple racial projects, to
become the subject of its own entire academic book. The other reason to keep this
36
project broad is that many of the potential primary “texts” remain marginalized (not
recorded, unpublished, self‐published, published by independent presses, not written
or translated into English, orally transmitted, etc.) because of the very
disenfranchisement of disabled people of color and people in the Third World. I have
selected four of these configurations as the focus of my textual analyses: Immigration
(Chapter 1), Slavery and Its Aftermath (Chapter 2), Imperial War (Chapter 3), and
Flexible Accumulation (Chapter 4). Though I have selected these four configurations
because of their significance in the anti‐racist and anti‐imperialist history of disability I
have traced in this dissertation, there are some glaring omissions, including the
Conquest of Native Americans and the regulation and racialization of students of color
and/as students with disabilities within institutions of North American public education.
These are potential areas to be prioritized in future research for and revisions of this
project. Common themes running through nearly all of these configurations include
labor exploitation and chemical exposure, biomedical research and medical regulation,
and the emergence of non‐heteronormative social formations as a mode of resistance
and survival in the face of imperialism, racism, sexism, and disability prejudice.
Chapter 1, on the literature of Sui Sin Far and the history of Chinese immigration
and exclusion, opens the project in a time period—the mid‐19th to the early 20th
centuries—examined by many historians of health, disability, race, and immigration.
This time period has attracted significant attention because of the influence of biological
racism and public health discourses on North American political life, resulting in the
medicalization and bureaucratization of the immigration process and the restriction or
exclusion of newcomers from Asia, Latin America, and Southern and Eastern Europe on
37
the basis of purported ill health and inferior heredity. Ironically, as Sui Sin Far reminds
readers through her essays and short fiction, the living and working conditions that
awaited immigrants in North America were the more genuine threats to health. Further,
she critiques the imposition of white Western medical practices and standards on the
bodies of Chinese immigrants, particularly women, and theorizes disability as an
opportunity for non‐heteronormative social formations among Chinese immigrant
women.
Chapter 2, “Disabled Bodies as Dissenting Bodies in Ann Petry’s The Street,” moves
forward to the Great Migration and World War II. While northern industrialists
promised lucrative jobs and greater freedoms to African Americans migrating from the
South, Petry’s novel The Street presents a bleaker vision, portraying disability as one of
the grim fates awaiting newcomers to Harlem: Shipyard labor destroys a musician’s
ability to play the fiddle; a tenement fire leaves a woman’s body scarred from head to
toe; grueling domestic labor leaves another woman’s feet in chronic pain. However, The
Street also portrays characters with disabilities resisting oppression that comes in both
overt and covert forms—one character eludes conscription by purposely disabling
himself while another refuses plastic surgery; a third turns to a root doctor when
Western medicine fails her. I situate these acts of “disability dissent” in a tradition of
African American resistance extending back to slaves who sought out alternative
healers or even feigned disability to escape or avoid forced labor. Ultimately, Petry’s
novel offers a dualistic representation of disability as a tragic consequence of racism
and as a transformative experience that enables some to escape the destinies
prescribed for them by a racist American society.
38
In Chapter 3, “After the Bomb: U.S. Scientific Imperialism, Media Censorship, and
the Hiroshima Maidens Project,” I analyze TV and print media coverage of the
Hiroshima Maidens Project—an episode of “disability diplomacy” that reflected
widespread faith in the power of medical technology to eradicate disability and
contribute to world peace. In 1955, private charities partnered with the U.S. Air Force to
provide an all‐expenses paid trip to America and complimentary plastic surgery to 25
Japanese women who had been disfigured by the atomic bomb. While the project’s
organizers intended to remediate the terrible effects of America’s use of the atomic
bomb, this good‐will mission aligned medical humanitarianism with U.S. Cold War
ideology and foreign policy, and substituted symbolic and partial reparations for
complete redress for continued devastation in Japan. Further, news coverage
transformed the injured women into symbols of a conquered and compliant Japan,
while also establishing a different, “tasteful” standard for representing imperial injuries
from the standard set by disability charity telethons, thus collaborating with the U.S.
government’s aim to minimize claims of culpability.
Chapter 4, “Maquilapolis: Mobilizing Resistance to Global Capitalist Violence in the
Global South,” concludes the dissertation with an analysis of the U.S.‐Mexican
documentary film Maquilapolis (“City of Factories”; dir. Vicky Funari and Sergio de la
Torre, 2001), which portrays the day‐to‐day lives of several women sweatshop workers
in Tijuana. The film highlights the ways in which transnational corporations perpetuate
the legacy of colonialism by treating the bodies of Third World workers and their
environments as natural resources to be exploited and then discarded. However, it also
documents the women’s collaborative and grassroots efforts to obtain restitution from
39
transnational corporations and the Mexican government for a host of abuses to their
bodies and communities. Thus, I argue, the film demonstrates the centrality of
environmental and health concerns to anti‐imperialist struggles in the global South, yet
challenges the disability‐centered model of identity posited by Anglo North American
disability activists and scholars.

Why Narratives of Resistance?
Because much work in disability studies has focused on analyzing dominant cultural
constructions of disability, ranging from P.T. Barnum’s freak exhibitions to William
Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury to William Wyler’s film The Best Years of Our
Lives, thus revealing a great deal about the prejudicial and stigmatizing ideas that have
prevailed throughout American history about disability, I have chosen to examine
narratives about disability that emerge from the margins of U.S. imperial culture. As an
intellectual who is also committed to anti‐racist and anti‐imperialist activism, I have
chosen to focus on those literary, media, and film narratives whose creators sought in
some way to resist injustice in any of its guises—cognizant, however, that intentions of
resistance do not necessary prevent a text from aligning with other dominant and
discriminatory discourses. Sui Sin Far, for example, fashioned literary narratives that
challenged the dominant culture’s anti‐Chinese sentiment and prejudice against the
disabled, yet packaged those cultural critiques in ethnographic vignettes, at the behest
of her publishers, thereby satisfying white readers’ fascination for the exotic. Such
compromises illuminate the limits and possibilities in a particular historical moment for
articulating resistance in forms that will actually garner the attention of the dominant
40
majority. Meanwhile, the “Hiroshima Maidens” Project is perhaps more aptly described
as a “narrative of reform,” advanced in seeming opposition to official U.S. policies
toward a former enemy nation, yet still coopted in the service of American imperialism
because of its promotion of the seemingly benign values of peace and postwar
reconciliation and its promotion of the United States as a benevolent and humanitarian
nation.
What role do disabled figures play in these texts’ larger critiques of racism and
empire? What theories and models of disability identity, experience, and activism do
these texts put forward? To what extent do those theories and models dovetail with or
disrupt contemporary North American disability studies scholarship? The answers to
these questions are not straightforward. A narrative that resists empire does not
necessarily also resist disability prejudice, but sometimes, as in the case of Sui Sin Far’s
literature, it does both. These narratives, therefore, offer important insights and
quandaries to intellectuals and activists about how to fashion a political movement that
is at once resistant to racism, global capitalism, and imperialism while also affirming
and supportive of those who have become disabled as a result of those phenomena.

Why North America?
I originally set out to do a study of U.S.‐based disability narratives. The “American”
primary texts I chose, however, quickly informed me that I would need to expand the
parameters, at the very least, to include Canada and Mexico. Following Sui Sin Far back
and forth across the U.S.‐Canadian border, I learned in the process that Canadian prime
ministers, acting on behalf of the British government, enacted their own Chinese
41
Exclusion Laws, citing the same biologically racist and public health discourses as their
U.S. peers. The slight differences in language and timing between the U.S. and Canadian
laws created possibilities for covert border crossings that shaped Chinese immigrant
experiences and narratives of resistance on both sides of that border. Meanwhile, the
film Maquilapolis provokes viewers in the United States and other affluent nations to
recognize that we/they—like earlier generations of citizens residing in colonial
metropoles—are responsible for and benefit from the imperial injuries that take place
outside our/their own national borders.
While North American accurately describes the locations where the primary
texts were first created and distributed, this term has proven limited in many instances:
In the case of Sui Sin Far, although she herself did not immigrate to North America from
China (her mother did by way of Britain), her literary portrayals of Chinese immigrants
create transpacific links between North America and Asia. The research into the history
of slavery and disability I present in Chapter 2 transports the project across the Atlantic
to the slave‐trading ports of West Africa and the Caribbean, while Chapter 3 addresses
the legacy of U.S. atomic violence in Japan. In other words, a study of U.S. imperial
injuries necessarily follows wherever U.S. empire has traveled through war, economic
influence, and immigration networks. Of course, this invites the criticism that, as an
American academic, I’m relying on and reinforcing those imperial circuits even as I
attempt to critique them. Further, in this potential shift toward a transnationally
conceived American studies project, I bump up against the current limits of my
language training (fluent English, intermediate‐level French, and introductory‐level
Spanish, which I am actively working to improve). These limits have led me to focus on
42
texts that have either been written in or translated into English. Surely, there are many
more narratives of resistance to American empire that have never been translated or
even directed at a primarily English‐speaking, American audience. Then again, it could
be argued that I do not possess the cultural background or educational training to
understand the context let alone the language in which such texts have been created.
Thus, I welcome a dialogue about these issues of geographical, political, and linguistic
scope in a project such as this one that seeks to map the bodily effects of American
empire around the globe.
43
CHAPTER 1
Disease, Disability, and the Alien Body in the Literature of Sui Sin Far

She was a cripple. A fall had twisted her legs so that she moved around with
difficulty and scarred her face so terribly that none save Lin John cared to
look upon it.
—Sui Sin Far, “The Chinese Lily” (1995, 101)

. . . considering that I still limp and bear traces of sickness, I am fortunate to
secure any work at all.
—Sui Sin Far, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1995, 227)

Literature scholars in Asian American studies and feminist studies have
heralded Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton, 1865–1914) as one of the founding figures of
Asian North American literature and lauded her efforts to combat anti‐Chinese racism
through her fiction, personal essays, and journalism.
7
In this essay, I draw attention to a
neglected theme in Sui Sin Far’s writings, arguing that her representations of illness and
disability foreground and resist the biopolitical dimensions of the anti‐Chinese
movement in North America.
8
While scientific and medical discourses in the late 19th

7
Throughout this essay, I refer to Eaton by the pen name she “consistently adopted” in her
correspondence and publications (Hsuan L. Hsu 2011, 29).
8
My explorations of “disease” and “disability” encompass not only those physical and mental
illnesses and impairments that would be recognized according to contemporary diagnostic
standards, including rheumatic fever, bubonic plague, paralysis, and blindness, but also those
phenomena designated by white exclusion‐era authorities as unhealthy or insane, including aberrant
gender and sexual behavior and political dissent.
44
and early 20th centuries characterized Chinese and other Asian immigrants as threats
to public health, Sui Sin Far’s writings counter‐demonstrate the many ways in which
racial inequality rendered the Chinese in North America vulnerable to illness and
disability, thus reconfiguring these phenomena as signs of imperialist violence rather
than as symptoms of racial contamination.
Sui Sin Far further theorizes that Chinese women in North America often
experience imperialist violence through or on behalf of the social formation of
heterosexual marriage. Congruently, she suggests that disability opens up possibilities
besides heterosexual marriage and motherhood for Chinese North American women.
Finally, through her figurations of disability, Sui Sin Far produces an Asian North
American female subjectivity “in excess of and in contradiction with the subjectivities
proposed by national modern and postmodern modes of aesthetic representation”
(Lowe 1996, 32), a subjectivity that exceeds the limitations of the sentimental and
ethnographic literary traditions through which Sui Sin Far seeks to represent the
“impossible subjects” of North American empire (Ngai 2005, 5).

Chinese Immigration to North America and the Advent of the Exclusion Era
US and Canadian lawmakers and businessmen initially welcomed the arrival of Chinese
laborers, viewing them as a cheap and steady workforce “naturally” suited to the harsh
labor of nation building. As Ronald Takaki explains, soon after the United States
defeated Mexico and annexed California in 1848, American lawmakers developed plans
to set up the newly acquired city of San Francisco “as the center of American trade with

45
China”; in turn, they regarded Chinese laborers as the perfect human resource to
accomplish this goal (1989, 22). Relying on racist clichés about the unique aptitude of
Chinese laborers—for example, their “perceived intelligence and asexual docility”
(Nguyen 2002, 38)—in comparison to African American laborers, white American
leaders recruited the Chinese to extend the U.S. and British empires to the edges of the
Pacific and beyond, across the ocean to their homeland. Arriving by the thousands,
Chinese laborers were quickly put to work in the often hazardous, sometimes deadly
construction of the U.S. transcontinental railroad and the Canadian Pacific Railroad, as
well as many other manufacturing, mining, agricultural, and service projects, as
Stephanie Hsu explains (2010, 193). Nguyen argues that “Chinese immigrants provide a
clear example of a domestic minority that is also a colonized minority” (2002, 37). Given
this status, their labor was rewarded not with appreciation but instead with a backlash:
by the 1870s, Progressivists, Populists, and trade unionists began to characterize
Chinese immigrants as a “yellow peril” threatening the wages of white working‐class
laborers. Similar arguments arose in Canada in the 1880s as soon as the railroad was
completed there. As Takaki explains, this backlash arose because employers “developed
a dual‐wage system to pay Asian laborers less than white workers and pitted the groups
against each other in order to depress wages for both” (1989, 13). White labor
organizers blamed Chinese immigrants for their willingness to accept lower wages and
live more frugally, bringing down the “American Standard of Living” that was thought to
distinguish conditions in the United States from those in Europe and Asia (Reddy 360).
The labor arguments lodged against Chinese immigrants during this period manifest the
central tenet of Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation: race, Hall argues, is “the modality
46
through which class ‘is lived,’ the medium through which class relations are
experienced, through which it is appropriated and ‘fought through’” (1998, 341). Race
and racism thus serve to divide the working and lower classes, preventing them from
presenting a united front “against capitalism, against racism” (Hall 1980, 341). In the
case of the Chinese in North America, as Takaki puts it, “the class interests of white
capital as well as white labor needed Asians as ‘strangers’” (1989, 13).

The Advent of Medicalized Nativism
Operating in confluence with North American trade unionists’ arguments against
Chinese laborers in the 1870s, two health‐related discourses—biological racism and
public health—influenced popular opinion against the Chinese in North America
9
and
fostered public support for immigration exclusion. While the “science” of biological
racism characterized Chinese and other racialized peoples as innately inferior in
intelligence, ability, and appearance, the emerging field of public health characterized
them as prone to contagious diseases.
The “science” of biological racism gained prominence in the United States in the
1860s, when it provided a convenient justification for the nation’s own increasingly
complex “racial geometry” (Omi and Winant 1994, 165 n2, n3, 14; Gould 1996, 409–
410). Inspired by German naturalist J. F. Blumenbach’s taxonomy of five human races,
which ranked the races by degrees of degeneration from the Caucasian ideal, American

9
Following Erika Lee’s example, I use the term “Chinese immigrants” to refer to the first generation,
the term “Chinese North Americans” or “Chinese Americans” to refer to second and later generations,
and the “Chinese in North America” when referring to members of two or more generations together
(2003, 258–59 n7).
47
eugenicists devised their own ranking, with Caucasians at the top, “Mongolians” in the
middle tier, and “Ethiopians” at the bottom, reflecting the new status of Asian
Americans in the U.S. labor market (Gould 1996, 85). American politicians,
appropriating this discourse, asserted during a debate of the Joint Special Committee on
Chinese Immigration in 1877 that “the Chinese lacked ‘sufficient brain capacity . . . to
furnish motive power for self‐government’” (qtd. in Lee 2003, 100). Biological racism
also inspired the British and North American medical communities to adopt the term
Mongolism for the condition now known as Trisomy 21 or Down Syndrome, based on
the theory that it resulted from a “biological reversion by Caucasians to the Mongol
racial type” (Baynton 2001, 36).
Reinforcing the hierarchy that placed “Caucasians” over “Mongolians,” public
health reports racialized the Chinese as incubators of numerous contagious afflictions
including bubonic plague, hookworm, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, and trachoma (Kraut
1994, 4; Lee 2003, 83; Molina 2006b, 26; Shah 2001, 2). Officials attributed the
propensity for disease to Chinese immigrants’ non‐Western lifestyles and medical
practices and their non‐normative gender and sexual formations, including bachelor
societies, extended kinship networks, and matriarchal households, which arose in
response to the disproportionate exclusion of Chinese women, as Nayan Shah explains
(2001, 1, 79, 93). Officials further argued that “Chinatown’s vice culture and leisure
spaces,” including “opium dens, gambling houses, and brothels, . . . fostered intimate
relationships between Chinese and white people that accelerated the transmission of
syphilis and leprosy to white Americans” (Shah 2001, 77–78).
48
These anti‐Chinese and anti‐Asian discourses contributed to a series of
increasingly severe immigration restrictions and exclusions in the United States and
Canada. Beginning in 1870, California assessed a $500 penalty on all noncitizens
arriving at the state’s ports, creating a financial disincentive for Chinese and other Asian
laborers to come to the United States via California, usually the first point of entry for
Asian immigrants. The U.S. Page Act of 1875 prohibited the immigration of convicted
felons and contract laborers from China, Japan, and Mongolia, as well as women from
these countries suspected of being trafficked for prostitution; this bill “effectively
prohibited the immigration of unmarried women” from East Asia (Stephanie Hsu 2010,
194). In May 1882, the U.S. Congress passed “An Act to Execute Certain Treaty
Stipulations Relating to Chinese,” known today as the first Chinese Exclusion Act. The
Act states that “the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order
of certain localities” and therefore such “coming” is “hereby, suspended” (U.S. Congress
1882a, preamble). Those Chinese immigrants and travelers deemed “exempt‐class”—
merchants, teachers, students, diplomats, tourists, and their families—were denied
citizenship, under Section 14, which held that “hereafter no State court or court of the
US shall admit Chinese to citizenship; and all laws in conflict with this act are hereby
repealed” (U.S. Congress 1882a, sec. 14).
10

Despite the class‐based exemptions, the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act
effectively racialized all Chinese Americans as foreign, unassimilable, and illegal,

10
The question of whether this restriction applied to US‐born descendants of Chinese immigrants
was not clarified until 1898, when the US Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that
“regardless of race, all persons born in the United States” are “native‐born citizens of the United
States and entitled to all of the rights that citizenship offered” (Lee 2003, 103).

49
regardless of their actual legal status and documentation. This semblance of illegality
was reinforced with each renewal and expansion of the original Chinese Exclusion Act:
The U.S. Congress extended the exclusion act for another decade with the Geary Act of
1892; expanded it to encompass the newly acquired territories of Hawai’i and the
Philippines in 1898 and 1902, respectively; and removed the time limit on the policy in
1904 (Lee 2003, 45–46). Chinese exclusion thus remained in effect across the U.S.
empire until the policy’s symbolic repeal in 1943, after which a mere 105 Chinese per
year were admitted to the United States (Nguyen 2002, 65). Meanwhile, the U.S.
Immigration Acts of 1921, 1924, and 1934 dramatically reduced the number of eastern
and southern European immigrants allowed into the United States and excluded
immigrants from all other Asian countries. These exclusionary measures remained in
effect until the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.
The Canadian Parliament passed its first anti‐Chinese immigration law in 1885,
imposing a head tax of $50. This tax steadily increased, reaching $500 in 1903. Twenty
years later, Canada passed the Chinese Immigration Act, excluding nearly all Chinese
from the country until the law’s repeal in 1947. Differences in policies between Canada
and the United States created opportunities for covert border crossings, which Sui Sin
Far represents in stories such as “The Smuggling of Tie Co.”
In addition to facilitating the passage of the Chinese and other race‐based
exclusion laws, biological racism and public health discourses inspired several
immigration restrictions and exclusions that were explicitly directed at the disabled and
diseased, yet implicitly directed at nonwhite foreigners. California’s 1870 immigration
law established a $1000 bond for any “lunatic, idiot, deaf, dumb, blind, cripple or infirm
50
person not members of families, or who are likely to become permanently a public
charge” (qtd. in Chan 1991, 98–99). This law, passed amid great anti‐Chinese fervor in
California, provided an opportunity for California officials to turn away Chinese and
other Asian immigrants on the pretext of any number of imprecise “diagnoses” ranging
from insanity to suspicion of prostitution.
11

In August 1882, just three months after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in
the United States, the U.S. Congress approved “An Act to Regulate Immigration,” which
echoed California’s 1870 immigration law by prohibiting entry to any “lunatic, idiot, or
any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge”
(US Congress 1882b, sec. 2). This second federal exclusion law extended and
strengthened the new “gatekeeping” apparatus established under the Chinese Exclusion
Act, and provided a flexible mechanism for excluding immigrants from nations around
the world believed to be racially inferior and predisposed toward disease (Lee 2003, 7,
82). This law authorized immigration officials to profile and physically examine
newcomers, an invasive process Shah refers to as crossing the “medical border” (Shah
2001, 179). Thus, the second 1882 immigration law provided U.S. officials with an extra
mechanism for excluding Chinese immigrants; those who could prove their merchant‐
class exempt status under the Chinese Exclusion Act might still find themselves rejected
at the port on “medical” grounds.

11
By this time, the Immigration Acts of 1848 and 1869 had already begun to mandate examinations
for mental and physical fitness in various Canadian port cities (Hanes 2011).

51
Contesting Health‐Related Discrimination
Sui Sin Far, born Edith Maude Eaton in Britain to a Chinese mother and an English
father, and raised in Canada and the United States, devoted her writing career to
defending the Chinese in North America against various prejudicial claims, including
frequent charges of unhealth. In an editorial, “A Plea for the Chinaman,” published in the
Montreal Daily Star in 1896, she intervenes in a debate among Canadian legislators
regarding a recently proposed $500 head tax on all Chinese immigrants seeking entry to
Canada. Writing as “E. E.” under the guise of a white Canadian woman, Sui Sin Far
refutes the complaints of British Columbia’s Members of Parliament “that the Chinese
work cheap and therefore white men cannot compete with them, that they are gamblers
and grossly immoral, that they introduce disease, cost the public much money and delay
the development of the country” (1995, 193). Specifically addressing the health‐related
charges, Sui Sin Far argues that when Chinese immigrants “fall sick they are not thrown
upon our hands to be cared for; they are looked after by their own countrymen”; she
thus articulates a community‐based ethic of care among Chinese immigrants that she
implies is absent from white North American culture (1995, 195).
Indeed, in the 19th century, white town leaders across the United States and
Canada responded to urban growth, increasingly migratory populations, and reformers’
concerns about neglect by constructing asylums to house the sick, disabled, orphaned,
and elderly in their midst. These asylums replaced the home‐ and community‐based
model of care that had been a costly and time‐consuming fixture of early colonial
settlements as well as the almshouses, poorhouses, workhouses, and jails where
mentally ill and physically disabled individuals were often incarcerated (Rothman 1990,
52
3, 19–20, 36, 38; Sussman 1998, 260–261). Through her journalism and fiction, Sui Sin
Far represents Chinese North Americans as offering small‐scale, community‐based
alternatives to the dominant culture’s asylum model of “care.” In “The Story of One
White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” Sui Sin Far portrays a Chinese family in the
United States whose members care for their sick and disabled kin, including “Liu Jusong,
the father, [who] was a working jeweler; but, because of an accident by which he had
lost the use of one hand, was partially incapacitated for work” (1995, 72). The story
continues: “Therefore, their family depended for maintenance chiefly upon their
kinsman, Liu Kanghi” (1995, 72). Rather than abandoning the disabled elder to a nearby
asylum, his family keeps him at home, and a younger kinsman, Liu Kanghi—described at
different moments as a friend or a cousin—provides financial support. This economy of
care extends beyond the boundaries of the traditional nuclear family to include Liu
Kanghi as well as the white woman, Minnie (the story’s narrator), he eventually
marries. The family takes Minnie in after her divorce from a cold, belligerent white man,
and cares for her and her young daughter during an extended illness. Upending
conventional white North American gender roles (but perhaps also confirming
stereotypes of Asian male effeminacy), Liu Kanghi even cooks for Minnie. When her
health is restored, she becomes an active contributor to the family‐community
economy, sewing silk flowers for Liu Kanghi to sell in his shop.
The Chinese American family’s generosity appears in sharp contrast to the
indifferent attitude of a white suffragette earlier in the story, who, on encountering the
53
narrator’s sick baby, declares:
12
“‘There is no necessity for its being sick. . . . There must
be an error somewhere. . . . We have no disease that we do not deserve, no trouble
which we do not bring upon ourselves’” (1995, 69). This woman’s statement
encapsulates the convergence of moralistic and scientific discourses in the 19th century
that deemed illnesses and disabilities as punishments immigrants brought upon
themselves through immoral behavior and as statistical “errors” that needed to be
corrected through the mechanism of exclusion. Challenging this biopolitical equation,
Sui Sin Far reminds readers through the example of Liu Jusong that Chinese immigrants
often obtained their disabling injuries or illnesses through work in North American
trades and industries that were considered too dangerous for white laborers. Further,
she represents illness and disability as predictable components of human experience,
contradicting what Shah describes as middle‐class Americans’ “zealous confidence” in
the 19th century “that knowledge about physiology and hygiene could assure a healthy
life” (2001, 106).
Concluding her editorial for the Montreal Daily Star, “E. E.” appeals to the
widespread North American preoccupation with health, adding that her recent two‐
week trip to New York’s Chinatown left her “the better for [her] visit,” despite warnings
that if she “went in there alone” she “would never come out alive or sound in mind or
body” (1995, 196). Sui Sin Far adopts the role that middle‐ and upper‐class white
women had developed for themselves in the 19th century as “domestic sanitarians,

12
The unsympathetic portrayal of this suffragette critiques a feminist politics that places abstract
principles ahead of the material welfare of women. Mary Chapman agrees that “Sui Sin Far styles a
more directly and privately contoured model of political agency for women than the progressive
ideal of suffrage” (2008, 978).
54
responsible for the care and defense of the home and of the moral and physical well‐
being of the family” (Shah 2001, 105), and for the health of the nation through “sanitary
reform” activities (Sivulka 1999, 1; Di Cresce 2011, 26, 28, 30). This role affirmed
middle‐ and upper‐class white women’s traditional place in the domestic sphere, yet
also expanded their participation in the political sphere at a time when “concepts of
health and cleanliness increasingly contributed to the definition of normative American
identity” as well as Canadian identity (Shah 2001, 105–106; Di Cresce 2011, 23, 25–28).
Marshaling this gendered and racialized authority, “E. E.” offers first‐person testimony
contradicting the stereotype of Chinatowns as dangerous and dirty places (1995, 196).
In 1903, Sui Sin Far, now living on the West Coast of the United States, published a
series of feature articles on Chinatown life for the Los Angeles Express. In the opening
piece, “In Los Angeles’ Chinatown” (1995, 198–200), she once again asserts her female
authority on health yet does so under her Chinese pen name, contradicting readers’
assumptions that only white women can play such an advisor role (Shah 2001, 105). Sui
Sin Far extols the healthful qualities of a Chinese diet and lifestyle, challenging claims
made by public health “experts” that “Chinese vulnerability to plague” resulted from
“their rice‐based diet, the absence of animal protein leaving their bodies unable to fight
off the disease” (Kraut 1994, 85). Such claims dovetailed with trade‐unionists’
arguments that Chinese immigrants accustomed to a “slave” diet” had an unfair fiscal
advantage over white laborers (Kearney and Knight 1878, 244). Turning this logic on its
head, Sui Sin Far advertises the good health white Americans might experience if they
too adopt a “Chinaman’s” diet, which she describes as “wholesome” and “nutritious”
despite being “rather insipid to the palate” (1995, 200). “Notwithstanding what is said
55
to the contrary,” she argues, “the Chinese are good livers, and there are few dyspeptics
among them, their food being the kind that digests easily” (1995, 200). Noting that
“everybody knows” that the staple of a Chinese diet is rice, Sui Sin Far challenges her
Anglo readers to reconsider what, if anything else, they “know” about Chinese North
American life ways, hinting that this knowledge is likely partial, second‐hand, and/or
based on biased sources (1995, 200). Thus, characterizing Chinese Americans as
healthful ascetics at a time when dyspepsia was a common complaint
13
and white
reformers had popularized dietary asceticism (Lobel 2011), Sui Sin Far recasts the
arrival and continued presence of the Chinese as a potentially beneficent development
for white Americans’ cuisine and health.

Resisting the Imperialist Endangerment of Chinese Immigrants’ Health
While American and Canadian officials focused on the perceived threat Chinese
immigrants posed to white citizens’ moral and physical health, the Chinese in North
America counter‐argued that the arduous screening process endangered the health of
immigrants seeking entry to the United States and Canada, sometimes to the point of
death (Lee 2003, 56).
14
They also questioned the justice of excluding newcomers for

13
Numerous doctors in the 19th and early 20th centuries published guides on dyspepsia aimed at the
general public (see Ralph 1835; Fitch 1859; and Bowen 1877); these guides typically offered lay
explanations of the ailment, home remedies to try (e.g., ether, eau de cologne, ginger, mercury), and
lists of foods, beverages, and behaviors to avoid (e.g., pork, goose, cabbage, alcohol, tea, worry,
inactivity, overeating). M. T. Gerin‐Lajoie’s Dyspepsia and How to Cure It (1895) confirms Sui Sin Far’s
claim about the wholesomeness of a rice‐based diet, listing rice among the foods that are “Emolient
and Laxative, and Easily Digested” (1895, 68–69).
14
During the first few decades of the exclusion era, Chinese immigrants to the US were detained at
San Francisco’s Pier 40 in a shed designed to hold 200 inmates in bunk beds, but which often housed
double that number; further, as Lee documents, the “ventilation was poor, and the inmates often fell
sick, and some even died” (2003, 124). In one case, merchant Ho Mun, who arrived in San Francisco
56
common parasitic diseases that were “treatable and posed no serious health threat”
(Lee 2003, 83–84) and could have been contracted in transit to North America. Shah
includes a translation of a poem carved in Chinese on the wall of the Angel Island
detention center in San Francisco: “It is indeed pitiable the harsh treatment of our
fellow countrymen. / The doctor extracting blood caused us the greatest anguish. / Our
stomachs are full of grievances, but to whom can we tell them?” (qtd. in Shah 2001,
179). While Sui Sin Far appears not to have experienced the same level of scrutiny when
crossing international borders as other Chinese immigrants because of her English
family name and her ability to pass as white (White‐Parks 1995, 101), she gave voice to
the “grievances” of those who survived more violent crossings. As a journalist and
creative writer who traveled widely across North America, she had her finger on the
pulse of issues affecting the Chinese in North America, including the inhumane
treatment of immigrants during screening and the dangers that awaited them beyond
the gate.
Armed with such confidences, Sui Sin Far used her journalistic and literary
publications to raise awareness among her white readers of the dangers posed to the
Chinese in North America by racially discriminatory policies. In a series of reports for
the Montreal Daily Witness, published in 1890, she challenges the injustice of Canadian
immigration policies that led, in one case, to a Chinese Canadian man being detained on

in September 1899, was imprisoned for months because of a “minor technicality” in his documents;
during his detention he became seriously ill but was refused medical care and eventually died while
his case was still pending (Lee 2003, 56). At the Angel Island station, which opened in 1910, Chinese
and other Asian immigrants “counted their detention time in weeks, months, and even years,”
whereas immigrants at Ellis Island—primarily of European origin—”usually spent only a few hours
or at most a few days at the island depot” (Lee 2003, 75).

57
suspicion of “insanity” because he failed to express patriotism toward his new country
(1995, 179–180). In the story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1995, 17–27), the character Mr.
Spring Fragrance complains to his white neighbor about his brother’s detention by U.S.
immigration officials; in the story “In the Land of the Free” (1995, 93–100), a baby is
separated for 10 months from his parents on the pretext of an immigration paperwork
technicality. The unjust and cruel detention of children was a recurrent theme in Sui Sin
Far’s fiction, including two additional stories that challenge white readers’ presumed
expertise on health and safety, “A Chinese Boy‐Girl” (1995, 155–59) and “The Sugar
Cane Baby” (1995, 258–61). In these stories, Sui Sin Far dramatizes the dangers posed
to children of color when white and/or Christian authorities intervene in parenting
situations they do not understand.
Sui Sin Far explores similar themes with adult protagonists in “The
Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” conveying that the pressure to adopt white American
customs and values creates an unbearable and unhealthy situation for the title
character. This story focuses on the unhappy migration experience of Pau Tsu, who has
ventured to the United States to marry Wan Lin Fo, a successful businessman in Seattle.
Pau Tsu expresses no interest in assimilating into American culture, instead hoping to
leave the labor of intercultural and interracial exchange up to her husband. Lin Fo,
however, perceives his wife as culturally disabled, interpreting her adherence to
Chinese culture and customs as a sign of her inferiority as a Chinese American wife. He
thus appoints his white American friend, Miss Adah Raymond, to the task of helping Pau
Tsu assimilate. Miss Raymond’s role resembles that of the white middle‐class female
reformers and missionaries who ventured into Chinatown to “educate” Chinese
58
immigrant wives on domestic hygiene and “proper” female decorum. Her function also
anticipates the modern‐day occupational therapist who coaches people with disabilities
to adapt to “normal” society, a “helping” professional whose purpose nevertheless
implicitly conveys that the dominant culture’s way of doing things is superior.
Midway through the story, the tender and sensitive Pau Tsu falls ill, seemingly
because her constitution cannot bear the damp, cool climate of the Pacific Northwest.
However, the story implies that she has also been worn down by her husband’s
pressuring “‘to adapt and adopt in a few months’ time’” (in Miss Raymond’s assessment)
the language, dress, and social customs of her new country (1995, 91). The conclusion
of the story also reveals that Pau Tsu is pregnant, and so it is possible she may be
experiencing morning sickness. Though Pau Tsu prefers to be treated by a female
Chinese American doctor, Lin Fo insists that she be attended by Miss Raymond’s family
doctor, a man who is presumably white. Miss Raymond reluctantly helps Lin Fo coerce
Pau Tsu to submit to the examination, a scene the white woman later describes in terms
reminiscent of sexual violation: “‘The modesty of generations of maternal ancestors was
crucified as I rolled down the neck of her silk tunic’” (1995, 89). This scene reveals the
extent to which Americanization involves the violent imposition of white Western
technologies of health on the racialized immigrant female body, as well as the
investment and participation of Chinese immigrant husbands and white American
women in this process. Further, it suggests tensions within Chinese North American
communities over the extent to which one should comply with white Western standards
of health and medical practices in order to achieve acceptance (Shah 2001, 10). Pau
Tsu’s desire to be treated by a Chinese American female root doctor points to the
59
presence of, and continued preference for, non‐Western medical care among many
Chinese in North America, a fact that confounded public health investigators of the day
(Shah 2001, 10).
Sui Sin Far’s representation of this violating medical examination links to the
invasive medical examinations Chinese immigrants endured in order to gain entry to
North America. Single Chinese women, including fiancées such as Pau Tsu, faced
heightened scrutiny. Sucheng Chan argues that immigration restrictions directed at
“those most likely to become a public charge” and “lewd or debauched women”
implicitly targeted unmarried Chinese women, who were widely perceived as having no
means to support themselves except prostitution, even though many found work in the
manufacturing industry sewing and doing piece‐work (Chan 1991, 95; Shah 2001, 81).
Sui Sin Far herself encountered this assumption, as she reports in her essay “Leaves
from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” when a white naval officer propositions her
sexually after learning that she is “not all white” (1995, 226). As Lee observes, “Chinese
prostitutes—and by extension all Chinese women—were considered to be one of the
most dangerous threats of Chinese immigration” (2003, 93). Officials framed this threat
in moralistic and medical terms, warning against the “mercenary prostitute” whose
mission was to compromise the morality of white men and boys and then infect them
with syphilis (Shah 2001, 79). Meanwhile, Shah explains, married Chinese women in
North America “were perceived as . . . sequestered and uneducated merchant wives
unable to further the progress of their families” (2001, 105). White suffragists
contributed to this perception by “deploy[ing] Orientalist tropes such as bound feet as
metaphors for the oppression of women worldwide,” transforming the image of the
60
Chinese woman into a symbol for “female powerless under patriarchy” (Chapman 2008,
975, 979). Ironically, even though reformers in China sought to end the disabling
practice of foot binding in the late 19th century, U.S. immigration officials offered an
incentive for its continuation by classifying bound feet as the strongest possible
evidence a Chinese woman could offer of her virtue and merchant‐class status (Lee
2003, 93).
In light of this context, Pau Tsu’s refusal to Americanize, evidenced when she
abandons her husband, represents a stunning repudiation of the gendered and
racialized restrictions she experiences as a recently married Chinese immigrant woman.
After Pau Tsu threatens divorce, Lin Fo realizes the error of his ways and seeks to make
amends with his wife on her terms: “’If I find her,’” he proclaims to Miss Raymond, “’I
will not care if she never speaks an American word, and I will take her for a trip to
China, so that our son may be born in the country that Heaven loves’” (1995, 92). The
story concludes with Lin Fo sending Miss Raymond away and preparing to enter the
home where Pau Tsu has taken refuge. This ending promises a recalibration of power
within the marriage if Pau Tsu agrees to take Lin Fo back, but also suggests the
possibility that she will refuse him.

“Impossible Subjects”
Not all immigrants to North American could afford to return to China if they wanted to,
a material limitation reflected in Sui Sin Far’s stories focusing on laboring characters,
61
including her disability‐themed piece, “The Chinese Lily” (1995, 101–104).
15
While
several stories in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, including “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” and
“Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” focus on merchant‐class immigrant characters, whom Arnold
Pan describes as “model minorities before their time” (Pan 2010, 92), “The Chinese Lily”
centers on a set of working‐class immigrant characters who exist closer to the “yellow
peril” stereotype and who possess no legal alibi for residing in the United States during
the exclusion era. This story, first published in Charles Lummis’s journal Out West,
offers a glimpse into the lives of a trio of young Chinese immigrants living in San
Francisco’s Chinatown: Mermei, who is physically disabled and spends her days
inventing stories based on scenes she spies from her window; her devoted brother Lin
John, who works in a laundry and visits her in the evenings; and Mermei’s neighbor Sin
Far, another single woman living in her dwelling‐house, who befriends Mermei yet who
also becomes the object of Lin John’s desires. This triangle of affection combusts
tragically in a tenement fire, during which Lin John must make the terrible choice of
whether to rescue his sister or Sin Far; with Sin Far’s blessing, he chooses Mermei and
Sin Far goes to the “land of happy spirits” (1995, 104).
In this story, Sui Sin Far risks reinforcing the stereotypical associations of
sickness and disability with Chinese immigrant communities, yet instead manages to

15
“The Chinese Lily” was first published in 1908 in Charles Lummis’s journal Out West: A Magazine of
the Old Pacific and the New and later included in the collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). Until
now, scholars have assumed that “The Chinese Lily” first appeared in Mrs. Spring Fragrance. In the
earlier Out West version, the main character Mermei is named “Tin‐a” and “Sin Far” is called “Sui Sin
Far” or “the Chinese Lily,” but otherwise the plot and phrasing are identical to the version published
in Mrs. Spring Fragrance; the author is listed as “Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far)” of Seattle, Washington
(Eaton 1908, 508–510). In this chapter, my citations refer to the later version, anthologized by Ling
and White‐Parks (Sui Sin Far 1995, 101‐104).

62
portray illness and disability as hazards of immigrating to and living in a racist society.
The description of the death of Mermei and Lin John’s parents—“Their mother had died
the day she entered the foreign city, and the father the week following, both having
contracted a fever on the steamer” (1995, 102)—represents illness as a danger of the
immigration process itself, engendered by the crowded and unsanitary space of the
commercial “steamer,” as opposed to the racialized bodies making the journey. The
explanation of how Mermei became disabled—“A fall had twisted her legs so that she
moved around with difficulty and scarred her face” (1995, 101)—emphasizes the
accidental nature of her disability, and even implies that Mermei may have “fallen”
victim to the crowded, poorly constructed living spaces imposed on the Chinese in
North America, a point later reinforced when her tenement erupts in flames.
By not revealing in what year her laboring‐class characters immigrated, or when
the present‐day action occurs, Sui Sin Far leaves open the possibility that Mermei, Lin
John, and Sin Far may have belonged to the thousands of Chinese who followed “the
crooked path” into North America (in the words of an Angel Island detainee quoted in
Lee 2003, 189) during the exclusion era. Thus, the characters in “The Chinese Lily”
resemble those Mae Ngai calls “impossible subjects” (2005, 5). Ngai argues that
immigration restrictions and exclusions “produced the illegal alien as a new legal and
political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality
and a legal impossibility” (2005, 4). Insofar as the laboring‐class characters in Sui Sin
Far’s stories may represent these legally “impossible subjects,” the text insists on a
different kind of impossibility: the impossibility of eliminating Chinese North American
communities through legal measures. The story reminds, perhaps even quietly
63
threatens, white readers that Chinese immigrants will continue to arrive and survive in
North America regardless of the white majority’s efforts to exclude them. Central to this
survival is the community‐based ethic of care Sui Sin Far articulated in her editorial for
the Montreal Daily Star and in “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese.”
This ethic of care manifests in “The Chinese Lily” when the orphaned Mermei and Lin
John are “taken in charge by their father’s brother, and although he was a poor man he
did his best for them until taken away by death” (1995, 102). After their uncle’s death,
Lin John assumes responsibility for his sister, though Mermei also embroiders for a
living. Equally important, he provides emotional companionship and listens to her
stories. Meanwhile, Sin Far lives with her sister and brother‐and‐law, and Sin Far and
Mermei offer emotional support to each other when their needs for company exceed the
capacities of their respective biological relations. Through these details, the story
informs readers that neither Mermei nor Sin Far is “at risk of becoming a public charge.”
However, the story reveals the precariousness of their situation and the fact that
impossible subjects often confront seemingly impossible choices. As a laundryman, Lin
John is unlikely to have the financial means to support both Mermei and Sin Far if he
marries Sin Far. It is possible that both women could contribute to the family economy
through piecework. However, by creating a scenario in which Lin John must choose
between saving his beloved sister and saving his love interest (the ladder he brings to
the burning tenement will not bear the weight of both women), Sui Sin Far
metaphorically represents the scarcity of resources he might have eventually faced as a
husband, father, and brother charged with the care of a growing family. If Lin John (or
the author) sacrifices Mermei, he affirms the dominant cultural assessment that she is
64
“not fit to live” (1995, 104), and thus a burden on her family and society. If Lin John
sacrifices Sin Far, he loses the opportunity of heterosexual matrimony. This social and
sexual formation was a precondition for acceptance within white North American
society, yet the legal exclusion of single Chinese women hindered possibilities for
heterosexual marriage among the multitude of bachelor laborers, including Lin John,
who might have desired this option. This backdrop explains the gravity of Lin John’s
loss when Sin Far dies, for she is a rare unmarried Chinese woman in exclusion‐era San
Francisco, as Min Hyoung Song points out (2003, 141). Through this scene, Sui Sin Far
confronts her white readers with the consequences of their anti‐Chinese racism, which
has contributed to the shortage of emotional and economic resources within North
American Chinatowns leading to such “impossible” choices.
While Lin John’s loss is rendered legible to readers by Western culture’s
privileging of heteronormative romance, the significance of Mermei’s loss when Sin Far
dies requires a more subtle and queer counter‐reading. Early on, the story makes clear
that Mermei, as a disabled and disfigured woman, is neither mobile nor considered
attractive enough to participate in the rituals of heterosexual romance (1995, 101). Her
exclusion from this institution may explain her sudden fit of weeping after she sees a
group of young women pass by her window, “dressed gaily as if to attend a wedding”
(1995, 102). However, Mermei herself does not understand the precise “reason” for her
“sad reflections” (1995, 102). Thus, as Martha J. Cutter argues, the text “leaves open the
possibility” that Mermei may “be crying because she wants not to be like those young
girls, but liked by them—desired by them” (2002, 158). Cutter proposes that, “one way
of reading” the moment when Sin Far arrives at Mermei’s door bearing a Chinese lily,
65
the flower synonymous with her name, is that “Sin Far offers herself, her body, her
flower, as an object of desire, as a replacement for the bodies of the gaily dressed
women that Mermei desires, the bodies of the Chinese women who are entering the
heterosexual marriage plot” (2002, 158). Further evidence supporting this
interpretation includes the use of talking as a euphemism for sexual activity, when Sin
Far explains that her newly married sister and brother‐in‐law have “much to say” to
each other in the evening and this is why she experiences such loneliness in their midst
(Sui Sin Far 1995, 103). The “delightful hour” Sin Far and Mermei spend “chatter[ing]
out their little hearts” together becomes in this reading suggestive of more than just
conversation (Sui Sin Far 1995, 102–103; Cutter 2002, 158).
16

Cutter premises her argument on a psychoanalytic reading of Mermei’s physical
disability as a “trope for another kind of ‘illness,’ a sexual ‘deformity’ or ‘impropriety’
that might constitute a kind of lesbian identification” (2002, 157). Yet, it is also possible
to read Mermei’s disability as a form of embodiment that engenders the possibility of
queer intimacy rather than as a sign or symptom of queer desire. Mermei’s disabling
accident, which “made her not as other girls” (Sui Sin Far 1995, 101), spares her from
the “heterosexual marriage plot” (Cutter 2002, 158) and leaves open the option of an
intimate friendship with Sin Far, who not only offers herself as an erotic object to
Mermei, but also presents herself as a desiring subject who, like Lin John, “cares to look
upon” Mermei’s disfigured face (Sui Sin Far 1995, 101).

16
Amy Ling likewise argues that the intimacy and effusiveness of the friendship between Mermei and
Sin Far is “suggestive of a lesbian sensibility” (1990, 48).

66
Other moments in the text suggest that Sin Far may prefer Mermei’s
companionship to Lin John’s. During Sin Far’s first visit, she explains that, on numerous
occasions, she had approached Mermei’s door, but always retreated because she heard
“the voice of him whom they call your brother” (Sui Sin Far 1995, 103). Likewise, the
story’s climactic scene obscures the nature of her feelings for Lin John. When Lin John
arrives at the burning apartment building, Sin Far declares that “the ladder will not bear
the weight of both” women (1995, 104). Mermei insists that she should be the one to die
because she is “not fit to live” and because Lin John loves Sin Far “best”: “You and he can
be happy together,” she concludes, perhaps acknowledging that she and Sin Far would
face many obstacles to happiness as intimate companions (1995, 104). Sin Far does not
respond to this assertion, instead proposing that Lin John be the one to decide their
respective fates. “For one awful second,” he hesitates, and searches Sin Far’s eyes for
guidance (1995, 104). “’Come, Mermei,’” he then beckons (1995, 104). After the fire, Lin
John tells a distraught Mermei that he saved her with Sin Far’s “approval, aye, at her
bidding” (1995, 104). Sin Far’s apparent self‐sacrifice in this moment can be interpreted
as an affirmation that a disabled life is worth living, a romantic gesture to save her
beloved Mermei, and a dramatic means to escape a possible marriage with Lin John. As
Cutter explains, “[i]t is possible that Sin Far . . . chooses death instead of life without her
loved one (Mermei)” (2002, 159). However, with this ending, the author extinguishes
the possibility of a long‐term erotic partnership between Mermei and Sin Far, thus
characterizing queer intimacy as an ephemeral consolation for Chinese women in
America.
67
Ultimately, “The Chinese Lily” concludes with an affirmation of the tender bond
between brother and sister, reminding readers of the contingent family formations
innovated by Chinese immigrants in the face of exclusion and discrimination, and
condemned by public health investigators. If Sin Far’s brief entrance into the lives of
Mermei and Lin John conjures possibilities of queer and/or heterosexual desire, her
death leaves us with a different kind of queer family, in the sense of the non‐nuclear,
non‐heteronormative kinship formations foregrounded by Shah. Although Lin John
insists that he saved Mermei at Sin Far’s “bidding,” his choice may reflect in the end his
preference for Mermei’s company, calling into question the assumption that
heterosexual marriage would necessarily and always have been the first choice among
Chinese immigrants if it had been possible. Thus, “The Chinese Lily” illustrates the
importance of questioning the “conceptual stabilizations” Shah has identified as
“haunt[ing] historians”: these include “permanence over transience,” “the nuclear
family household,” and “polarized sexuality” (2011, 6). Shah argues that migrant history
in particular challenges these conceptual stabilizations and requires that scholars “take
the measure of elastic and shifting movements,” “the many permeable forms and
structures of cohabitation,” and the “variance of erotics . . . in society” (2011, 6, 8). Sui
Sin Far’s stories about laboring‐class characters, including “The Chinese Lily,” introduce
readers to the “impossible subjects” who leave few permanent records of their
presence, their household structures, or their erotic desires, practices, and attachments,
except when they become entangled with the law. In doing so, she renders sympathetic
some of the most demonized Chinese figures of the exclusion era: the disabled
68
immigrant at risk of becoming a public charge, the bachelor laundryman, and the single
woman.

Centering the Disabled Heroine in the Sentimental Tradition
In order to generate sympathy for these and other stereotyped figures, Sui Sin Far relies
“heavily on a recognizable sentimental literary tradition,” as Song argues (2003, 140),
emphasizing Sui Sin Far’s focus on “interpersonal relations,” “emotional attachments,”
and “loss” as well as the “explicitly didactic” quality of her work (2003, 138, 140).
However, in “The Chinese Lily,” along with “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” Sui Sin Far
also revises the sentimental tradition by centering the disabled female character’s point
of view and experience. Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson notes that many white women’s
sentimental novels from the 19th century portray white, able‐bodied women as
heroines who attempt to care for and rescue “their disabled sisters”—usually women of
color or working‐class white women—“who stay on the narrative margins, degraded by
oppressive institutions and ultimately sacrificed to the social problems the novels
assail” (1997, 82). Further, Garland‐Thomson argues, the tragic death of the disabled
female character serves as a “rhetorical element” in the novelists’ “arguments for
humanitarian social reform” (1997, 82). These novels also validate the new model of
“able‐bodied womanhood” cultivated by middle‐class white women in the 19th century
(Verbrugge 1998, 11). This model contradicted the “pervasive . . . belief that females
were inordinately, even inherently delicate creatures; however, in promoting this new
model of womanhood, white middle‐class women seemingly displaced the “cult of
female invalidism” onto immigrant and working‐class women who began to be targeted
69
by social reformers as the new exemplars of poor health and hygiene (Verbrugge 1998,
16).
If traditional sentimental literature teaches readers that disabled characters are
marginal, Sui Sin Far offers her readers a different lesson. The opening paragraph of
“The Chinese Lily” announces Mermei as the main character; further, the story’s
omniscient narrator most often focalizes through Mermei’s perspective, less frequently
through Lin John’s, and not at all through Sin Far’s. Mermei’s desire for companionship
initiates the initial conflict; the sound of her weeping, triggered by the sight of the young
women outside, beckons Sin Far to her door and into her life. These formal details
suggest that the implied author is first and foremost concerned with Mermei’s
loneliness and isolation, her need for companionship and an audience for her stories.
Further, Sui Sin Far departs from sentimental literature’s usual formula by sending the
able‐bodied Sin Far to her death instead of Mermei at the story’s end; similarly, at the
conclusion of “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” Sui Sin Far allows Pau Tsu to survive her
illness and potentially renegotiate the terms of her marriage. By centering the ill and
disabled women’s experiences and perspectives in these respective stories and allowing
them to live past the conclusions of her stories, Sui Sin Far revises the sentimental
literary tradition to honor and accommodate the complex intersection of racism,
sexism, and disability prejudice in the lives of disabled Chinese women in North
America. She also informs readers about the conditions that will make possible their
survival and happiness.
Sui Sin Far’s motives for these interventions are suggested in her
autobiographical writings from the period 1909 to 1912, in which disability figures as a
70
prominent theme. In the essay “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,”
published in The Independent just six months after “The Chinese Lily,” the narrator
explains that a chronic health condition that arose in her youth prevented her from
following her “sturdier” siblings into “dancing classes” and apprenticeships, and instead
led her to pursue a career as a writer (1995, 222). Describing her condition, she writes:
“I have no organic disease, but the strength of my feelings seems to take from me the
strength of my body. I am prostrated at times with attacks of nervous sickness” (1995,
221). This description disrupts the biologically racist formula that classified disability
as a sign of racial degeneracy and/or miscegenation, instead suggesting that her
physical “weakness” stems from her emotional sensitivity, a trait regarded as the
privilege and burden of refined white women in the 19th century (Verbrugge 1988, 16).
Though the narrator’s family doctor provides a clinical explanation for her periodic
“attacks of nervous sickness,” declaring that her “heart is unusually large,” this too
serves as a metaphor for her finely tuned feelings (1995, 221). Hsuan L. Hsu contends
that this “excessive sentimentalism contradicts stereotypes about the Chinese, who,” in
Sui Sin Far’s own words, “are ‘said to be the most stolid and insensible to feeling of all
races’” (Hsuan L. Hsu 2011, 19; Sui Sin Far 1995, 221). Hsu continues: “At the same
time, her inordinate sensitivity to the suffering of others makes Far eminently qualified
for her vocation as sentimental author” (2011, 19). Calling forth the image of Christ on
the cross, Sui Sin Far declares that “the cross of the Eurasian bore too heavily upon my
childish shoulders,” suggesting that bearing the cross of being biracial in a racist and
racially polarized society was too heavy a burden for her emotionally tender heart
(1995, 221).
71
As further evidence of her sensitivity, the narrator describes the emotional and
physical distress she experiences listening to her mother’s “screams of agony” during
childbirth, a repeated experience (Edith Eaton was the second of 14 children) that may
have diminished the author’s enthusiasm for marriage and motherhood (1995, 221).
This skepticism carries over to stories such as “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” “The
Wisdom of the New,” and “The Prize China Baby,” which depict women and children
endangered by marital discord. In “Leaves,” the narrator expresses her openness to
marrying a “Chinaman,” but reflects negatively on the prospects of marrying a white
man in an anecdote about a Eurasian woman who experiences great relief when her
engagement to a white suitor ends abruptly. However, this woman’s ambivalence
toward marriage appears to transcend racial lines when she proclaims: “’Never again
shall I be untrue to my own heart. Never again will I allow any one to ‘hound’ or ‘sneer’
me into matrimony’” (1995, 230). This passage sheds light on the question of why the
author Sui Sin Far might have sacrificed the character bearing her own name in “The
Chinese Lily.” In staging the character Sin Far’s sacrificial death, Sui Sin Far rescues her
from marriage and from prostitution, the occupation white readers would most likely
have associated with an unmarried Chinese immigrant woman.
Having bypassed both options, the narrator of “Leaves” then reveals the
tenuousness of her situation as a self‐supporting disabled woman writer, at one point
leaving Canada for the West Coast of the United States in search of work and a more
salubrious climate, “so reduced by another attack of rheumatic fever that I only weigh
eighty‐four pounds” (1995, 226). She accepts a typist position at a railway agency for a
paltry salary, barely enough to live on or send to her family, let alone support her
72
writing. Yet, she explains, “I console myself with the reflection that, considering that I
still limp and bear traces of sickness, I am fortunate to secure any work at all” (1995,
227). Three years later, in a publicity piece for the Boston Globe that coincided with the
publication of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far suggests that disability “is the chief
reason, no doubt, why an ambition conceived in childhood is achieved only as I near the
close of half a century” (1995, 291).
17
While this statement implies that “recurrent
attacks of the terrible fever” interfered with the continuity of her writing career, both
essays allude to the prejudices and economic strife she experienced as a disabled
woman of Chinese descent. She indicates that her large and impoverished family, unlike
the Chinese North American families of her fiction, drained any financial reserves she
managed to save “toward a rest in which to write the book of my dreams” (1995, 294).
Since bearing “traces of sickness” could be perceived as a sign of racial
contamination during this period, the narrator’s description in “Leaves” of the prejudice
she experiences as a disabled woman suggests that the visibility of her chronic health
condition racializes her even when she passes for white; or, perhaps, that she
understands the experience of racial prejudice through the experience of disability
prejudice. This possibility is reinforced by a description Lummis provides of Sui Sin Far
in Land of Sunshine, which Cutter includes in her article “Sui Sin Far’s Letters to Charles
Lummis: Contextualizing Publication Practices for the Asian American Subject at the
Turn of the Century”: Claiming Sui Sin Far as his “discovery,” Lummis notes that she is
“a wee spiritual body, too frail to retain much strength for literature after the day’s

17
She also provides a more clinical explanation of her condition than she does in “Leaves,” explaining
in the Boston Globe article that a “fever” in her adolescence “retarded [her] development both
mentally and physically” and left her with a permanently weakened heart (1995, 291).
73
bread‐winning” (qtd. in Cutter 2006, 268). This assertion, which reduces her entire
being to her petite and fragile body, underestimates her rhetorical and emotional
strength (Cutter 2006, 268), and provides a convenient editorial justification for the
shortness of her stories, the “wee” size and “frail[ty]”of her body determining how much
she is allowed to say and in what form.

Ethnography: A Disabling Limitation
Despite Lummis’s patronizing limitations, Sui Sin Far advanced her own agenda through
“deceptively simple” stories (to borrow a phrase from Yu‐Fang Cho 2009, 38). Thus,
reading beyond the surface of a story like “The Chinese Lily” reveals not only a subtext
of queer possibilities, but also a metaphor for the wounding professional limitations Sui
Sin Far experienced as a disabled woman writer of Chinese descent. Although she
aligned her work with the 19th‐century women’s tradition of sentimental literature, few
publishers or reviewers recognized her chosen literary mode, instead interpreting her
stories as a series of ethnographic accounts of life in Chinese North American
communities, authored by a “native informant.”
18
This racist perception, Dominika
Ferens observes, placed an “imperative” on Sui Sin Far “to dwell on cultural differences
to satisfy reader expectations” (2002, 14). Sui Sin Far comments on this pressure in
“Leaves,” describing how some “funny people tell me that if I wish to succeed in
literature in America I should dress in Chinese costume, carry a fan in my hand, wear a
pair of scarlet beaded slippers” (1995, 230). Although “Leaves” includes an appreciative

18
Sean McCann points out that Sui Sin Far rejected the literary tradition of naturalism (1999, 79–80),
whose canon of white male authors frequently incorporated anti‐Chinese or anti‐Asian themes into
their capitalist critiques, as Colleen Lye demonstrates (2005, 8).
74
line regarding a California editor who matches Lummis’s description (1995, 230),
Cutter indicates that Sui Sin Far struggled to “construct a literary identity for herself in
which she was not always Lummis’s ‘little’ exotic fledgling contributor” (2006, 260).
While Sui Sin Far expressed in her letters to Lummis that she yearned to publish longer
fiction and that other periodicals were accepting such pieces from her (the subtext
being that longer pieces might allow her to break free from the constraints of the
ethnographic account), Cutter notes that Lummis ignored her pleas, and continued
accepting only “short sketches,” which served to punctuate longer pieces by white
writers, male and female alike (2006, 267).
19

Sui Sin Far also bore the burden of countering the anti‐Chinese racism that
permeated the pages of Lummis’s magazines. The journal in which “The Chinese Lily”
first appeared, the California‐based Out West, was published by the Archeological
Institute of America and carried forth the mission of Lummis’s earlier journal Land of
Sunshine, which began featuring Sui Sin Far’s short stories as early as 1896. Through
this journal, Ferens explains, Lummis “sought to define the meaning of California for
both insiders and outsiders and to create a sense of regional identity for wealthier
newcomers from the East” (2002, 84). However, whereas Lummis considered himself a
preserver of the Native American and Mexican cultural heritage that had shaped the
American West, he expressed no nostalgia for the arrival of Chinese immigrants to the
United States, sharing the dominant view that Chinese and other Asians were
“unassimilable aliens.” He routinely penned editorials and published stories that

19
The three‐page story “The Chinese Lily,” for instance, is sandwiched between a five‐page report
from the “Friends of the Indians” conference and Lummis’s monthly column "In the Lion's Den,” an
eight‐page treatise on the proper Spanish pronunciation of Los Angeles (1908, citation).
75
reinforced notions of the Chinese in America as perpetual foreigners, gamblers,
tricksters, and opium smokers, often in the same journals as Sui Sin Far’s work (Cutter
2006, 261–64). Cutter argues that Sui Sin Far’s stories “consistently deconstruct” the
stereotypes Lummis’s magazine elsewhere “enforces” (2006, 260).
In “The Chinese Lily,” Sui Sin Far employs a hybrid form of sentimental
ethnography likely intended to satisfy Out West readers’ expectations for charming,
colorful sketches of Chinatown life and to inspire those same readers to sympathize
with her racially marginalized characters.
20
Ethnographic touches in “The Chinese Lily”
include Sui Sin Far’s descriptions of the “other little Chinese women living on the same
floor” as Mermei (1995, 101), the “yellow‐robed priests . . . on their way to the joss
house,” “a man carrying an image of a Gambling Cash Tiger,” or even Mermei’s “small
black head”—an image that racializes and genders Mermei in terms similar to those
Lummis used to describe Sui Sin Far herself (1995, 102).
However, even as the author yields to the conventions of ethnography in “The
Chinese Lily,” she also implies through her portrayal of Mermei that the white
majority’s expectation for ethnographic tales places a disabling limitation on her
creative and political expression. Mermei serves as an analogue for the Chinese woman
writer in North America who earns her living through “piecework” (embroidery,
stenography), but whose true passion is telling stories. Confined to her apartment,
Mermei watches vibrant scenes of Chinatown outside her tenement window,

20
Sui Sin Far’s generic hybridization represents one of the “flexible strategies” Viet Thanh Nguyen
argues Asian American “authors and characters [have chosen] to navigate political and ethical
situations” (2002, 4).

76
interpreting and inventing stories from these scenes to share with Lin John each
evening: “Mermei could embroider all day in contented silence if she knew that in the
evening someone would come to whom she could communicate all the thoughts that
filled a small black head that knew nothing of life save what it saw from an upstairs
window” (1995, 102). By representing the writer through the figure of a disabled
woman, Sui Sin Far validates the often‐unappreciated perspective of a disabled “shut‐
in.” However, Mermei’s confinement to this limited space may represent Sui Sin Far’s
confinement to the conventions of ethnography: Just as Mermei’s view of the world is
limited to what she can see from her upstairs window, so too Sui Sin Far’s writerly
imagination is hemmed in by the expectations of her publishers and readers; her
stories, like Mermei’s, return repeatedly to the same scenes of Chinatown life. Further,
the proliferation of anti‐Chinese discourses in North American culture compels the
author to the never‐ending work of rebuttal and resistance. Finally, Mermei’s
confinement and inability to move about the city may represent the larger confinement
of the Chinese to segregated spaces and occupations in North American cities.
21

Contingent Survival
Mermei’s survival at the conclusion of “The Chinese Lily” suggests an alternative vision
of futurity for Chinese North American culture—one that centers the disabled female

21
Alongside Sui Sin Far’s metaphor of invalidism, David Eng employs a different metaphor of
disfigurement—racial castration—to describe the perceived emasculation of Chinese and other Asian
American men through their confinement to occupations typically regarded as feminine, as well as
their confinement to “spaces institutionally barred from normative (hetero)sexual reproduction,
[and] nuclear family formations” (2001, 17).

77
storyteller’s role in the endurance and perpetuation of the community rather than the
heteronormative and procreative fantasy of an able‐bodied wife and mother birthing
the next generation. Further, read in conversation with Sui Sin Far’s autobiographical
writings, this story implies that a Chinese woman writer in North American must kill off
the societally expected selves of courtesan, wife, and mother in order to preserve her
literary career. She may even have to relinquish her erotic attachments, fashioning
herself as a “serious and sober‐minded spinster” (1995, 226).
Sui Sin Far’s journalistic, fictional, and autobiographical writings suggest that
she understood illness and disability as tragic consequences of racism, yet also as
potentially generative experiences and states of embodiment. In her reporting and
editorials for the Los Angeles Express, the Montreal Daily Star, and the Montreal Daily
Express, she defends the Chinese in North America against unfounded claims of ill health
and disability, while yet protesting the unhealthful and disabling conditions created by
U.S. and Canadian imperial policies. In the essay “Leaves” as well as her interview with
the Boston Globe, she describes her chronic health condition as having impeded her
literary achievements, not only because she lost writing time during her periodic bouts
of fever, but also because she could not count on steady employment in the face of
prejudice against people with visible illnesses and/or Chinese ancestry. However, in
“The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” she connects physical frailty to emotional sensitivity,
and in “Leaves,” she connects emotional sensitivity to writerly perceptiveness and
creativity. Further, in “Leaves” and in “The Chinese Lily,” Sui Sin Far implies that
disability may provide inspiration or justification for pursuing alternative paths from
heterosexual marriage and motherhood. Finally, in “The Chinese Lily,” Sui Sin Far
78
envisions a situation in which the disabled Chinese immigrant woman is exempt from
the pressures of marriage and prostitution, yet cared for by kin, making it possible for
her to devote her energy and time to creating stories. In the end, Sui Sin Far portrays
Mermei’s circumstances, though lonely, as more secure than her own.

79
CHAPTER 2
Disabled Bodies as Dissenting Bodies in Ann Petry’s The Street

Although this chapter moves forward chronologically from the exclusion era of
Sui Sin Far’s literature to the mid‐20th century, it also moves back in time to
acknowledge the interlinked histories of slavery and medical exploitation that continue
to shape African American experience, as a way of introducing the political stakes and
historical contexts of Ann Petry’s more contemporary representations of disability in
her novel The Street (1946). Set in New York City during the 1940s, The Street portrays
bodily disfigurement and disability stemming from labor exploitation, segregated and
unsafe housing conditions, and lack of access to adequate health care or nourishing
food. These forms of violence and neglect can all be linked to structural racism, sexism,
and imperialism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state‐sanctioned and/or
extra‐legal production and exploitation of group‐differentiated vulnerabilities to
premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies” (2007,
247); while Gilmore’s definition emphasizes death, it implies vulnerability to premature
disability as well, which I call imperial injury (see explanation in Introduction).
Further, by drawing attention to the structural and systemic forces that
contribute to imperial disablement, The Street highlights a central contradiction
between liberal state ideology and capitalist economy, which operate in the service of
U.S. imperialism. Liberal state ideology equates freedom with one’s ability to work for
wages; however, capitalist economy relies on a steady supply of cheap and expendable
racialized and gendered bodies that can be exploited to the point of disablement. Petry’s
80
novel explores what happens after that point, dramatizing the challenges and triumphs
experienced by several characters who experience imperial disablement. Drawing on
Roderick Ferguson’s argument that “sites of contradiction” between liberal state
ideology and capitalist economy contribute to the emergence of non‐normative gender
and sexual subjectivities and social formations, I argue that Petry’s novel posits
disability as a precursor to nonheteronormative social formations. While Ferguson
contends that her contemporary Richard Wright pathologized such formations in Native
Son (1940), Petry does not seem to do the same, but instead endows her disabled
characters with what Ferguson would call “oppositional agency” (Ferguson 2004, 44).
Petry’s novel shares with Sui Sin Far’s writings a dualistic representation of
disability as a tragic consequence of racism and as a transformative experience that
enables some characters to escape the destinies prescribed for them by the larger
society. Thus, the novel offers a more ambivalent theorization of disability than that
offered by leading disability scholars, who theorize disability as a “transformation that
requires accommodation” and as a “socially mediated difference that lends group
identity and phenomenological perspective” (Garland‐Thomson 1995, 602; Snyder and
Mitchell 2006, 10). These definitions of disability, though offering important
interventions into dominant cultural discourses that characterize disability in terms of
abnormality and inferiority, contribute to disability studies’ privileging of white
people’s experiences and perspectives on disability.
22
Snyder and Mitchell’s definition
implies that disability is the primary or sole experience of “socially mediated difference”

22
Critiquing the “failure” of disability studies “to engage issues of race and ethnicity in a substantive
capacity,” Bell contends that the field should be referred to as “White Disability Studies,” since “it is
disingenuous to keep up the pretense that the field is an inclusive one when it is not” (2006, 275)
81
for those in the “group”—an assumption that marginalizes those whose lives are shaped
by multiple, intersecting forms of difference including race, class, gender, sexuality, and
immigration status (Crenshaw 1994; Laura Fugikawa, pers. comm.). The Street
contributes to a more inclusive understanding of disability by offering a both/and
framework that represents the experience of becoming disabled in terms of tragedy and
transformation. It also redefines transformation to include, as Ferguson does, the
development of non‐heteronormative social formations. This framework opens space
for a recognition of the grief and rage individuals might experience in response to a
sudden loss of ability or appearance brought about by racism, and of the need to end
racist and capitalist violence leading to further imperial disablement. In the process the
novel critiques the processes of disablement that lead to an either/or framework, and
thus makes possible a different kind of disability subjectivity, which incorporates race
and imperialism, as well as gender and sexual nonconformity.

Slavery and Its Aftermath: Onerous Embodiment
In his theoretical meditation on violence in The Street, Lindon Barrett argues that
nonwhite peoples are racialized as being in a state of “timelessness in space,” which
differs from the privileged state of “spacelessness in time” enjoyed by whites. This
“spacelessness in time,” Barrett explains, links “those who bear white skin” with
connotations of “significance, animation, the divine,” and “those who do not” with
“bestiality, culpability, obdurate materiality” (1998, 111). This racial hierarchy justified
the Conquest of the Americas and the enslavement and forced displacement of Africans
82
and their descendants to the New World, where they were then exploited as a colonized
population.
The system of New World slavery linked the economic value of slaves to their
health and able‐bodiedness and granted masters sovereignty over the medical
treatment of slaves. Zeta Summers explains that the “importance of healthy, able slaves
to the plantation system was so great that the frequent purchase of new bodies”—or
the forced reproduction of new slaves through sexual violence—“was necessary,
especially in light of the abusive treatment and inadequate nutrition” (Summers 2002).
Because of concerns that disabled former slaves, no longer valued by their owners,
would be “freed” and thus become a public burden, Southern state governments began
to limit manumission in the 1830s; thus, as Wahl explains, legislators restricted the
possibility of manumission “to slaves of a certain age who were capable of earning a
living” (Wahl 2008). These restrictions to manumission suggest that freedom depended
on one’s able‐bodiedness and gender, a requirement that extended into the Civil War
and Reconstruction periods. Jim Downs reports that, during the Civil War, slaves
seeking to join Union forces were accepted only if they were recognized as men and
deemed “able‐bodied” enough to “perform arduous labor” on behalf of the military
(2008, 3). “From digging ditches to caring for the sick to laundering uniforms and
cooking meals,” Downs explains, freed slaves gained their ‘freedom’ through their
employment” (2008, 3). Although the standards for determining “able‐bodiedness”
were never formally specified, Downs explains that those slaves accepted into Union
service were recognized in men who “ranged in ages from 14–60, and, were, from the
observations of the medical official, without any discernible or obvious physical
83
handicaps” (2008, 3). Following Emancipation and the war’s end, many disabled former
slaves “were forced to remain under the thumb of former slaveholders” because they
did not have the physical capacity to leave and earn a living elsewhere. Others ended up
incarcerated in federal asylums (Downs 2008, 7). Downs gives the example of a
freedwoman, Maria Holmes, who in April 1866 petitioned the federal government to
help reunite her with her disabled mother. Holmes lived with her husband in Richmond,
Virginia; her elderly mother, “very feeble in health,” was living in a “Freedman’s
Hospital” in New Orleans. Holmes requested that federal authorities transport her
mother to Virginia, explaining that “her mother ‘shall never be of any expense to the
government if we can only get her here as my husband and myself anxiously desire to
provide her comfort’” (Downs 2008, 3). Experiences such as these, Downs argues,
compel “us to reconsider our understanding of the process of emancipation, and the
ways in which the meaning of freedom” hinged on one’s gender, ability to work, and
ability to travel (2008, 2).
Downs’s argument highlights the possibility that the Great Migration, which
some have called the Second Emancipation (Singh 2004, 68), was primarily undertaken
by the young and able‐bodied; though an equal number of men and women migrated,
gender determined what fates awaited the travelers at the end of the line. Recruited to
work in capitalist industries, including wartime manufacturing, more than two million
African Americans left the “collapsing agrarian economy” of the South between the
years 1910 and 1940, resettling in northern and western cities across the United States
(Ferguson 2004, 89; Singh 2004, 68). Statistical evidence indicates that the majority of
migrants were between the ages of 15 and 34; further, as Carole Marks points out, the
84
significant cost of transportation likely limited the opportunity of migration “to those
who had spent some time in the wage economy” (1991, 46, 45)—a limitation that likely
excluded many African Americans with disabilities. However, the working and living
conditions that awaited the young, mostly able‐bodied migrants to the North and West
were not necessarily conducive to continued health and ability. While the Great
Migration, “the largest internal migration in U.S. history” (Singh 2004, 68), made it
possible for some African Americans to “leverage improved conditions” in both the
North and South (Harrison viii), and “created the possibility for nationalizing black
struggles for equality” (Singh 2004, 68), the promises made by Northerners of lucrative
work and less virulent racism were not fulfilled (Marks 1991, 47). Newly arriving
African Americans, regardless of their literacy and/or experience in skilled trades, were
typically offered the lowest skilled, least paying, and most strenuous jobs—such as
janitorial work for men, domestic service and prostitution for women (Ferguson 2004,
89, 94; Marks 1991, 47). Further, as Marks explains, migrants “suffered not only from
bad working conditions but poor health and overcrowding,” and experienced
“staggering . . . rates of infant mortality” (1991, 47).
Set in New York City during the final wave of the Great Migration, The Street
portrays the dashed hopes and dreams of those who migrated from the South only to
find themselves battling Northern variations of racism and a different yet still
deplorable set of labor options. Petry’s novel—written in the literary tradition of
naturalism, which emphasizes the influence of a person’s environment on his or her
fate—illustrates how the intersecting forces of racism, sexism, and capitalism steadily
tighten their grip on various characters, some of them migrants, others New Yorkers by
85
birth who share the altered environment of a post‐Migration North. Even the main
character Lutie, who moves only a few miles from Jamaica, Queens, to Harlem, imagines
she will be able to make a fresh start, but finds one option after another—one basis for
hope after another—stolen, as she strives first to get ahead economically and then
simply to break even as a single Black mother in the 1940s. At every turn, Lutie is
threatened with financial ruin or sexual exploitation, demonstrating that Emancipation,
industrialization, and migration to the North have done little to end the exploitative
practices of slavery.
23
In fact, these phenomena have led to the creation of new
economies and spaces in which a new set of “masters” benefit from the traffic in Black
bodies, particular Black women’s bodies.

The Landscape of Harlem: Disfigurement and Disability
Petry portrays bodily disfigurement and disability as endemic to Harlem, as reflected in
Lutie’s descriptions of the “obviously hurt” feet of the Black women returning home
from long days “working in the white folks’ kitchens” (1946, 65), as well as the “scarred
faces” of the bouncers she sees at the Casino (1946, 220). Meanwhile, Lutie’s neighbor
Mrs. Hedges bears the scars of a tenement fire; another neighbor, Min, has lost her teeth
and developed painful bunions through her work as a domestic servant. The musician
Boots has a scar running along his cheek from a fight with a former lover, as well as a
hidden injury to one of his ears performed at his behest so that he can avoid the draft.

23
One could argue that, with The Street, Petry offers a post‐Emancipation narrative of natal
alienation, portraying Lutie’s desperate decision after she murders Boots to abandon her son Bub.
Lutie’s only chance to evade imprisonment, she believes, is to take the first train out of New York; the
novel ends with Bub incarcerated in juvenile detention and Lutie on the run. The novel thus portrays
how the imprisonment of young Black men has continued the legacy of natal alienation from slavery.
86
Each of the main characters offers different insights regarding disability, which
Petry reveals as the novel moves from one perspective to another, weaving them
together into a complex theorization of the relationship between race and disability in
American society. Lutie, who moves back and forth between spaces of immense white
privilege (suburban Connecticut) and racialized deprivation (Harlem), and who gathers
and interprets the visual evidence around her of health or illness, concludes that racism
is to blame for the endangerment of health she witnesses in Harlem. Thus, she marvels
at the improbable good health of those neighbors who aren’t yet ill or disabled, given
that they must make do with the “leavings, the sweepings, the impossible unsalable
merchandise, the dregs and dross that were reserved especially for Harlem” (1946,
153). She predicts that “it couldn’t go on like that. Even the strongest heritage would
one day run out” (1946, 154). She fears that Bub, so “healthy, sturdy, strong” now, will
eventually fall ill from his impoverished surroundings (1946, 154).
Despite her fears for her son’s physical health, Lutie wishes (rather sarcastically)
to become disabled herself, imagining that being born without one’s senses would
shield her from an agonizing awareness of the world’s “great contrasts.” These
hierarchical divisions, she realizes, hold “people like herself” at arm’s length from “the
richest part,” and thus,
it would be better to have been born blind so you couldn’t see it, born deaf so
you couldn’t hear it, born with no sense of touch so you couldn’t feel it. Better
still, born with no brain so that you would be completely unaware of anything,
so that you would never know there were places that were filled with sunlight
and good food . . . where children were safe. (1946, 155)
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In her critique of the imperialist and racist accumulation of wealth by the few at the
expense of the many, Lutie adds one disability after another to her “wish list,” finally
contemplating a brainless existence that would surely spell instant death. In doing so,
she implies that sensory disability would be the preferable injury over racial injury, if
she could choose.
While Lutie distinguishes racial injury from disability, seeing the latter as a
material result of the former, and as possibly being a preferable state of existence, the
musician Boots theorizes that racism metaphorically disables its subjects, which in turn
allows exploitation to continue unchallenged. He argues that the white‐dominated
society seeks to keep the Black man in a permanent (and metaphorical) state of
disability, “‘crawling . . . on [his] belly with a broom and a shovel in each hand’” (1946,
260–261). Later, Boots observes wryly that Mr. Junto’s customers are “dumb, blind, deaf
to the white businessman’s existence,” despite his presence at the bar every evening
(1946, 275). “If they wanted to sleep, . . . if they wanted to drink, . . . if they wanted to
dance, they paid him, and never even knew it,” Boots reflects, offering a canny
assessment of the unseen, manipulative power of the white entrepreneur over his
Harlem empire (1946, 275). Boots pities his neighbors who, without realizing it, hand
over every cent they earn to the white man, suggesting that racism itself imposes a kind
of ideological blindness or oblivion.
Though offering incisive critiques of American racism and imperialism, Boots and
Lutie ungenerously equate the condition of having multiple sensory impairments with
perceptual and ideological obliviousness. Lutie’s neighbor Min, however, complicates
their insights, reflecting that her racist employers already treat her as if she were
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disabled, interpreting her racial and gender status as signs of disability. This collapsing
of race with disability only makes her more vulnerable to abuse:
[s]ome of her madams had been openly contemptuous women who laughed at
her to her face even as they piled on more work; acting as though she were a
deaf, dumb, blind thing completely devoid of understanding, but able to work,
work, work. (1946, 127)
Min, who endures hours of domestic drudgery each day, laments her white employers’
disregard for her humanity—their pretense that she cannot perceive the cruel things
they say, the sound and sight of their derisive laughter, their excessive demands. Min
conveys (without endorsing) the common assumption that a “deaf, dumb, blind” person
is less than human, a “thing completely devoid of understanding” whose feelings and
body couldn’t possibly be affected by such abuse. While Lutie imagines that being
severely disabled would protect her from the knowledge of her subjugation, Min
theorizes that being deaf, mute, and blind might actually render a person more
vulnerable to exploitation, a theory that clings more closely to the historical record of
African American disability experience.
Petry extends her critique of American racism and sexism from the spheres of
housing and labor to the sphere of medicine, revealing a powerful connection between
the medical gaze and racial and gendered subjection. As Ann Folwell Stanford argues,
“medical treatment all too often becomes the means of reproducing and/or maintaining
systems of oppression” (2003, 3). This observation is powerfully illustrated in the novel
when Min ruminates about the doctors who examine her, noting that
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their minds weren’t really on her as a person. They were looking at her feet, but
not as though they belonged to her and were therefore different, individual,
because they were hers. All they saw were a pair of feet with swollen, painful
bunions on them—nigger feet. The words were in the expressions on their faces.
(1946, 136)
Seeking care and comfort, Min instead finds herself exposed to the Othering gaze of the
doctors who disregard her humanity and individuality and focus only on her abused
and injured feet. They do not recognize her as an African American woman who has
become disabled through a lifetime of grueling domestic labor; instead, they regard the
“swollen, painful bunions” on her feet as signs of her racial identity: to be an n——‐ is to
be disabled.
This scene reveals how much the medical gaze shares with the Othering gaze
facilitated by the freak show in 19th‐ and early 20th‐century American popular culture.
Min’s reflections painfully conjure the ghost of Joice Heth, an elderly former slave—
blind, toothless, and partially paralyzed—whom P. T. Barnum showcased in the 1860s
under the pretense that she was the 161‐year‐old former nursemaid of President
George Washington (Garland‐Thomson 1997, 59–60). While Heth’s numerous
disabilities testified to the ravages of slavery, Barnum emphasized her appearance as
evidence of her exceptional (and thus abnormal) longevity. This exhibition reinforced
the notion that Blackness was an inferior and more primitive form of human
development, which in turn provided a rationale for the continued marginalization of
African Americans following the formal end of slavery. Such views, The Street
demonstrates, have become part of the “common sense” (Gramsci 1992) of American
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racism, carrying over to Bub’s white school teacher, Miss Rinner, who “shudder[s] at the
sight” of the Black residents she encounters on the streets of Harlem, “thinking they
were probably diseased” (1946, 332). However, through the pun on “sight,” Petry also
implies that Miss Rinner shudders in recognition that those she passes each day can see
her and recognize the objectifying racism in her gaze. They are not blind, in other
words, to her presence or privilege.

Bodies in Dissent: Agency and Resistance
Indeed, risking punishment or death, African Americans have resisted white people’s
assertion of control over their bodies—in particular, their health, abilities, or lack
thereof. Slaves practiced “their own forms of healing” and sometimes sought out healers
without the knowledge or consent of their masters—healers who were not beholden to
the slave‐owner’s interests or to the methods of Western medical science (Schwartz
2006, 34; Mutschler 2012, 145–146). Schwartz explains that, “Whereas physicians
preferred bold treatments intended to induce drastic change in physical functioning,
enslaved healers paid attention to a broader range of symptoms and worked to create
harmony between the patient’s physical condition and the human environment” (2006,
34). Further, by treating their own ailments or seeking out healers privately, slaves
could potentially conceal an illness that might lead to their being sold.
Some slaves may also have feigned affliction to avoid work or sale (Mutschler
2012, 141, 152). Thus, Mutschler describes “the slave’s illness as a kind of disappearing
act” (2012, 141), a temporary state of escape, what Daphne Brooks might call a “fugitive
body” or a “body in dissent” (2006, 10, title). “Illness,” Mutschler powerfully argues,
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“pointed to the indeterminacy of the slave’s body, which could be captured and chained,
but never arrested in [his or her] continual movements into and out of health” (2012,
143). In William and Ellen Crafts’ slave narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
(1999 [1860]), the protagonists escape from slavery in Georgia using disability as a
disguise. As William Craft explains, after years of contemplating various escape plans, “it
occurred to me that, as my wife was nearly white, I might get her to disguise herself as
an invalid gentleman, and assume to be my master, while I could attend as his slave”
(1999 [1860], 29). Thus, the husband and wife head northward by train, Ellen Craft
assuming the role of a white master and “feign[ing]” physical disability as well as
deafness to avoid interactions with white travelers that might blow the pair’s cover
(1999 [1860], 44).
24

Petry’s novel extends this tradition in The Street when the character Boots
simulates disablement to evade the World War II military draft. When his draft card
arrives in the mail, he demands that Junto—his white boss at the Casino—”’[f]ix this
thing’”; Junto then dispatches Boots “to a doctor who perform[s] a slight, delicate,
dangerous operation on his ear” (1946, 261). Boots recovers from the operation with
his hearing still intact, but appears just disabled enough to fool the draft medical board.
Thus, through this pre‐emptive and simulated self‐disablement, Boots renders his body
“in dissent” of the American government’s sovereignty. Further, this disability “fix”

24
Ellen Samuels, the only critic thus far to examine “the repeated and essential function of disability”
in the Crafts’ narrative (2006, 16), lists several other “fugitive slaves who faked disabilities during
their escapes,” including “James W. C. Pennington, who pretended to have smallpox, and Lewis
Clarke, who employed disguises very similar to those of Ellen Craft, including green spectacles and
handkerchiefs tied around his forehead and chin”; Samuels further notes “this strategy is deeply
gendered . . . : slave women employed feigned illness more frequently and more successfully than did
men” (2006, 42‐43 n3).

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makes it possible for Boots to preserve his musical career and refuse the “obdurate
materiality” white society has assigned to him (Barrett 1998, 111), similar to the way
some slaves may have feigned illness to avoid forced labor.
Petry portrays parallel episodes of resistance by the characters Min and Mrs.
Hedges. When Western medicine fails to ameliorate her injuries, Min turns to a root
doctor, The Prophet, who, recalling Schwartz’s phrase, helps her “create harmony
between [her] physical condition and the human environment” (2006, 34). Instead of
trying to cure her bunions or replace her teeth, The Prophet provides her with spiritual
aids allowing her to gain greater control over and autonomy in her abusive relationship
with the superintendent Jones, ultimately enabling her to save up enough money to
leave him and find (hopefully) a better situation for herself.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Hedges—the lone survivor of a tenement fire that leaves every
inch of her body bald and scarred—rejects the promise of restoration offered by the
new medical technology of plastic surgery, and also develops a kind of second sight or
heightened ability to understand the workings of American imperialism and racism. In
the hospital, she stares back “with hard, baleful eyes” at the “nurses and doctors” who
cannot “conceal the expressions” of “dismay” and “sheer horror” when they expose her
“burnt, bruised body” (1946, 246–247). Finding the hospital environment horribly
oppressive, she refuses to prolong her stay for plastic surgery, even when her business
partner Junto offers to pay for it. “‘No,’” she responds firmly. “I couldn’t stay in the
hospital long enough for ‘em to do nothing like that.’” She reflects that she “would die if
she did. As it was, it had been hard enough, and to prolong it was something that would
be unendurable” (1946, 246). Mrs. Hedges’s assertion of agency over what methods of
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medical care she will receive, along with her distaste for the hospital environment, are
shared by Audre Lorde in her account of hospitalization for breast cancer. Lorde
expresses her loathing for the institution where she spends weeks undergoing testing,
surgery, and recovery, subjected to the condescension of medical experts and aides who
prescribe a normalizing agenda for healing: “It was an erotically blank environment
within whose undifferentiated and undemanding and infantilizing walls I could
continue to be emotionally vacant,” she explains (1980, 46). She also emphasizes the
importance of being able to choose whether or not to have a mastectomy after learning
the results of her biopsy and considering all the alternatives: ”what was most important
was not what I chose to do so much as that I was conscious of being able to choose, and
having chosen, was empowered from having made a decision” (1980, 33). This
opportunity has been denied to thousands of women of color in the United States who
have been subjected to mastectomies, hysterectomies, and other surgeries without their
fully informed consent.
In refusing the option of plastic surgery, and later, Junto’s offer of a wig, Mrs.
Hedges also refuses to hide the evidence of her injury, which serves as evidence of the
threat racism poses to the health and ability of African Americans. Lorde encourages
post‐mastectomy women to consider going without a prosthetic breast, arguing that
prosthetics designed to simulate a normative appearance benefit others more than the
women wearing them (1980, 57–58). When a volunteer arrives at Lorde’s hospital
room with an “upbeat message” about prosthetic breasts, she insists to Lorde, “You’ll
never know the difference” (1980, 42). Lorde muses, “she lost me right there, because I
knew sure as hell I’d know the difference” (1980, 42). The volunteer’s claim echoes
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Junto’s assurance to Mrs. Hedges in the hospital: “‘You can wear a wig. Nobody’ll ever
know the difference’” (1946, 245), an assertion Mrs. Hedges does not dignify with a
response.
Lorde argues that the medical establishment’s post‐mastectomy insistence on
women wearing prosthetics encourages a melancholic relationship to their losses. She
contends that the “emphasis upon physical pretense” during the immediate post‐
mastectomy phase “encourages women to dwell in the past rather than a future” (1980,
57). Further, she adds, this approach “encourages a woman to focus her energies upon
the mastectomy as cosmetic occurrence, to the exclusion of other factors” including the
possibility of “her own death” (1980, 57). Lorde emphasizes the importance of
mourning in the wake of a radical mastectomy—mourning the lost breast, as well as the
loss of something more abstract—the security of one’s health and longevity. Yet, breast
cancer survivors are pressured to simulate their pre‐operative appearance, to pretend
as if nothing about their bodies has changed—in a sense, to cling melancholically to the
normative female body that was lost during the mastectomy.

Melancholia As Resistance to Imperial Disablement
While Lorde advocates mourning over melancholia in response to disability—a stance
Mrs. Hedges seems to assume in her refusal of plastic surgery and the “prosthetic” of a
wig, Petry includes another example of disability that calls forth a melancholic response.
This melancholia, however, is portrayed as a form of resistance rather than capitulation
to American racism. In this way, the novel challenges Sigmund Freud’s characterization
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of melancholia as a pathological response to loss (1957),
25
a characterization implicitly
shared by white disability studies when the loss in question concerns loss of function,
ability, or appearance.
The character Boots portrays certain instances of disability as tragic
consequences of American racism and imperialism. When he explains to Junto why he
wants to avoid the military draft, he offers as evidence a story of imperialist
disablement, recounting how a member of his band, a young Black man like himself, lost
his ability to play the fiddle because of the particular kind of labor assigned to him
during the war. “‘That boy,’” Boots insists,
‘can make a fiddle talk. Make it say uncle. Make it laugh. Make it cry. So they
figured they’d ruin his hands loading ships. He tried to play when he come by the
other night. . . . Jesus! He broke down and cried like a baby’ (1946, 160).
Boots theorizes that the disablement of this young musician is not a mere accidental
casualty of wartime service, but instead a calculated effort by the white government to
destroy his most cherished ability. This talent offered him dignity and distinction and
an opportunity to make a living some other way than performing manual labor for
white people. The man who once could command the fiddle to “say uncle”—surrender
defeat—is in turn defeated, Boots says, by the labor he is commanded to perform.
Losing his ability to make the fiddle sing, the disabled musician is returned to the
state Barrett describes as “onerously em‐bodied” as opposed to “in‐voiced” (1998, 114).

25
In his Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud writes that mourning is “the reaction to the loss
of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s
country, liberty, an ideal.” Melancholia, however, is the predisposition to “an exclusive devotion to
mourning which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests” (1957, 252).

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Barrett argues that the singing voice (which perhaps encompasses the singing
instrument) “approximates more closely than speech the unfixed fluency of
spacelessness in time,” the privileged state inhabited by whites (1998, 114); thus,
Barrett contends, the singing voice “rehearses an alternative rendition of space and
time than that imposed upon the street, an original rendition admitting the future”
(1998, 114). The destruction of this musician’s nimble fingering silences the “singing
voice” of the fiddle, transfers the instrument’s “cry” to the musician himself, who
mourns the apparent end of his musical future.
Boots’s view of the musician’s disablement as a kind of punishment runs counter
to the view put forward by many disability studies scholars. As Garland‐Thomson
explains in her definition:
The functional element of disability revolves around either a change or difference
in the way one accomplishes life activities. Because this change can sometimes be
sudden or the result of trauma, it often appears to be a loss of capacity rather than
a transformation that requires accommodation (1995, 602).
Garland‐Thomson’s view of disability as “a transformation that requires
accommodation” usefully challenges the stigmatizing assumption that people with
disabilities are pitiful creatures, exotic freaks, or wondrous anomalies (Garland‐
Thomson 2002, 56). However, in this chapter and throughout the dissertation I seek to
acknowledge the grief and outrage that might arise within or on behalf of a person who
becomes disabled as a result of a socially produced and/or state‐sanctioned “trauma”—
including racially motivated violence, imperialist warfare, or environmental
devastation. “I would lie if I did not speak of loss,” Lorde proclaims (1980, 16). Further,
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people who become disabled as a result of trauma may also be the ones least likely to
have access to the accommodations that would make it possible to experience disability
as a “transformation.”
The Street offers a both/and framework that represents the experience of
becoming disabled in terms of loss and transformation, opening up space for a
recognition of the mourning process that attends some experiences of disablement.
Even further, Boot’s story in The Street regarding the disabled musician portrays both
mourning and melancholia as twin responses to imperial disablement. In Boots’s telling,
the musician enters a state of mourning—weeping on stage when he discovers he can
no longer play. Boots, however, relates to the disabled musician’s loss melancholically.
In his narration of this story of imperial disablement, Boots deploys a complex sense of
temporality that affirms the musician’s pre‐disabled self and the alternative future his
musical ability opened up to him. Barrett draws attention to the “exceedingly intricate”
sequencing of events in The Street, arguing that Petry’s use of “flashbacks and
unexpected changes in narrative perspective” disrupts the “conventional chronology—
in which the present moment seeks and acquires its fortune or future” (1998, 103).
While Barrett emphasizes that Petry’s unusual narrative techniques for representing
time reinforce the ways in which, for inhabitants of “the street,” the “currency of the
future” is “postpone[d]” (1998, 103), in this particular scene, Boots’s a‐chronological
narration of time preserves a moment in the past when the musician’s future still held
“currency.” The two temporal states Boots invokes are hinged by his use of the present‐
tense “come” in the sentence “‘He tried to play when he come by the other night’” (Petry
1946, 160). Boots narrates the decisions of the musician’s white military superiors, as
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well as the labor that disables his hands, in past tense; so too, the musician’s failed
attempt to play, his breaking down in tears. Yet, Boots describes the man’s musical
talent in the present tense—”That boy can make a fiddle talk”—suggesting that, in
Boots’s eyes, this man will always remain an able musician, and will therefore, in
Barrett’s terms, possess the “timelessness in space” and “in‐voiced” status that makes
possible a hopeful relationship to the future. Boots, in a sense, refuses to mourn this
musician’s loss—a loss he sees as representative of the larger disablement of African
Americans at the hands of whites—and therefore clings melancholically to the pre‐
disabled version of this man’s life.
Thus, a melancholic attachment to the abilities, senses, limbs, or appearance one
has lost through an act of imperial disablement can be viewed as a form of resistance to
state‐sanctioned and socially produced violence. This form of resistance challenges the
either/or framework promoted by white disability studies, in which one must “work
through” one’s feelings of loss (proper mourning) in order to move forward to a
healthier and more affirming stance of “transformation.” Petry’s novel, anticipating
recent critical work on racial melancholia (e.g., Cheng 2001; Eng and Kazanjian, eds.
2003; James 2011), suggests an appreciation for melancholia as “a form of recalcitrant
survival,” particularly in relation to disablement as a consequence of internal
colonization.

Disability As Inspiration for Nonheteronormative Social Formations
Petry’s novel, however, offers a different reading on melancholia when the “object” at
stake is normative heterosexuality. Ferguson argues that “African American racial and
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communal formations became sites of contradiction and negation that opened up
alternative subject and social formations around race, class, gender, and sexuality”
(2004, 39). He analyzes the contradictory forces of liberal state ideology and capitalist
economy that “conspired” during the New Deal era to undermine heteropatriarchal
family formations among African Americans while simultaneously pathologizing African
American culture for not conforming to the heteropatriarchal ideal (2004, 38). He
points to the influence of economic policies including the Social Security Amendment of
1939, which “excluded personal servants, domestics, and casual and agricultural
workers from coverage” (2004, 38) and therefore, in effect, excluded men of color from
this financial safety net; thus, the Amendment refused “African American men the very
economic protections that were said to restore heteropatriarchal family structures”
(2004, 38).
The resulting prevalence of female‐headed households, prostitution, “black and
tan” nightclubs, and “sexual nonconformity” inspired concern among white sociologists
and politicians, as well as some Black nationalist artists and activists, including Petry’s
contemporary Richard Wright (Ferguson 2004, 38, 44). In The Street, Petry portrays
several Black female characters whose lives are defined—strained, challenged, nearly
destroyed, but also reinvented—by the very contradictions Ferguson traces. By charting
the trajectories of several characters faced with similar constraints, the novel
illuminates the limitations and possibilities engendered by the contradictions between
liberal state ideology and capitalist economy. However, Petry seems to resist the
pathologizing judgment Ferguson detects in Wright’s Native Son (1940); further, she
attributes “oppositional agency” (Ferguson 2004, 44) to the characters who invent
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these “alternative subject and social formations” (Ferguson 2004, 39). Clare Virginia
Eby analyzes the strategic importance of the multiple points of view utilized within The
Street, arguing that “Petry adopts a politics of sympathy that encourages identification
(of our common humanity) while insisting upon individual variability” (2008, 36).
Further, Eby argues, “[b]y emphasizing the unique perspectives of secondary
characters, The Street rejects the notion that oppressed people have uniform
experiences” (2008, 36). Among the many variations depicted, the novel contrasts
Lutie’s futile aspirations to conform to a heteronormative standard of morality with
Mrs. Hedges’s and other Black female characters’ embrace or invention of “alternative
subject and social formations” that Ferguson argues are “opened up” by “sites of
contradiction” (2004, 39).
In the narrative sections devoted to Lutie’s perspective, the novel theorizes that
her marriage fails because her husband Jim cannot find work and, in turn, cannot bear
being left alone to nurse his wounded masculinity and care for their son while Lutie
cares for a wealthy white family in a Connecticut suburb hundreds of miles away.
“‘What did you expect?’” Jim asks when Lutie discovers he is having an affair. “‘Maybe
you can go on day after day with nothing to do but just cook meals for yourself and a
kid. . . . But I can’t,’” he declares (Petry 1946, 54). It is unclear from the novel whether
Lutie would enjoy being a housewife to her own family, but she never has an
opportunity to find out, the “heteropatriarchal household” to which she and Jim aspire
rendered impossible by the racist economy in which they live. Yet, the novel reveals,
Lutie often blames herself, internalizing the end of her marriage as a personal rather
than a societal failure. Following the separation, Lutie and her son Bub initially seek
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refuge with her extended family—her bootlegging father Pop and his various
girlfriends; however, once she earns her civil servant certification, she seeks out her
own apartment. The novel opens at this juncture, foregrounding Lutie’s efforts to
differentiate herself from the other jilted wives and single mothers in Harlem by
removing Bub from what she considers her family’s immoral influence. She defers
romantic intimacy because she cannot afford a divorce.
Kimberly Drake argues that, in contrast to Lutie’s futile striving toward
heteronormativity and an economic prosperity modeled by her former white
employers, Petry presents “minor characters” with “working‐class morals and
lifestyles” who “survive and even flourish . . . while the protagonists suffer” (1998, 67).
Drake argues that these “minor characters” share features with the “blues woman”—a
“cultural rebel” who, like the legendary performer Bessie Smith, is “openly defiant of
bourgeois conventions” and embraces “any number of personas”—including “hoodoo
queens, matriarchs, wild women, [and] lesbians” in her performance and lifestyle
(Barlow qtd. in Drake 67). While Drake focuses on the character Min as a “blues
woman,” other characters in The Street belong in this pantheon—including Mrs. Hedges
and Mary, who flout bourgeois standards of respectability and become domestic
companions after Mrs. Hedges is burned in the tenement fire.
During her hospitalization, Mrs. Hedges becomes convinced that no man will ever
love her, and develops a “determination never to expose herself to the prying, curious
eyes of the world” (Petry 1946, 246, 247). Thus, she decides that she needs “to have
someone living with her to do her shopping, to run errands for her” (1946, 247). She
invites Mary, a “thin, dispirited young” woman (1946, 247), to share her apartment
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rent‐free in exchange for performing various domestic responsibilities. Mary, recently
abandoned by her husband and fired from her job, agrees. And so, the narrative
continues:
Mary came to live with her and she gradually lost her dejected look. She laughed
and talked and cleaned the apartment and cooked. Mrs. Hedges began to take a
kind of pride in the way Mary blossomed out. (Petry 1946, 248)
Mrs. Hedges has the financial means to offer this situation to Mary because of her
alliance with the white businessman Junto, who offers Mrs. Hedges a rent‐free
apartment as consolation for her disfigurement. With Junto’s resources at her disposal,
Mrs. Hedges in turn offers care and support to Mary, who “blossom[s] out,” a testament
to the vitality of their homosocial socioeconomic arrangement. This arrangement
resembles the provider‐homemaker roles of a heteronormative marriage more than a
roommate situation, except for the fact that the provider, Mrs. Hedges, never leaves the
house.
This social formation—overlooked by many critics because it appears so briefly in
the text—portrays two Black women appropriating the resources of a wealthy white
entrepreneur to benefit their own household and well being. This alternative social
formation represents, at least temporarily, a site of resistance to the exploitation of
Black women that is de rigueur under American imperialism. Drake argues (with a
different set of “minor characters” in mind), that “at the margins of domesticity, in the
space between the home and the street,” Petry’s “minor characters challenge the
dichotomies which define society, separating the classes and genders: public vs. private,
mobility vs. stasis, single vs. married, Jezebel vs. housewife” (1998, 70). While Mary
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finds herself in a nonheteronormative domestic arrangement because her marriage
fails, Mrs. Hedges arrives at this partnership because of her disability.
Thus, Petry’s novel foregrounds an additional “site of contradiction” Ferguson
does not discuss at the intersection of liberal state ideology and capitalist economy.
Disability marks this site of contradiction. While liberal state ideology equates freedom
with one’s ability to work for wages (as evidenced by the post‐Emancipation crisis for
disabled former slaves), capitalist economy depends on the cheap and expendable
bodies of racialized and gendered workers, who can be exploited to the point of
disablement. Because disability in turn renders racialized peoples even more vulnerable
to abuse, exploitation, and poverty, this site of contradiction contributes to the
emergence of non‐normative gender and sexual social formations, as evidenced by Mrs.
Hedges’s choice to form a female domestic partnership as a result of her lack of
prospects for legal employment and heterosexual marriage. Meanwhile, the character
Min seeks out an extra‐marital relationship, since she cannot obtain a divorce from her
husband, yet still desires a romantic and economic partner who will share the rent and
provide companionship—an exchange that will allow her to save money for new teeth,
and also provide a “safety net” (Drake 1998, 85) in the event that her disability prevents
her from working.

“There’s Some Things That Are Personal”: Reconsidering the Possibility of Desire
While it is unclear whether Mrs. Hedges and Mary share an intimate relationship, I draw
attention to this possibility because other critics have tended to read Mrs. Hedges’s
disfigurement as the conclusion of her erotic life and desires. Garland‐Thomson, for
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example, mourns the “apparent asexuality” of Mrs. Hedges’s character, seeing this
representation as symptomatic of a larger trend in disability representations. Drake,
likewise, does not mention Mrs. Hedges in her assessment of minor female characters in
Petry’s novels who defy bourgeois standards of gender and sexual respectability
(1998). Garland‐Thomson’s assessment (and perhaps Drake’s) is seemingly inspired by
Mrs. Hedges’s “exclusion from femininity and other normative positions” (1995, 613
n7), a reading that overlooks the possible erotic counter‐readings of Mrs. Hedges’s
“female masculinity” (Halberstam 1998) and her domestic companionship with Mary.
Indeed, though Mrs. Hedges’s desires are obscured by a phrase she utters to Junto—
“There’s some things that are personal”—the novel leaves open the possibility that Mrs.
Hedges develops or discovers an erotic appreciation for other women, including Mary,
after the fire. The close reading that follows is purposefully provisional, intended not to
impose a reading of queer and/or perverse sexualities on a text that is, in the end,
ambiguous, but instead to suggest that assigning “asexuality” to Mrs. Hedges may be a
premature and an arbitrary interpretation. Further, this reading suggests that Mrs.
Hedges’s erotic attention to other Black women’s “flawless” hair and skin perhaps stems
from a melancholic fixation on the attributes she lost in the fire, possibly linking her
experience of disability with her choices to form a domestic partnership with Mary and
later to become a madam.
Before the fire, Mrs. Hedges describes having “hoped that she would find a man
who would fall in love with her” when she first migrated north from Georgia to New
York (Petry 1946, 242). During the fire, as she flees the flames, she keeps “thinking that
all she needed to do was to get badly burned, and never as long as she lived would any
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man look at her and want her” (1946, 244). While this phrase evokes her dismay at
losing the possibility of a man’s desire, its very construction seems to offer a
prescriptive formula for escaping heterosexuality altogether: If you do not want a man
to desire you, all you have to do is “get badly burned” (1946, 244). Mrs. Hedges
undergoes a symbolic rebirth as she forces herself through “a narrow aperture not
really big enough for the bulk of her body” in order to escape the fire (1946, 244). This
process extinguishes Mrs. Hedges’s hopes of ever being desired or loved by a man. After
the fire, she realizes that no man will ever find her attractive—at least no man she
would want to be with, since she finds Junto’s “squat” and “gray” appearance distasteful
(1946, 245). Never, however, does Mrs. Hedges reminisce about having actually desired
any particular man; she simply seeks to attain a man’s love, even if she has to buy it.
According to Lorde’s framework, Mrs. Hedges seems to mourn her disfigurement
through her refusal of plastic surgery and the prosthetic wig; however, the novel
suggests that she also maintains a melancholic relationship to her lost feminine
appearance and the possibility of being loved by a man. This melancholia is reflected in
her assuming the title “Mrs.” despite not being married, as well as in her fixation on
other Black women’s hair and unscarred skin after the fire. Thus, her disfigurement
seemingly leads to her developing a melancholic “female masculinity” as well as an
erotic appreciation for feminine‐appearing Black women.
While Mrs. Hedges at first seems bitter about losing her feminine attributes in the
fire, she later claims her masculine appearance, rejecting Junto’s second offer of a wig:
He tossed it in her lap. The hair was black, long, silky. It was the kind of hair that
a man’s hands would instinctively want to touch. She pushed it away violently,
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thinking how the hard, black flesh of her face, the forward thrust of her jaw, the
scars on her neck, would look under that silken, curling hair.
‘Take it away. I don’t want it.’
‘But—’ He started to protest.
‘There’s some things that are personal’—she touched at the course red
bandanna with her hand and glared at him fiercely.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. . . . ‘But I understand why you don’t want it. I
understand better than you think.’ (Petry 1946, 253)
Refusing Junto’s gift (which she guesses may be a romantic gesture), Mrs. Hedges
rejects the idea of her own head being adorned with such hair, or of “a man’s hands”
touching her.
Whether Mrs. Hedges’s melancholic fixation involves attraction or appreciation
remains obscure—perhaps purposely so. As she insists to Junto (and by extension,
readers of the novel), “some things”—like one’s gender identity and desires?—“are
personal” (Petry 1946, 253). However, while it might seem that Mrs. Hedges develops
her erotic, appraising gaze of Black women as a result of becoming a madam, the novel’s
flashback narration actually reveals the reverse—that her erotic attention to Mary
precedes and perhaps influences her decision to become a madam. Of her first meeting
Mary, for example, Mrs. Hedges recalls that “the girl’s hair was thick and wiry and with a
little care it would look very nice” (1946, 147). Later, ruminating about an exchange
between them, Mrs. Hedges remembers how “Mary patted a stray hair in place, and her
eyes had followed the movement of Mary’s hand and stayed there on the high curve of
the pompadour, on the white rose that seemed to nest in the thickness of the hair”
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(1946, 254). Lutie makes a strong impression as well; after she leaves Mrs. Hedges’s
apartment, Mrs. Hedges can “still hear the soft, silken whisper of Lutie’s skirt, see the
shining hair piled high on her head and the flawless dark brown of her skin” (1946,
246). Just after this reflection on Lutie’s attractive features, Mrs. Hedges thinks “of her
own scarred body with distaste” (1946, 246)—a reflection that reinforces the
melancholic connection between her own disfigurement and her appreciation of other
women’s “flawless” features.

Utopian Possibilities Foreclosed
The novel forecloses the utopian dimension of Mrs. Hedges’s relationship with Mary
when Mrs. Hedges becomes a madam. This choice transforms Mrs. Hedges from being a
woman attracted to or appreciative of other women’s beauty to being a woman
purveying other women. Her transition from companion to madam occurs precisely
when she realizes that Mary, though flourishing in her new homosocial living situation,
may still have desires that exceed their domestic partnership. “One night,” the reader
learns, “a tall young man walk[s] past the window” and asks for Mary (Petry 1946, 249).
Mrs. Hedges invites him in to wait until Mary returns from shopping, then sizes him up
as a ne’er‐do‐well:
Yes, she thought, and you saw Mary, and you think you’re going to get yourself
some free loving. Only he wasn’t. He was going to have to pay for it. Mary would
earn money, and she, Mrs. Hedges, would earn money from Mary’s earnings.
(Petry 1946, 249)
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In this instant, Mrs. Hedges exercises her power as the financial provider to assert
control over Mary’s body and sexuality, redefining the younger woman’s erotic
relationship with the young man as an economic transaction that will benefit both
women and sustain the homosocial domestic arrangement they have created for
themselves.
While Mrs. Hedges imagines she protects Mary from exploitation, she orchestrates
Mary’s transformation from domestic companion to prostitute without Mary’s consent.
Thus, in becoming a madam, Mrs. Hedges redirects her female masculinity from
servicing a consensual economic and possibly erotic social formation with Mary to a
nonconsensual and hierarchical economic social formation that “involves the
subordination and objectification of women,” which Keith Clark defines as intrinsic to
the “domain of white men” (1992, 498). Once Mrs. Hedges has redefined her domestic
arrangement with Mary into one of madam and prostitute, she invites other young
women to join their living situation, converting the apartment into a brothel. Though
Mrs. Hedges insists that white men will not patronize her establishment, she invites the
white man Junto to become her silent business partner in this new enterprise.
In becoming a madam, Mrs. Hedges capitalizes on the non‐disabled embodiment
of other Black women, since she perceives that her own scarred body has little to no
value as a sexual commodity in heterosexual marriage or prostitution. She also creates a
job that authorizes her erotic looking at and assessment of other women’s bodies. For
example, when she recruits young Black women to join Mary in the apartment—women
“who had been married and woke up one morning to discover that their husbands had
moved out”—she calls them to her window, “her eyes somehow always linger[ing] on
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the hair piled high above their small, pointed faces” (Petry 1946, 252). “‘I been seein’
you go by,’” Mrs. Hedges explains to them, by way of introducing the brothel as a
solution to their financial problems, revealing that her gaze is at once sympathetic (I see
that you are suffering), erotic (and that you are beautiful), and appraising (and that you
would earn a good price). While some of the young women accept her offer, Lutie
instantly forms a dislike for the madam at the window whose “snake”‐like eyes she feels
“wandering over her body, inspecting and appraising her from head to foot” (1946, 6).
Thus, from the very outset of the novel, the two women engage in a silent war—Lutie
refusing Mrs. Hedges’s gaze and her attempts first to cajole and later to coerce her into
prostitution.
In her analysis of the different positions of Mrs. Hedges and Lutie, Garland‐
Thomson reveals the risks inherent to analyzing a work of literature by a nonwhite
author through the lens of pre‐existing frameworks in feminist and disability studies
that have been designed around the figure of the white woman and/or white person
with a disability. Garland‐Thomson seeks, in her words, to “appropriate” the character
Mrs. Hedges as a role model for all women with disabilities (1995, 608). Interpreting
Mrs. Hedges through the lens of white feminist critiques of normative femininity,
Garland‐Thomson esteems Mrs. Hedges for possessing “both the gaze and a voice, the
personally empowering elements of subjective agency that culture has consistently
denied women” (1995, 611). Further interpreting Mrs. Hedges through the lens of
disability studies, Garland‐Thomson argues that this character “also refuses the position
of the spectacle—the passive, “cripple role”—into which disabled people are often cast”
(1995, 611). In her effort to claim Mrs. Hedges as a disabled female heroine, however,
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Garland‐Thomson glosses over the fact that even able‐bodied Black women are held out
from the definition of normative femininity (Ferguson 2004, 42). No matter how hard
the able‐bodied character Lutie attempts to “cling to the feminine script” (Garland‐
Thomson 1995, 609), she is regarded by whites and even some Black men as a “whore.”
Lutie may be entrapped by her beauty in ways Mrs. Hedges is not, as Garland‐Thomson
astutely observes (1995, 610), but she is also denied the protections offered to white
women as a reward for conforming to the dictates of normative femininity. This facet of
gendered racialization not only undermines Garland‐Thomson’s argument regarding
the two women’s performances of gender, but also reveals why Lutie finds Mrs. Hedges
so threatening, while Garland‐Thomson finds her so admirable.

Mrs. Hedges’s Complicity
Garland‐Thomson is not alone in valorizing Mrs. Hedges as a “subversive” heroine who
innovates extralegal strategies for survival and success that defy the forces conspiring
against her and the other Black women in the novel. Clark applauds Mrs. Hedges for
possessing “the acuity to align herself with the powerful white male hegemony” (1992,
498), arguing that she rebelliously “undermine[s] the myth of the [American] Dream,
altering it to ensure both economic survival and varying degrees of emotional stability”
for herself and the women to whom she provides housing and protection in exchange
for their sexual labor (1992, 496). Rehka Rosha argues that Mrs. Hedges belongs to a
“counter‐triad” of “black market operators”—the madam, the bootlegger, and the
mystic—who “leverage resources to create wealth, which they redistribute to the
community” (2010, 294). Though acknowledging that Mrs. Hedges is sometimes “cruel,”
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Rosha sees this aspect balanced out by her directing “material resources” toward her
“community’s most disenfranchised members” (2010, 294–295), which include not only
the women in her brothel but her neighbors in times of need. After all, such reasoning
goes, Mrs. Hedges offers these young women a “job” that prevents them from being
taken for granted by young Black men who would otherwise take advantage of their
“free loving” (Rosha 2010, 249). She also refuses to allow white men to patronize her
brothel, narrowing the gap in social privilege between prostitute and john. Her
neighbors seek her advice and protection; she intervenes when a gang attacks Bub and
when Jones attacks Lutie.
Rosha and Clark make important contributions by emphasizing Mrs. Hedges’s
remarkable strength and savvy, yet they gloss over her role in commodifying other
women’s bodies. Her particular “black market” enterprise, after all, involves sexual
trafficking rather than, say, selling bootlegged liquor. As Barrett points out, Mrs. Hedges,
along with Boots, conspire with Junto to “entrap” Lutie into prostitution (1998, 119);
Barrett reminds readers that the “encoding of black female bodies” as “whores” is “a
potent sign circulated within the general economy and defines in part the specific
absence of African American women from the social condition of U.S. presence” (1998,
119). Although Mrs. Hedges does redistribute some of the resources she earns, she
obtains these resources from members of the Black community, taking advantage of
their desperation: “She told Junto people had to dance and drink and make love in order
to forget their troubles” (Petry 1946, 251); thus, she persuades him “that bars and
dance halls and whorehouses were the best possible investments” (1946, 251). Further,
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as Marjorie Pryse notes, Mrs. Hedges “chooses and chooses not to intervene in the lives
of Petry’s characters” as it suits her (1985, 119).
In contrast to those who laud Mrs. Hedges’s heroism, Barrett powerfully
condemns her complicity with Junto, whose Harlem empire consists of overpriced
tenements, nightclubs, bars, and brothels. Describing Mrs. Hedges as “Junto’s silent
cohort,” Barrett asserts that “the immense Mrs. Hedges . . . seems to incarnate—in her
corporeality and close connections to Junto—the indiscrete agency of U.S. presence in
the places of its absence” (1998, 117). Similarly, Pryse argues that Mrs. Hedges
functions as an “impersonal deity” (1985, 119) watching over the activities of the street,
whose “presence . . . points to larger forces”—the influence and privilege of white
people—”and gives those forces a tangible, physical agent” (1985, 120). In these
readings, Mrs. Hedges figures as a covert agent carrying forth the mission of American
imperialism into her corner of Harlem.
Though Barrett’s and Pryse’s critical assessments of Mrs. Hedges’s complicity
with white power and privilege offer compelling and necessary counter‐arguments to
the “subversive heroine” reading, Barrett’s interpretation of her “immense . . .
corporeality” as the incarnation of “U.S. presence” (1998, 117) calls up a long history of
interpreting corporeal differences as external manifestations of internal evil. Barrett
also overlooks the novel’s emphasis on Mrs. Hedges’s “rich, . . . sweet, sweet voice”
(Petry 1946, 5, 8), a feature she has in common with Lutie, who aspires to sing
professionally. Barrett, however, is not alone in conflating Mrs. Hedges’s deviant body
with her ethical corruption. Shockley, for example, argues that the characters Jones and
Mrs. Hedges resemble, respectively, the vampire and the monster, “two gothic figures”
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that “fall into the category referred to in the gothic tradition as the ‘living dead’” (2006,
451). Shockley’s interpretation of Mrs. Hedges as a monster echoes the horrified
assessments of the white employment agents, nurses, and doctors in Petry’s novel who
view Mrs. Hedges’s “enormous size,” the “blackness of her skin,” and her “burnt, bruised
body” as signs of “monstrosity” (Petry 1946, 241, 247, 241). Invoking the “tradition of
Frankenstein’s creature” and the “ungodly use of scientific knowledge,” Shockley
seemingly equates the experimental creation of the monster in Mary Shelley’s classic
with Mrs. Hedges’s disfiguration during the tenement fire. Ironically, Mrs. Hedges
refuses what some might consider an “ungodly use of scientific knowledge”—plastic
surgery, a medical technology that promises to erase the evidence of her disfigurement.

Claiming the Monstrosity
In Bodies in Dissent, Brooks discusses how “black feminist theorists . . . have opened up
new ways of considering the representational politics of the black body in the cultural
imaginary” (2006, 7). On the one hand, she explains, these theorists have highlighted
the ways in which “black women’s bodies continue to bear the gross insult and burden
of spectacular (representational) exploitation in transatlantic culture” (2006, 7). On the
other hand, Brooks contends that “black feminist scholarship has demonstrated the
viability of black women making use of their own materiality within narratives in which
they are the subjects” (2006, 8). She continues to explain that, “Such figures invent ways
to maintain the integrity of black female bodies as sites of intellectual knowledge,
philosophical vision, and aesthetic worth” (2006, 8). This explanation well‐describes the
complexity and integrity of the Black female characters in Petry’s novel—including the
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“shapeless” Min (1946, 23) and the disfigured Mrs. Hedges. In particular, the text offers
a far more empathetic and nuanced understanding of the relationship between Mrs.
Hedges’s disfigurement and her complicity with American imperialism than many
critics discern. For example, the novel’s flashback treatment of Mrs. Hedges’s early
years in New York poignantly portrays Mrs. Hedges, like Lutie, having arrived in Harlem
from Georgia with dreams of a better life, only to experience the scorn and prejudice of
those who find her too immense, too black, and later, too scarred. Unable to obtain work
or a partner, she scavenges for food in dumpsters until Junto comes along and offers her
a job. She, like the musician Boots, has arrived at a place of ethical compromise after a
long journey of suffering. Petry’s novel dramatizes the precise moment when Mrs.
Hedges crosses from survivor to exploiter—a moment seemingly prompted by her
jealousy of her companion Mary’s erotic connections with men. By highlighting that
moment with such intricacy, Petry draws attention to the limitations to and possibilities
for freedom, agency, subjectivity, meaningful work, sexuality, companionship, and
shelter that exist for Black women living at the crossroads of liberal state ideology and
capitalist economy.
Indeed, while the novel inspires in this reader and perhaps others a sense of
melancholia for the extinguished utopian possibility of an erotic partnership between
Mrs. Hedges and Mary, or at the very least, an egalitarian domestic partnership between
them, it also insists on the unlikelihood of such a partnership so long as the financial
resources that enable it are derived from a capitalist (i.e., racist, imperialist) economy.
Like Boots, whose financial success as a musician is entirely dependent on Junto, Mrs.
Hedges is reliant on Junto’s business partnership, and, in tandem, his exploitation of the
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Black community in Harlem. Even if Mrs. Hedges had not personally become a madam,
her income would have been derived from brothels on other streets in Harlem catering
to white men. Petry refuses to offer the reader the crutch of an ethical middle ground, in
which Mrs. Hedges might participate in the commodification of unnamed women while
protecting her female partner from the same fate. In Petry’s bitter indictment of
American political economy, genuine and reciprocal love and desire are represented as
impossible when basic needs have not already been provided for and when one
member of a partnership or relationship controls the capitalist resources. Thus,
although Boots and Mrs. Hedges both occupy the rare position of possessing the capital
to be providers, the women they desire don’t return their affection. By tracing the
moments of individual jealousy that tip Mrs. Hedges and Boots toward an even fuller
embrace of capitalist exploitation, Petry reveals the ways in which the local, private, and
intimate are not only shaped by (in Ferguson’s sense, 2004) but also corrupted by the
global, political, and economic. Petry replaces Wright’s pathologizing impulse for a
dystopian one.
Spillers argues that the history of slavery “places” the African American woman
“out of the traditional symbolics of female gender,” and that it is necessary “to make a
place for this different social subject” (2003, 228). Petry’s novel goes a long way toward
this place‐making project, arguably “claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the
potential to ‘name’),” as Spillers advises (2003, 229). In this way, Petry’s novel carefully
illustrates that her characters’ physical disabilities are neither the cause nor a symbolic
manifestation of their internal ethical compromises or corruption. This is a distinction
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some of Petry’s most astute critics overlook as they transform disability into a
metaphor for other social issues including racism and imperialism.
Further, just as Petry’s novel challenges scholars of race and empire to tread
sensitively in their interpretations of disabled corporeality, Petry’s novel also
complicates the either/or framework implied by leading scholars of disability studies;
this framework seemingly encourages people with disabilities to work through their
feelings of loss (proper mourning) in order to move forward to a more affirming stance
of “transformation.” Petry’s novel reminds readers of the importance of acknowledging
and addressing the grief and outrage that might arise within or on behalf of a person
who becomes disabled as a result of structural racism. In this way, the novel challenges
Freud’s characterization of melancholia as a pathological response to loss, a
characterization implicitly shared by leading disability studies scholars when the loss in
question concerns loss of function, ability, or appearance. Ultimately, The Street offers a
both/and framework that represents the experience of becoming disabled in terms of
tragedy and transformation. This perspective does not require a capitulation to the
dominant cultural assessment that disabled bodies and minds are inferior or pitiful, but
it does keep the spotlight trained on the acts of violence and neglect that lead to
imperial disablement and the consequent urgency of structural change and possibly
reparations. It is important to keep in mind that people who become disabled as a result
of racist and imperialist violence are also the ones least likely to have access to the
accommodations that help make it possible to experience disability as a
“transformation” rather than as, or in addition to, a “loss.”
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Finally, while a liberal response to Petry’s indictment of the imperial
disablement of African Americans might be to advocate for disability benefits (which at
the time of Petry’s writing did not exist and which today are difficult to obtain and
require participation in the medical industrial complex), a radical response will
hopefully redirect the conversation toward the goal of ending structural racism and
imperialism, in order to bring about an end to the continued exploitation and
premature disablement of Black bodies, and in particular, Black women’s bodies.

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CHAPTER 3
After the Bomb:
U.S. Scientific Imperialism, Media Censorship, and the Hiroshima Maidens Project

At the same time that the United States was waging an undeclared civil war
against African Americans and other racialized subjects on the “home front,” as
represented by Ann Petry in The Street, its leaders were preparing to declare overt war
against racialized enemies abroad. By the time the United States entered World War II,
the enterprise of war had been transformed into a mechanized industry that produced
weapons, materiel, and battle‐ready soldiers on an assembly‐line model and schedule; it
also, of course, specialized in producing premature disability and death. While the
origin of the English word casualty suggests that those who are killed or injured during
war represent “chance occurrences,” modern military leaders plan for and calculate
likely numbers of casualties, and even refer to them as expenditures.
26 ⁠ Such projections
determine how many soldiers need to be sent, how many medical personnel and
supplies, how many body bags. When, in 1941, the U.S. Congress declared war on Japan
and the other Axis powers, its members decided on behalf of the American public that
the stated objectives of the war—to save the world from German and Japanese
imperialists—justified the projected casualties, both American and non‐American,
human and environmental. Beyond the decision of whether or not the United States
should participate in the war at all, strategic decisions during the war—including the

26
For instance, when the Joint War Plans Committee prepared a plan for invading Japan, in June
1945, it concluded that, “in terms of percentage of casualties the invasion of the Tokyo Plains should
be relatively inexpensive” (qtd. in Oh 2012, 3).
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atomic bombing of civilians in Japan, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in the
United States, the relocation of Native Alaskans from the Aleutian Islands to camps in
Southeastern Alaska, the imposition of the draft—represented even more aggressive
exercises of biopower that increased the risk and numbers of premature death and
disability both domestically and worldwide.
27

Atomic Bomb as Announcement of U.S. Scientific Superiority
The U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, represented the terrifying
synthesis of scientific research and military power. These acts of warfare revealed the
importance of scientific discovery in the United States’s increasing global dominion.
“We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and
won,” President Harry S Truman proclaimed on August 6, 1945, announcing the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima. Framing this monumental act of violence as a milestone of
scientific progress, Truman explained in lay terms to his audience that “the force from
which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the
Far East” (Truman 1945a, 1). Several critical factors made this “achievement” possible
in what Truman portrayed as a race against Germany to develop nuclear weapons: a
“large number of scientists of distinction in the many needed areas of knowledge”;
“tremendous industrial and financial resources”; and the ability to keep America’s
laboratories and “production plants . . . out of reach of enemy bombing” (Truman 1945a,
1). Thus, Truman identified scientific specialization, industrial and labor capacity, and

27
Although Foucault’s theorization of biopower focuses on the management of health, disease, and
reproduction within the boundaries of the nation (2003a), scholars including Mel Chen have argued
that biopower needs to be reconceived of as global in scope (2012).
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geographic isolation as key elements of America’s rising status in world affairs—a sort‐
of blueprint for 20th‐century imperialism. In drafted sections of the speech Truman
eventually deleted, he declared the invention and deployment of the atomic bomb as
“the greatest achievement of organized science in history,” and marveled at the
impressive and harmonious collaboration of scientists, industrial designers, and
laborers under the supervision of the U.S. Army. Thus, in this early version not shared
with the nation, Truman outlined a vision of U.S. society and governance that placed the
military at the pinnacle, with science and industry at its command (Truman 1945b, 2).
Further, Truman directed the American public’s attention away from the specific
violence committed against humans and toward the abstract scientific achievement that
atomic weapons represented. While emphasizing the destruction to Japan’s “docks,
their factories, and their communications,” Truman did not acknowledge the civilian
casualties (Truman 1945a, 1).
28 ⁠ Though it is impossible to determine an accurate
accounting of the dead, recent Japanese estimates indicate that between 150,000 and
210,000 people, a majority of them civilians, died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
immediately or within the first four months of the atomic bombings (Lindee 1994, 6).
When non‐U.S. journalists, in Australia, Britain, and Vatican City, refused to take
Truman’s scientific bait and dared to question “the morality of the American use of the
bomb” (Lindee 1994, 120), U.S. ally British Prime Minister Winston Churchill responded
to critics by claiming that the atomic bombs had spared as many as “a million American
and a quarter of a million British lives,” which would have been lost in an invasion of

28
He also attributed the moral responsibility for the bombing to Japan’s leaders, declaring that they
had been issued an “ultimatum” at Potsdam in July 1945 and failed to surrender (Truman 1945a, 1).
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Japan (qtd. in Lindee 1994, 137). Truman later revised this estimate downward to
500,000 American lives (Truman 1955).
⁠ These equations asserted that the lives of
British and American soldiers, a majority of whom were white, held greater value than
the lives of Japanese soldiers or civilians. While this justification of “saving Allied lives”
became the conventional wisdom for generations to come, early skeptics included
British physicist P. M. S. Blackett, American lawyer and statesman Thomas Finletter, and
American editor Norman Cousins (who later helped organize the Hiroshima Maidens
Project), all of whom asserted that the United States had dropped the atomic bomb in
order to impress and intimidate the Soviet Union. A few decades passed, however,
before historians gained access to the government archival records that provided
concrete evidence in support of these early journalistic critiques. These archival records
revealed that the projected American casualties of an invasion of Japan were in the
20,000‐to‐46,000 range rather than the much higher ranges Truman and Churchill
publicly claimed (Selden and Selden 1989, xxxi); that Truman and his advisors knew
Japan was on the brink of surrender even before the atomic bombs were dropped; and
that growing tensions with the Soviet Union influenced the decision to drop the atomic
bomb (e.g., Walker 2004, 5–8). Others still have argued that anti‐Asian racism
contributed to the Japanese rather than the Germans being targeted with the world’s
first nuclear weapons (Makhijani 1995, 23–27). Racism certainly contributed to the
widespread acceptance by Americans of the use of atomic bombs against the Japanese,
who were racialized by American leaders and media as “beasts” and “savages,” whereas
German civilians were often distinguished morally from their Nazi leaders (Takaki
1995, 8).
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Twice the number of people killed by the atomic bombs, approximately 370,000
people, are counted as survivors of the attacks based on a variety of factors including
proximity to the hypocenter at the time of the bombing and/or exposure to radiation
within the first three days of the attacks, as in the case of rescue workers and family
members who entered the bombed cities to find survivors (Lindee 1994, 8). Many of the
hibakusha (loosely translated as “explosion‐affected people”) have permanent
disabilities, including disfigurement and loss of limb, sight, hearing, or mobility, while
others have experienced what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” of radiation exposure,
presenting with cataracts, thyroid disorders, leukemia, and cancers of the breast, lung,
and stomach over the ensuing decades (Nixon 2006–2007, 14; Lindee 1994, 244–245).
In addition, pregnant women exposed to the bombs’ radiation were much more likely to
give birth to children with physical and intellectual disabilities. Lindee points out that
many hibakusha have experienced multiple forms of violence and neglect as a result of
their injuries: first, they received no assistance from the Japanese or U.S. governments
to assist in their recovery until 1957, when Japan enacted the A‐Bomb Victims Medical
Care Law; further, they experienced “economic hardship as a consequence of their
physical disabilities,” which (in the absence of any accommodations) made them
vulnerable to employment discrimination; and finally, they were “socially ostracized
and rejected as marriage partners” because of widespread fears that they would
produce unhealthy children (1994, 9–10). It is also critical to remember that among the
dead and injured were many Koreans who were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as
colonized subjects of the Japanese empire and thus experienced the double‐burden of
Japanese and American violence (Ōe 1995, 9).
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The details of atomic casualties, however, were slow to reach the American public.
Truman’s speech marked the beginning of a decades‐long suppression and/or
censorship by the U.S. government of evidence of the full extent of human suffering
caused by atomic bombs. This media censorship in turn inspired alternate forms of
media coverage of atomic themes—scientific and sentimental—that complied with U.S.
governmental interests.
The convergence of the scientific and the sentimental is reflected in (and helps to
explain the popularity of) a humanitarian project launched ten years after the
bombings, referred to by the American press as the “Hiroshima Maidens” project.
Organized by Japanese and American peace activists in the early 1950s, this project
offered free plastic surgery to 25 Japanese women disfigured by the atomic bomb and
an all‐expenses‐paid trip to the United States, where the surgeries were performed. The
organizers of the project intended to remediate, on a small scale, the terrible effects of
America’s use of the atomic bombs, in defiance of the U.S. government’s refusal to
assume financial responsibility or provide medical treatment for atomic casualties.
However, although this project seemed to offer a narrative of resistance to the U.S.
government’s policies, its individualistic focus and message of intercultural peace and
harmony were easily coopted by the U.S. State Department, which exerted a powerful
influence over the print and television media coverage of the project, resulting in an
episode of disability diplomacy that in many ways served the ends of U.S. scientific
imperialism by aligning medical humanitarianism with Cold War ideology and foreign
policy.

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Subjects of Science
Before they even arrived in the United States, the participants of the “Hiroshima
Maidens” project likely came into contact with American scientists and medical
personnel through the operations of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC).
Lindee explains that the hibakusha have been subjected to “extensive scientific research,
both Japanese and American, almost continuously since 1945” (1994, 10). As test
subjects in long‐term epidemiological studies, the hibakusha have been redefined as
belonging, first and foremost, to science. The biomedical research generated from
annual investigations of their bodies has “provided [survivors] with valuable
information about their status,” in Lindee’s assessment, but has also compromised their
bodily autonomy (1994, 10).
The American Occupation of Japan (1945–1952) and the creation of the Atomic
Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) in 1947 extended the reach of American
imperialism into the terrain of “body fluids, information about abnormal births, and
survivors’ bodies for autopsy” (Lindee 1994, 13). American military investigators joined
Japanese scientists in studying the bombs’ effects on survivors within three weeks of
the attacks, and two years later, the ABCC opened offices in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The agency’s mission was to “investigate the long‐term effects of radiation on survivors”
(Lindee 1994, 10). Its operations continued through 1975.
29 ⁠ The swiftness with which
American military investigators joined Japanese scientists, along with the creation of
the ABCC, indicates that the U.S. government recognized the atomic bombings as an

29
In 1975, the agency was reorganized and renamed as the Radiation Effects Research Association,
jointly funded and controlled by Japanese and American researchers (Lindee 1994, 245).
125
opportunity for the advancement of scientific inquiry (Lindee 1994, 12).
30 ⁠ Releasing the
bombs’ destructive force on a nonwhite and non‐U.S. population provided an
opportunity for the United States to discover once and for all the long‐term effects of
radiation exposure, without officially putting white Americans at risk, or people
believed to have racial kinship with white Americans (such as the Germans).
31 ⁠ At that
time, radiation was a “recognized but poorly understood hazard to human health”
(Lindee 1994, 11). The knowledge of its effects was vital to American interests that
sought to profitably harness nuclear physics for military, energy, and medical purposes.
The fact of American Occupation, in tandem with the shortage of medical
personnel familiar with radiation illnesses in Japan, undermined the possibility of
genuine consent by the Japanese survivors who participated in the ABCC’s study. This is
revealed by the fact that, once the U.S. Occupation ended, Japanese journalists and
survivors began openly to question or criticize the ABCC’s presence and mission and
survivors’ rates of participation began to drop (Lindee 1994, 122, 125–126). The
greatest controversy surrounded the ABCC’s no‐treatment policy (Lindee 1994, 122).
Under this policy, ABCC researchers and physicians gathered information and

30
Lindee mentions that the ABCC’s policies “fueled the curious idea, popular in Hiroshima, that the
two cities had been bombed as part of a biomedical ‘experiment’” (1994, 126). Though Lindee finds
this notion “curious,” I hope that future historians will investigate the role that scientific imperatives
may have played in the U.S. government’s fateful decision to drop the atomic bomb.
31
Although the Americans who worked at or lived near the nuclear manufacturing and test sites
were subjected to dangerous levels of radiation without their knowledge, Truman claimed that the
workers “have not themselves been in danger beyond that of many other occupations, for the utmost
care has been taken of their safety” (Truman 1945a, 2). This claim has been undermined by the high
incidence of cancer experienced among workers in nuclear industries and residents living downwind
of nuclear test zones. (Fields 2009; Harkewicz 2010). Truman’s obfuscation suggests that, in practice,
he felt equally at liberty to endanger the health of American working‐class laborers and their
communities, whereas in the court of public opinion, it was desirable to suggest that the danger was
delimited to foreigners.
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diagnosed illnesses, but were prohibited by the agency from providing medical care for
the conditions they identified. Lindee points out that some individual physicians
involved in the ABCC did provide medical care to survivors, flouting the official policy,
but the majority of these were Japanese physicians employed by the ABCC (1994, 127).
Although the ABCC directors offered a variety of explanations and excuses for the no‐
treatment policy, Lindee has determined from her research that the “no‐treatment
policy was grounded fundamentally not in research needs or prevailing medical
practice, but in the larger international debate over the legitimacy and morality of the
American use” of the atomic bomb. Lindee goes on to explain that the U.S. government
was determined to “not apologize or atone for the use of atomic weapons in Japan, and
therefore it would not repair the bodies that had been marked by the bombs’ blast and
radiation” (1994, 118). Thus, the United States “would not provide medical treatment to
those who had survived the bombings, even though they were the subject of American
biomedical research” (1994, 118). With this policy, the ABCC placed U.S. foreign policy
ahead of survivor welfare, and tried to persuade the Japanese survivor‐subjects that
“diagnosis” was a benefit as valuable as treatment (Lindee 1994, 123). Despite
increasing requests and complaints from the Japanese medical community and
survivors for medical care, the ABCC refused to change its no‐treatment policy. As the
study entered its second decade, attrition rates rose, as survivors registered their
resistance to the project (1994, 125–126).
U.S. media coverage of the ABCC’s activities introduced the American public to the
“slow violence” and “attritional calamities” of atomic warfare (Nixon 2006–2007, 14),
yet managed to portray the agency’s research mission as a laudable scientific project
127
with humanitarian implications. Rob Nixon introduces the term “slow violence” to
describe the long‐term effects on human health from warfare and environmental
devastation.
32
Considering the example of the U.S. war in Vietnam, Nixon points out that
official tallies of casualties typically count only those who died or were injured “during”
the conflict, not the 3 million who have been affected over three generations by the U.S.
military’s use of Agent Orange (2006–2007, 15–16).
Nixon argues that the undercounting of war‐related casualties is linked to a media
“bias” against “attritional calamities” (2006–2007, 15, 14): “How,” Nixon asks, “in an age
that venerates the instant and the spectacular, can one turn attritional calamities
starring nobody into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment?” (2006–2007,
14). Nixon posits a causal relationship between media representations and justice,
arguing that the “under‐representation of slow violence in the media results in the

32
While Nixon provides contemporary cultural critics with a useful phrase for the long‐term effects
of imperialist and environmental violence, he is by no means the first to theorize the concept of slow
violence. In Hiroshima Notes, a series of essays by Japanese writer Ōe Kenzaburō, written in the
1960s, the author notes that, “a certain prophetic voice said that no grass would grow in Hiroshima’s
soil for seventy‐five years,” a prophecy that “soon proved false when late summer rains washed the
wasted land and urged it to new growth,” but which nevertheless captured a truth about the long‐
term “damage done at a deeper level”—at the level of cellular structure (1995, 126). Many of Ōe’s
essays dwell on the long‐term health effects of the atomic bombs, the heroism and persistence of
Japanese doctors, and the many injustices endured by survivors, ranging from the U.S. occupation
government’s suppression of information about radiation sickness and the risk of leukemia (1995,
135‐136), to the American declaration that only those who died within the first few months would be
“counted” as casualties (1995, 139‐140), to the decade‐long struggle by survivors to obtain medical
and financial assistance from the Japanese government (1995, 9, 15), to the insensitivity of American
journalists who ask Japanese survivors whether they think America’s use of the atomic bomb was
justified (1995, 72). Ōe includes a haunting quote from a young Japanese dentist that expresses the
particular despair and burden of atomic survivors: “‘Why must the Hiroshima people suffer even
after the war’s end?’” (1995, 127). While Hiroshima Notes arguably contributes to redefining the
Japanese as victims, a trend critiqued by Lisa Yoneyama for its erasure of the history of Japanese
imperialism (1999), Ōe also acknowledges Korean survivors of the atomic bomb and the fact that
many survivors hold the Japanese government equally responsible as the United States for their
injuries (1995, 9).
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discounting of casualties . . . [,] which in turn exacerbates the difficulty of securing
effective legal measures for preemption, restitution, and redress” (2006–2007, 15).
Although Nixon briefly mentions the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his
argument about the media’s emphasis on “instant and spectacular” violence and its role
in fostering support for reparations does not accurately reflect the U.S. media
environment during the early Cold War.
⁠
For example, an article appearing in December 1949 in Life magazine’s Science
section provides a justification for American scientific imperialism and military
occupation of Japan precisely through its emphasis on the long‐term health effects of
radiation. In “The A‐Bomb’s Children: Study of Half a Million Japanese Reveals the First
Delayed Effects of Atomic Radiation,” readers are introduced to the long‐term and
possible intergenerational health effects of radiation through a combination of
photographs, an individual survivor’s narrative, and background information about the
ABCC’s research activities.
The article’s first page is dominated by a quarter‐page photograph whose subject
matter announces one of the major themes of the article, the ABCC’s investigation into
possible genetic alterations caused by radiation, which “might be carried down through
successive generations to bring death and disfigurement to the descendants of the
survivors” (Life 1949, 60). The photograph shows a Caucasian man in the foreground,
seated at a long, rectangular table, wearing a white lab coat, facing some two dozen
women of apparently Asian ancestry, who are seated on all four sides of the table, with
two women seated next to him. One or two women are dressed in kimonos, the rest in
Western‐style women’s business attire. The word SCIENCE in all‐caps is stenciled over
129
the top right corner of the photograph, signaling to readers that we have departed from
the realms of POLITICS and ENTERTAINMENT. The caption reads: “THE SCOPE OF
ABCC’S INVESTIGATION INTO RADIATION EFFECTS IS REFLECTED IN MASS MEETING
OF MIDWIVES, WHO DELIVER 95% OF HIROSHIMA’S BABIES” (Life 1949, 59). The
headline and caption together offer the reader an explanation of the racial and national
affiliations of the figures shown in the photograph, which might not have been familiar
on first glance to every American reader of the late 1940s. The caption’s explanation
that 95 percent of Hiroshima’s infants are delivered by midwives assumes the tone of a
cultural anthropologist explaining the “unusual” customs of a foreign culture. This detail
conveys two possible messages to American audiences—first, that Japanese women
have retained greater power in the realm of obstetrics than American women have;
and/or that Japan is a less “civilized” nation that still relies on midwives while “modern”
nations like the United States have professionalized and masculinized the practice of
birth. Thus, the photograph suggests the intersection of modern science, embodied in
the figure of a lone white man, with ancient tradition, embodied in the figures of the
Japanese women. The male scientist is shown from behind, which has the effect of
aligning the reader with his perspective, as if we too are running this meeting,
possessed with the authority of scientific knowledge.
Although the possibility of intergenerational radiation impact is a major focus of
the article, the text actually begins with a different story of slow violence, as revealed
through the narrative of Kimura Hatsue (referred to by the article in Western
convention as Hatsue Kimura). The article transports us back to the first few days after
the bombing of Hiroshima, when Kimura—15 at the time—lost many friends and family
130
members and experienced “violent sickness” as a result of her exposure to the bomb
(Life 1949, 59). The article carries readers through the acute phases of her radiation
sickness, informing us that two weeks later her gums began to bleed, one month later
“she was completely bald,” and four months later she was still “too weak to get out of
bed.” By the six‐month mark, however, she seemed to have “recovered” (1949, 59). Fast
forward four years to February 1949, when Kimura took a job in the cafeteria of the
ABCC, which, the article explains, “had been set up by the U.S. government to find out
just what the American bomb had done to its Japanese victims” (1949, 59). In this way,
the article embeds the explanation of the ABCC’s purpose into the larger life story of one
of the survivors, perhaps implying that the agency’s mission is to provide help and
support to young women like Kimura who have been “victimized” by the bomb. When
Kimura’s vision begins to fade, she suddenly comes to the ABCC researchers’ attention
because her body provides new and “positive evidence of [the bomb’s] terrible delayed
effects” (1949, 59). Portraying the examination of Kimura’s eyes in terms vaguely
reminiscent of a gang rape, the article describes how “[o]ne after another the men
looked into Hatsue’s eyes and saw the black pattern of a radiation cataract” (1949, 59).
A small inset photograph reinforces this theme, showing two male doctors—one
Japanese, the other white and American—examining a young Japanese woman
identified by the caption as Kimura. The caption assumes an educational, explanatory
tone: “HATSUE’S EYES are examined by ABCC doctors. Cataracts are inside eyes, stretch
across back of lenses” (1949, 59). The image shows the young woman seated with her
face pressed into an eye‐examination machine, the American doctor pressing his face
into the other side, the Japanese doctor standing over the young woman. Through the
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positioning of these figures, the image conveys that the young woman is the passive
object of examination, the American doctor is the one actually performing the
examination, while the Japanese doctor plays an assisting role by ensuring the woman’s
cooperation.
We never learn what happens to Kimura—are her cataracts removed? Who
provides the treatment?—because the article segues from her personal story to a
general discussion of the ABCC’s activities, as if moving from a close‐up photograph to a
wide‐angle lens shot. The ABCC’s no‐treatment policy is not mentioned. Instead, the
work of the ABCC scientists is described as a valiant, time‐consuming effort requiring
the “patient examination of vast numbers of human subjects” (Life 1949, 60). Their
motivation: “a sense of fear—fear of what the bomb’s radiation has done up to now and
may yet do” (1949, 60). In this way, the article cultivates a structure of feeling organized
around fear, identified by Christina Klein as central to the U.S. Cold War ideology of
containment (2003, 24). But on whose behalf are the scientists afraid? The Japanese? Or
Americans who might in the future experience the horror of Soviet nuclear aggression?
The nature and origin of the fear is not identified, only that biomedical research
represents a way to allay the fears by gathering concrete data that can quantify the
precise effects of radiation.
The article implicitly frames the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan as an
opportunity for scientific progress: “Until the bomb fell,” the article explains, “there was
no way of finding out” the true extent of radiation’s dangers to humans (Life 1949, 60).
Previous laboratory experiments, the article informs, had been limited to “lower
animals—mostly fruit flies” (1949, 60). This sentence suggests that, prior to the
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dropping of the atomic bomb, it was not considered safe or ethically acceptable to
expose human subjects to the levels of radiation now being studied (despite the fact
that other forms of biomedical research were being carried out on vulnerable
populations). But the war in the Pacific changed all that: “now,” the article declares, the
“ABCC has a sufficient number of human subjects for a scientific study” (1949, 60). This
sentence creates a cause‐and‐effect relationship between the dropping of the atomic
bombs and the creation of human subjects for scientific study. Thus, war itself is
presented as a boon to science, for it alters the standards for acceptable treatment of
human subjects to such an extent that enemy civilians can be deemed no more worthy
of protection from radiation than “lower animals—mostly fruit flies.” Further, the
article characterizes the unprecedented scale of the atomic disaster as a particular
advantage to scientific progress for it has created a “sufficient” number—”half a million”
human subjects—to carry out a comprehensive scientific study (1949, 60). Finally, the
article implies a relationship of ownership between American scientists and Japanese
survivors—those who drop the bomb becomes the rightful owners of the “human
subjects” injured by it; thus Japanese survivors belong to the ABCC.

Domestic Origins of U.S. Scientific Imperialism Abroad
The ABCC’s mission to study the atomic bomb survivors in Japan belonged to a more
widespread exertion of scientific imperialism over the bodies of people of color and
other marginalized people within the domestic United States and the growing U.S.
empire. This scientific imperialism classified biomedical knowledge as a resource that
could be extracted from poor people and people of color to benefit white, middle‐class
133
Americans. Lindee explains that human subjects in the United States were involved in
much of the biomedical research “promoted by military needs” during World War II
(1994, 141). This research was overseen by the Committee on Medical Research of the
U.S. Scientific Research and Development office,” an agency created by the federal
government in 1941 to serve the scientific research needs of the military. Lindee, citing
a study by David Rothman, observes that ethical standards for “the handling and
treatment of human research subjects were not well defined” during this period; she
notes that “participants were commonly drawn from state institutions (prisons,
orphanages, homes for the mentally retarded, asylums) or from the pool of
conscientious objectors” (1994, 141). This means that a majority of test subjects were
likely people of color, who were disproportionately represented in prisons and asylums.
And though Lindee does not acknowledge this, obtaining meaningful consent from these
human subjects was severely compromised by their captivity and/or legal vulnerability,
as well as their age (in the case of orphans) and/or mental health or intellectual
disabilities.
The reliance on compromised human subjects for biomedical research in the
United States dated back at least to the Tuskegee syphilis study, which ran from 1932 to
1972. In that case, researchers misled the participants—all of them Black men—by not
explaining the true purpose of the study, which was to study the long‐term effects of
syphilis. They further endangered the participants by not revealing that they had tested
positive for the disease and by not explaining measures to prevent infection of their
sexual partners. The study took on even more sinister implications after World War II,
when penicillin became widely available for civilian use and could have been offered to
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the participants. The Tuskegee researchers withheld this treatment from the study’s
participants in order to observe the disease’s unhampered progression. Thus, an illness
that could have been treated or cured was allowed to turn into a chronic, disabling, and
ultimately deadly disease, since syphilis in its final stage causes organ failure, bone pain,
anemia, loss of mental functioning, and heart disease.
Other examples of biomedical imperialism from this period include the extraction
without consent of cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, a 31‐year‐old Black woman and
mother of five children, who was diagnosed in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital with a
new form of cervical cancer. Intrigued by the novelty of her medical case, Lacks’s doctor
removed a cell sample without her consent. Lacks died in the segregated hospital ward
within months of her first visit, following crude radiation and X‐Ray treatments (Skloot
2010, 5, 13; Van Smith 2002). Her cells became known as the HeLa cell line and have
been reproduced and sold to researchers around the world, including Jonas Salk, whose
discovery of the polio vaccine in 1955—made possible with HeLa cells—was regarded
as “one of the great medical innovations of the twentieth century” (Serlin 2004, 11).
Millions of dollars went into the vaccine’s research, and billions more were earned by
major U.S. pharmaceutical companies that licensed the vaccine and administered a
worldwide vaccination campaign in the 1950s (Theodore Edwards 1955). Yet Henrietta
Lack’s family members never received compensation for her forced “contribution” to
this particular “medical miracle” or any of the others—such as a search for an AIDS
vaccine—that have been attempted with the material legacy of her body. The use of her
cells for the benefit of the general public extended the legacy of Black women’s coerced
caretaking of white bodies.
135
During this same decade, the U.S. government initiated the “Bravo Medical
Program” in the Marshall Islands, two chains of islands in the northwestern Pacific that
shifted from Japanese to U.S. control after World War II. The Bravo Medical Program
was created to study the long‐term radiation effects on Marshall Islanders who were
exposed to fallout from the “Bravo” hydrogen test bomb—“the largest nuclear device
ever tested by the United States” (Harkewicz 2010, 5). Detonated over the Pacific Ocean
in March 1954, the Bravo test bomb released “the equivalent of 1000 Hiroshima bombs”
and exposed the Marshall Islanders to dangerous levels of radioactive fall‐out
(Harkewicz 2010, 5). The fall‐out from this test bomb also affected several Japanese
fishermen whose boat, the Lucky Dragon, was in the testing zone at the time. Analyzing
the Bravo test bomb and the Medical Program that followed it, Laura Harkewicz argues
that “Cold War science stressed national security concerns over those of human rights”
(2010, 9–10).
33

The “Hiroshima Maidens” Project
In 1953, Japanese Methodist minister Tanimoto Kiyoshi
34
approached American literary
editor and anti‐nuclear spokesman Norman Cousins about the possibility of an
American‐led humanitarian project to provide medical assistance to young Japanese
women survivors who were severely disfigured by the atomic bomb. Reverend
Tanimoto had founded the Hiroshima Peace Center, an organization dedicated to

33
While Harkewicz offers a compelling and comprehensive study of the Bravo Medical Program, I
question her assertion that, “At the beginning of the [Bravo Medical] Program, . . . little was known
about radiation effects” (2010, 10). According to Lindee, by 1954, the Atomic Bomb Casualty
Commission had been studying the effects of radiation exposure in Japan for seven years (1994).
34
For Japanese names, I place surnames before given names, except when they appear otherwise in
quotations.
136
fostering peaceful world relations and ending the use of nuclear weapons, and hosted
support groups for hibakusha at his church (though the support groups did not require
adherence to Christianity). One such group, composed entirely of women who had been
children or adolescents at the time of the bombing, had all experienced social prejudice
and economic hardships that prevented them from completing their schooling, finding
work, and/or finding romantic partners. Several had undergone experimental plastic
surgeries in Japan, none of which had been successful in restoring functional use of
arms and fingers, or in permanently removing scar tissue. David Serlin reports that
Soviet doctors offered plastic surgery to the Hiroshima survivors, but only “on condition
that the Maidens speak out publicly against American imperialism and nuclear weapons
testing” (2004, 99). This offer was refused. Various sources suggest the women
themselves did not want to have their injuries used as political propaganda (Shibusawa
2006; Barker 1985). Reverend Tanimoto, who had attended seminary in the United
States, learned through research that the “most challenging plastic surgery was being
done in American hospitals”; this information paired with his desire to foster peaceful
relations between Japan and the United States led Reverend Tanimoto to propose that
the women go to America for medical treatment (Barker 1985, 64). After being turned
down by Eleanor Roosevelt, Reverend Tanimoto approached Norman Cousins, with
whom he had collaborated on the formation of the Hiroshima Peace Center and its
American‐based affiliate, the Hiroshima Peace Center Associates. Though initially
reluctant, Cousins signed on in fall 1953 after meeting the women in Reverend
Tanimoto’s support group and witnessing the extent of their injuries. From this point
forward, Cousins directed the American activities, from fundraising to lining up host
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families to persuading doctors and hospitals to provide free medical services (Barker
1985, 64–65).
Arriving in May 1955 and staying for more than a year, the 25 Japanese women
selected for the project received complimentary transportation from the U.S. Air Force,
food and lodging provided by Quaker American host families in the mid‐Atlantic states,
surgical services provided by two leading plastic surgeons from Columbia University’s
College of Physicians and Surgeons, and medical facilities provided by Mount Sinai
Hospital in New York City. A few Japanese surgeons also accompanied the women to
learn advanced techniques of plastic surgery, not yet developed in Japan, so that they
could more effectively treat survivors in Japan and so that they could verify that
American doctors were not performing experiments on the hibakusha (Barker 1985,
78). Approximately half of the women who participated were drawn from Reverend
Tanimoto’s original support group; the others responded to a call sent out through the
Hiroshima media. This invitation drew in 43 young women, who were examined by
visiting American plastic surgeons to assess the extent of their injuries and the realistic
likelihood of their benefitting from plastic surgery.
35 ⁠ “According to city officials,” notes
Rodney Barker, “there were hundreds of eligible women,” but widespread suspicion
that the Americans planned to use the participants as “guinea pigs” in another ABCC‐
type study likely deterred many from showing up (1985, 76).


35
None of the sources I have consulted thus far includes a clear statement about what the hibakusha
participants hoped to achieve through the project. It seems apparent that no one ever asked or
recorded their wishes until much later in life, but assumed that Reverend Tanimoto reflected their
wishes. His primary concern was with their prospects for education and employment (Barker 1985,
59), although the American media focused on marriageability.
138
Through this project, which the American media called the “Hiroshima Maidens”
project, both the American and Japanese participants sought to harness the power of
medical science to undo the damage wrought by nuclear physics. War was the engine
behind both ends of this scientific spectrum, since plastic surgery was a medical
specialization developed in response to injuries sustained by soldiers during World War
I, and the atomic bomb had created a new generation of disfigured survivors whose
injuries required further innovations in the field. While Cousins and the religious
leaders involved in the project signed on because of their sense of moral responsibility
to survivors and their antinuclear convictions, the lead surgeon, Dr. Arthur Barsky,
agreed to participate because he was “intrigued by the challenge presented by atomic
burns” and knew that “advancement in modern surgical techniques was tied to the
kinds of injuries sustained in successive wars,” though he also felt “concerned for the
innocent children caught in the crossfire of war” (Barker 1985, 75). Harkewicz argues
that “dual‐goal studies were a common practice of Cold War medical science,” and that
the dual goals often led to conflicts of interest “between research and therapy, healing
and hurting” (2010, 10). Though the Hiroshima Maidens Project was not conceived of as
a biomedical research study, in many ways it suffered from a dual‐goal focus that sought
to appease American political interests while also meeting the medical needs of the
hibakusha. In the end, Michael Yavenditti argues, the “‘curing’ of the Maidens
symbolized the healing of wartime hatreds and projected an image of American
compassion, benevolence, and generosity toward a former foe” (1982, 21), an outcome
that was far more valuable to the U.S. government than the benefits provided to the
Japanese women who participated.
139
U.S. State Department’s Influence
During the planning phase, the organizers of the Hiroshima Maidens Project ran into
greatest opposition from the U.S. State Department, whose consent was required in
order to obtain the necessary visas for the Japanese visitors. State Department officials
objected that providing medical treatment to the Japanese women “could give the
appearance of admitting America’s culpability in dropping the atomic bomb” (Barker
1985, 72). Indeed, the project’s mission seemed to undermine the ABCC’s longstanding
no‐treatment policy. Further, State Department officials argued, the Japanese women’s
“presence” in America “would embarrass the United States and might well be turned
into anti‐American propaganda by communists” (Barker 1985, 72). During the planning
phase, Cousins sent Reverend Marvin Green, the treasurer of the Hiroshima Peace
Center Associates (HPCA) and a former classmate of Reverend Tanimoto, to win the
support of a skeptical State Department. In this meeting, Green portrayed the
humanitarian project as an important public relations opportunity for the United States
that would help diffuse rather than inflame anti‐American sentiment in Japan and
elsewhere in the world. He indicated that “it was his group’s intention to show that
Americans today were understanding of the problems facing other people in the world
and that a person‐to‐person campaign to rehabilitate the innocent victims of war could
only have a salutary effect” on American foreign relations (Barker 1985, 72–73). He also
suggested that this humanitarian project could go a long way toward diffusing “anti‐
American propaganda generated by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission’s hands‐off
policy” (Barker 1985, 73). Finally, he pointed out that the women had “already been
approached by communist leaders, who wished to exploit their plight through
140
international publicity” (Barker 1985, 73). In other words, Green threatened, if the
United States didn’t offer help, the Soviets “might get to them first” (Barker 1985, 73). In
essence, Green articulated the strategic value of medical humanitarianism as a method
to win over communist‐leaning hearts and minds. After “two hours of intense, heated
discussion,” followed by assurances from Green that publicity for the project would be
“limited and tasteful,” the State Department representatives reluctantly agreed to issue
the necessary visas for the Japanese visitors (Barker 1985, 73). Their condition was that
the project must not be not “billed as an act of expiation or atonement for dropping the
atomic bomb, or confused with a form of government restitution” (Barker 1985, 73).
At the last minute, however, the State Department attempted to cancel the project
when it discovered how difficult it would be to keep the project’s publicity “limited and
tasteful” (Barker 1985, 81). On May 5, 1955, the day before the hibakusha were
scheduled to leave Japan, “several dozen newsmen, photographers, and news
cameramen” showed up to record the issuance of their visas at the American Consulate
in Hiroshima. American Consul Ralph Blake reported to the State Department that,
“[w]hen several photographer and moviemen attempted to take close‐ups of the girls,
one in particular attempting to take movies of a girl with hideously deformed hands
laboriously signing her visa, the reporting officer covered the camera lens and refused
permission for continued photography” (qtd. in Barker 1985, 81). After receiving this
report, the State Department telegrammed an order to cancel the entire project. But U.S.
Air Force General John W. Hull ignored the telegram until the plane carrying the
Japanese women was already in the air. General Hull “reported the flight as a fait
accompli and stated that reversing the plane in mid‐flight might cause international
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embarrassment” (Shibusawa 2006, 235). After this setback, the State Department
refused to allow any other Hiroshima Maidens Projects to be launched in other cities,
where there were willing hosts and medical sponsors. Thus, the State Department
effectively limited the extent of U.S.‐based humanitarian efforts to these 25 women, and
through media influence prevented the American public (except for those who met the
young women in person) from seeing the most dramatic of their atomic injuries.

Asia in Early Cold War U.S. Media
Reverend Green’s articulation of the value of the Hiroshima Maidens project as an
international “person‐to‐person” exchange that would foster harmonious world
relations invoked the “ideology of integration,” which Christina Klein identifies as
having been central to American Cold War policy. In her analysis of American cultural
representations and foreign policy dictates concerning Asia and Asians during the early
Cold War period (1945–1961). Klein connects the “expansion of U.S. power into Asia”
and the “simultaneous proliferation of popular American representations of Asia”
including the narratives offered by humanitarian projects (2003, 5). She argues that
Cold War‐era intellectuals and cultural producers helped to generate what Raymond
Williams calls “structures of feeling” (1977) that “regularized patterns of emotion and
sentiment” in support of Cold War political ideology, which authorized American
intervention into Asian political affairs (Klein 2003, 7). In Klein’s view, the two central
principles of Cold War ideology—containment and integration—generated two
different but related structures of feeling: The ideology of containment sought to limit
the spread of communism beyond the Soviet Union and led to a structure of feeling
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based on fear. The ideology of integration linked “democratic political freedom” with
“an internationally integrated free market economic order” (2003, 24, 25). It led to a
structure of feeling—articulated by Arthur Schlesinger Jr—based on sentimental
attachments to community. Schlesinger, Klein contends, “identified America’s global
problem as an excess of individualism and an insufficiency of bonding, and advocated
its solution in terms of fostering a greater sense of the self‐in‐relation” (2003, 42). Klein
contends that middlebrow literature and entertainment that depicted intimate
encounters between white Americans and Asians—including Richard Rodgers and
Oscar Hammerstein’s musicals The King and I (1956) and South Pacific, James
Michener’s The Voice of Asia—encouraged white Americans to cultivate a kind of
sentimental attachment to the peoples of Asia. This sentimental connection, combined
with a widespread fear of communism, encouraged white Americans to view Asians as
good‐natured but immature children who needed the guidance and support of their
benevolent and superior Anglo neighbors; translated into foreign policy, such views
contributed to a consensus that the United States should “protect” its “friends” in Asia
from communism. In this way, the United States could fashion a national identity as a
benevolent protector while eschewing more recognizable imperialist methods of
religious conversion and direct rule over subjugated populations.
Klein discerns these Cold War structures of feeling infusing two postwar
humanitarian programs initiated by Cousins to provide assistance to people in Japan:
the Moral Adoption program and the Hiroshima Maidens Project. The first program
offered middle‐class Americans the option to “sponsor” a Japanese child who had been
orphaned during the war. Ironically, because of anti‐Asian immigration exclusion laws,
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the “adopted” orphans in Japan could not actually come to the United States. This, of
course, would have raised a different set of ethical and political problems, as Jodi Kim
discusses in her analysis of documentary films focused on later transnational adoptees
from Korea and China (2009, 856). In the early Cold War period, however, the exclusion
laws provided Americans an opportunity to undertake “moral” or sentimental
adoptions, which provided an avenue through which to “channel their atomic guilt”
(Shibusawa 2006, 213). The second program, focused on the disfigured young women
from Hiroshima, involved a much greater commitment by the host families and other
sponsors—a sort‐of temporary adoption during the time of the women’s medical
treatment. Media coverage of the project provided American audiences with a more
specific set of individuals to identify with as the beneficiaries of American generosity.

Japan in the Postwar American Imagination
With its emphasis on the integration of the hibakusha into American host families, and
its emphasis on young women in particular, the Hiroshima Maidens Project aligned with
a more specific U.S. Cold War imperative regarding Japan identified by Naoko
Shibusawa (2006). Shibusawa argues that, during the early Cold War years, U.S.
government policies and popular culture converged to transform Japan in the American
cultural imagination from a “hated racial enemy” of World War II to a “valuable ally” of
the Cold War (2006, 4). “Clearly many Americans continued to despise the ‘Japs’ after
the war,” Shibusawa explains, “but as the Cold War intensified shortly thereafter, Japan
became America’s most important ally in Asia” (2006, 3). Shibusawa observes that, on
the cultural front, American cultural productions largely served the interests of the U.S.
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government by persuading many white Americans to overcome their hatred and
develop a benevolent attitude toward Japan and its people. News reports, novels, films,
and travelogues by white Americans who visited Japan during the American occupation
facilitated the political transformation by depicting Japan as a nation of submissive and
repentant dependents who required the benevolent guardianship of the United States
to mature into a “modern, liberal capitalist democracy” (Shibusawa 2006, 5). Such
narratives—including James Michener’s Sayonara (1954) and Hollywood films
including The Teahouse of the August Moon, starring Marlon Brando (1956); Sayonara,
again starring Marlon Brando (1957); and The Barbarian and the Geisha, starring John
Wayne (1958)—focused on Japanese women and children, geishas and orphans
respectively, positing these figures as metonyms for Japan itself. The “ideology of
maturity” (Shibusawa 2006, 5) implied by these narratives maintained the hierarchical
relationship between the two nations, as Shibusawa explains: “Portraying Japan as a
woman made its political subjugation appear as natural as a geisha’s subservience to a
male client, while picturing Japan as a child emphasized its potential to ‘grow up’ into a
democracy” (2006, 4–5). Thus, American popular culture facilitated public acceptance
of Japan’s new status as America’s junior or “geisha ally” in the U.S.‐led war against
communism.
The context Shibusawa sketches helps to explain the particular appeal of the
Hiroshima Maidens Project for American philanthropists, journalists, and media
audiences. By focusing on disfigured women who had been children or adolescents at
the time of the bombing, the project aligned with the larger media phenomenon
Shibusawa identifies of portraying Japan as the “geisha” or “orphan” ally. A feature
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article in the Hartford Courant profiling two of the Japanese visitors illustrates these
trends. The article opens with the assertion that “It’s all far behind them now—all but
the scars and the terrible memories” (Miller 1955, SM11). This statement downplays
the extent of the women’s injuries, which included not only scars, but also loss of limb
function because of scar tissue. It also conjures a fantasy in which the removal of the
women’s scars will somehow erase their memories of the tragedy altogether. Further,
although reconstructive surgery (intended to restore function) was of equal priority to
cosmetic surgeries (intended to alter appearance), the article focuses on the return of
the women’s racialized feminine appearance as the primary goal and benefit of the
project: “They are staying in Darien, awaiting medical treatment that may banish the
sorrow of bodily disfigurement and restore their delicate Oriental beauty” (Miller 1955,
SM11). The description of the women’s “delicate Oriental beauty” invokes the
Orientalist notions of demure and slight creatures, childlike victims even in their
adulthood, a decade after the bombing. In this journalist’s telling, the nuclear attack is
reduced to a story of sexual violation and damaged femininity, a story designed to
titillate and solicit sympathy from white, middle‐class readers. During the article’s brief
account of the actual bombing, the reporter describes how one of the women, Oshima
Suzue—then just a child—looked down to discover that “she had on only her white
underwear,” the rest of her clothes having been burnt off (Miller 1955, SM11). This
image of Oshima’s youthful nakedness following the attack symbolically represents the
atomic bombing as a kind of sexual assault. Hence, the article implies that the women
have been robbed not only of their beauty but also of their sexual innocence. Thus, in
more ways than perhaps intended, the article’s author participates in the trend of
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depicting Japanese women, and by extension, all of Japan, in terms of the sexually
available and consumable geisha.
Further, by emphasizing the role of American medical science in healing the
women’s injuries, the article reinforces the narrative of American cultural and scientific
superiority and benevolence, which contributes to the “junior” ally image for Japan. This
image is further reinforced in the article’s depiction of two “maidens”—Oshima Suzue
and Kannabe Misako—as grateful and helpful guests, untainted by bitterness or anger,
who cheerfully arrange flowers and help out with household chores during their stays
with each host family. In the main photograph accompanying the article, the two
women are shown sewing a comforter as a gift for their host family. “They’re the most
delightful guests we’ve ever had,” raves Mrs. Edith Hastings (Miller 1955, SM11). The
article goes on to list all the charitable contributions that have been made on the
women’s behalf, and then concludes with a quote from Oshima that seems to affirm the
power of humanitarianism to compensate for war crimes: “When I think about how
kind everyone is, I’m glad I’ve never been bitter about the bomb” (Miller 1955, SM11).
While Oshima’s quote speaks only to her own personal feelings and reflections, its
placement at the conclusion of the article implies that the generosity of a few Americans
(primarily Quakers and Jews) has compensated for the injuries to many caused by the
U.S. government’s atomic warfare. The article ends with an appeal from Oshima: “Just
please—no more Hiroshima,” a plea that hints at the larger political stakes of the
humanitarian project, whose organizers possessed anti‐nuclear sentiments (Miller 1955,
SM11). However, the quotation’s construction as a request rather than a command
reveals the power imbalance between Oshima as a Japanese woman and her
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predominantly white American audience. The article’s conclusion thus contributes to
the construction of Japan as an “orphan” or junior ally who must rely on the generosity
of its older, wiser, and wealthier American mentor.

The Influence of Atomic Media Censorship
While Klein and Shibusawa stress the voluntary cooperation of media makers with U.S.
foreign policy dictates, it is important to consider the role and influence of
governmental censorship on the field of American media representations concerning
Asia, and Japan more specifically, during the early Cold War. As Nora Gilbert explains in
an article on Victorian literary and Hollywood cinematic censorship, “a new school of
censorship theory emerged” in response to Michel Foucault’s repressive hypothesis in
The History of Sexuality; this school of theory, Gilbert explains is “devoted to exposing
and unpacking the productive effects of censorious practices” (2012, 543). It is
impossible to know, but important to consider, whether the rise of scientific journalism
and sentimental media productions such as the ones Klein and Shibusawa analyze can
be identified as belonging to the “productive effects” of the U.S. government’s
suppression of visual evidence of human suffering caused by the atomic bombs in Japan.
By placing media restrictions on the Hiroshima Maidens Project organizers, the
State Department extended the U.S. government’s wartime control of the media and
reinforced its efforts to censor or suppress documentary evidence of the atomic
devastation. George Roeder Jr argues that, during World War II, “the U.S. government,
with extensive support from other public and private organizations, made the most
systematic and far‐reaching effort in its history to shape the visual experience of the
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citizenry” (1995, 2). Media coverage of the atomic bombings was tightly controlled from
the day of the first blast, with General Douglas MacArthur declaring the southern region
of Japan off‐limits to journalists (Goodman and Goodman 2012, 1). Amy and David
Goodman report that the “world's media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off
the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese,” while the evidence of the
atomic aftermath lay miles beyond their reach (2012, 1). “The official [U.S.] narrative of
the atomic bombings,” the Goodmans explain, “downplayed civilian casualties and
categorically dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation” (2012, 2). A
few Western journalists defied MacArthur’s orders and filed reports that challenged this
narrative: Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, for example, managed to reach
Hiroshima a month after the nuclear attack and wrote a “searing” account of the bomb’s
devastation and the new “atomic sickness” that was plaguing survivors. Burchett’s story
was published in the London Daily Express in September 1945, much to the
embarrassment of the U.S. government (2012, 2). An American reporter, George Weller
of the Chicago Daily News, “slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000‐word story on the
nightmare that he found there,” only to find his article silenced by MacArthur’s censors
(2012, 2).
In addition to restricting journalists’ physical access to southern Japan and
censoring news reports of the carnage, the U.S. government prohibited publication in
the American media of “all photographs of killed or injured Japanese” (Fields 2009, 61),
from the day of the first bombing until late 1952, the year the American Occupation
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ended in Japan.
36 ⁠ Serlin indicates that the State Department assumed control over
American media censorship, presumably following the dissolution of the Office of
Censorship in November 1945 (2004, 66). The U.S. government also “seized and
suppressed film shot in the bombed cities by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel
teams to prevent Americans from seeing the full extent of devastation wrought by the
new weapons” (Reuters 2005, 1; Barnouw 1982, 92). The Japanese film, which was shot
in black and white, was not declassified or returned to Japan until the late 1960s
(Reuters 2005, 1; Barnouw 1982, 92).
37 ⁠ The U.S. military film included color footage
that remained classified as secret until the 1980s (Reuters 2005, 1). Thus, even though
the U.S. Office of Censorship was officially closed on November 15, 1945, the moving‐
image evidence of the bombings’ aftermath remained inaccessible to the American
media and public for decades (Barnouw 1982, 92; Roeder Jr 1995, 152).
In his article for the London Daily Express, Burchett cautioned readers that the
“damage is far greater than photographs can show” (qtd. in Goodman and Goodman
2012, 1), a powerful instructive to media consumers to not trust photographic evidence

36
During the Occupation, the Supreme Commander of Allied Power (the U.S. Occupation
government) imposed a censorship policy in Japan that prohibited any and all Japanese—journalists,
scientists, medical personnel, and individual memoirists—from publishing written or visual material
related to the bombings. This policy was justified as a means to maintain “public tranquility”; in other
words, to minimize opposition by the Japanese to the U.S. Occupation government (Braw qtd. in
Lindee 1994, 48‐49).
37
The U.S. seizure of Japanese newsreel film for the first few decades after the bombings perhaps
contributed to Japanese director Sekikawa Hideo’s decision to reenact the day of the Hiroshima
bombing in his feature film Hiroshima, instead of using newsreel footage. The film, released in 1953
one year after the American occupation ended, was supported by the leftist Japanese Teachers’ Union
and 90,000 Hiroshima inhabitants who participated in the filmmaking. Barker describes this film as a
“semidocumentary” seemingly “edited to agitate anti‐American feelings in viewers” (1985, 62). He
also notes that the film includes shots of some of the women in Reverend Tanimoto’s support group.
Shibusawa identifies Hiroshima as a “documentary film” (2006, 233). However, the lack of access to
newsreel footage of the bombings likely limited possibilities for documentary filmmaking about this
event in Japan and the United States.
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alone. Burchett’s statement drew attention to the limits of photography as a
documentary form, implying that written descriptions based on eye‐witness accounts
such as his own were equally critical to understanding the impact of nuclear warfare.
However, there was perhaps an additional meaning suggested by his assertion, insofar
as Americans were not being shown the full photographic record of the atomic
bombings, something Burchett likely knew given that his own camera, loaded with
undeveloped images from Hiroshima, “mysteriously vanished while he was in the
hospital” (Goodman and Goodman 2012, 2).
The American news media developed a variety of strategies for representing
atomic violence that complied with government censorship policies. For instance,
Allison Fields notes that U.S. news sources offered “grim images of destroyed and
deserted landscapes” in place of images that depicted humans impacted by the bomb’s
blast and radiation (2009, 61). Serlin argues that these “images of the bleak, destroyed
landscape—and the remains of public buildings . . . —became deliberate and extremely
palpable substitutes for the people who could not be shown” (2003, 66). While these
images were arguably shocking and spectacular, they “slyly” disguised the human toll of
the bombs (Serlin 2003, 66). Further, they created a tabula rasa effect, portraying Japan
as a landscape “wiped clean” by the atomic bomb of its former civilization and people.
Such images may have helped to legitimate the American Occupation of Japan and
reconstruction of Japan’s political economy. These images may also have provided the
misleading impression that the bombs killed all humans in the area instantly, leaving
only rubble and shadows, no survivors or sufferers.

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Following President Truman’s lead, the U.S. press also turned to science
journalism as a censorship‐friendly means for representing atomic‐themed topics. In
the early months after the bombings, New York Times science journalist William L.
Laurence—who was also on the War Department’s payroll—provided an alibi for the
U.S. government through his news reports about atomic radioactivity, which
contradicted Burchett’s claims about the risks of radiation exposure. Goodman and
Goodman explain that, four days after the London Daily Express published Burchett’s
shocking report, Laurence was invited by Major General Leslie Groves to visit the “site
of the first atomic test” in New Mexico. Groves’s “intent,” the Goodmans surmise, “was
to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site,” a claim Laurence put
forward in his news report, despite evidence to the contrary (Goodman and Goodman
2012, 2). Laurence’s example suggests that the U.S. government relied on science’s
status as an apolitical, “objective” discourse to obscure the true impact of atomic
radiation, a trend evidenced in the Life magazine article about the ABCC analyzed
earlier in this chapter.
38

Within a year of the bombings, written human‐interest accounts began to fill in
the visual gaps: notably, John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946), first published in installments
in the New Yorker, later as a book, introduced American readers to the aftermath of the
Hiroshima bombing through interwoven narratives chronicling the lives of six survivors

38
By the time that article was published, in 1949, the U.S. government appears to have dropped its
efforts to disguise the long‐term impact of radiation exposure, instead acknowledging this fact as a
way to justify the ABCC’s continued presence in Japan, and to cultivate the structure of feeling of fear
which Klein identifies as central to American Cold War policy (2003).
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from the day of the attack to the first‐year anniversary.
39 ⁠ Some scholars credit
publications such as Hersey’s with inspiring regret and remorse among Americans who
had previously supported the U.S. government’s use of the atomic bomb (e.g., Fields
2009, 50–51), while others argue that “remorse” was only ever a “selective” sentiment
rather than a collective one (Yavenditti 1982, 21). Yavenditti points out that “opinion
polls taken in 1945 and other evidence indicate that most Americans approved the use
of the atomic bomb on Japan to end the war quickly and as retribution” (1982, 21–22).
By the 1950s, when more information had become available (however limited)
regarding the human suffering caused by the bombs and the long‐term effects of
radiation exposure, public opinion had shifted to “confusion” but not as far as
widespread “remorse” (Yavenditti 1982, 22). It is impossible to know whether a
majority of Americans would have been swayed considerably if the full photographic
and moving‐image evidence of the bombings had been made available in the immediate
days, weeks, months, and years after the attacks. It is impossible to know whether, on
the basis of the visual evidence, the United Nations would have called for an
investigation into the atomic bombings as crimes against humanity, and whether, in the
immediately postwar political climate, such calls would have been taken seriously.
George Roeder Jr. cautions that, “[t]o write of the power of wartime visual imagery is
not to assume that it had a precisely measurable or predictable effect” (1995, 5).
Nevertheless, he points out that U.S. “civilian and military leaders realized” during

39
Other written narratives published in the United States during the censorship period include
Norman Cousins’s article, “Hiroshima Four Years Later” (1949); two articles by Japanese American
journalist Bill Hosokawa about the Atomic Bomb Civilian Commission (ABCC)’s research on A‐Bomb
survivors (1950; 1951); Arnold Grobman’s popular science text, Our Atomic Heritage (1951); and
Nagai Takashi’s We of Nagasaki: The Story of Survivors in an Atomic Wasteland, translated into
English and published in the United States in 1951.
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World War II “that often they would have their greatest impact on public attitudes by
withholding information,” a strategy the U.S. military, and in turn the State Department,
implemented full‐force following the atomic bombings (Roeder Jr 1995, 2–3).

An Absent Presence
The suppression of visual evidence of the atomic bombings, in combination with the
proliferation of scientific and humanitarian discourses regarding the long‐term welfare
of atomic survivors, rendered those most severely impacted by the atomic bombings an
“absent presence,” borrowing a phrase from Caroline Chung Simpson (2002). Her study
focuses on the “absent presence” of a different group—Japanese Americans—who
suffered forced relocation and internment during the war. Simpson, also influenced by
Foucault’s thesis in The History of Sexuality, argues that “the proliferation of information”
regarding the Japanese American internment experience (such as reports authored by
social scientists) “ironically furthered the nation’s avoidance of the deeper challenge of
the role of internment in our understanding of postwar and cold war national history”
(2002, 3). Thus, she argues, Japanese Americans became an “absent presence” (drawing
on Jacques Derrida’s notion as filtered through the work of Marita Sturken) in postwar
national history that “challenges the ideals of democratic nationalism and the narrative
of unity of nation that historical discourses ostensibly provide” (2002, 4). Simpson
explains her project as one that focuses on “a series of discursive ‘instances’ when the
specter of internment became implicated, either by displacement or engagement, in the
articulation of nationhood in the tumultuous postwar and cold war years” (2002, 4).

154
One of those “discursive instances” is the Hiroshima Maidens Project: Simpson
adds to the historiography of this event by drawing attention to the participation of two
Japanese American “host mothers” (2002, 116). She argues that media coverage largely
ignored their participation because they disturbed the larger social meanings attributed
to the project—which Simpson identifies as the power of white mothers to heal the
wounds of war (2002, 125). She notes that much of the media coverage of the
humanitarian project focused on the nurturing bonds between the white American
“adoptive mothers” and their injured Japanese “daughters” (2002, 124). The life stories
of the two Japanese American participants— Helen Yokoyama, who had been exiled in
Japan during the war; and Yuri Kochiyama, who had survived internment and who later
became an antiracist activist and friend of Malcolm X—contradicted the upbeat and
benevolent portrait of American culture the project organizers (and the State
Department) sought to put forward (2002, 126).
⁠ Simpson speculates that Yokoyama’s
exile in Japan likely led the American media to portray her as only Japanese, rather than
as Japanese American, thus obscuring her ties to American culture and her experience
of exile. “Because Yokoyama’s return to the United States occurred in the context of a
goodwill mission for women from Japan,” Simpson analyzes, her identity as an
American citizen was no doubt obscured by the fact of her foreign residence and her
seemingly similar Japanese identity” (2002, 127–128).
By suppressing or ignoring the Japanese American identity of these two host
mothers, the American media displaced the fact of internment from its official narrative
regarding the Hiroshima Maidens Project. This official narrative could not support more
than one American‐created historical holocaust. “Clearly,” Simpson analyzes, “the mere
155
presence of these two Japanese American mothers . . . had at the very least the potential
to undermine the unrelenting optimism” of the reports about American generosity and
benevolence (2002, 130). The media story’s appeal, she argues, “depended largely on
the overt racial and national differences between the maidens and their American
mothers to ensure the moral superiority of white American femininity” (2002, 130).
Lisa Yoneyama, in a review essay, notes that Simpson’s book “urges us to continue
to be suspicious of the knowledges that spatially and temporally demarcate Japanese
from Japanese Americans” (2002, 297). Such knowledges might distract the
contemporary cultural critic from recognizing that when the American media engaged
with an aspect of Japanese history, such as the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, it may have
been actively displacing an aspect of Japanese American history, or vice versa. Although
Simpson focuses on the “absent presence” of the Japanese American participants in the
Hiroshima Maidens Project, her argument inspires a recognition of other absent
presences—the hundreds of thousands who died, the male survivors of the atomic
bombings, those female hibakusha who refused to go to America, the female survivors
who were turned down for the project because their injuries were too extensive, those
who survived the bombing of Nagasaki. The notion of “absent presence” also conjures
the women’s disfigured bodies, which were cloaked and concealed in news media
photographs and TV appearances.

“Limited and Tasteful”
The “limited and tasteful” media coverage required by the State Department had the
effect of muting the anti‐nuclear messages of the Hiroshima Maidens Project organizers
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and aligning the project with Cold War structures of feeling. Shibusawa highlights the
paradoxical effects of the censorship of visual images of the Japanese women before
their surgeries. She explains that the State Department’s media wishes actually aligned
with many of the women’s own stated wishes for privacy. Shibusawa also points out
that:
Always trying to be considerate of the Hiroshima women’s sensitivities, Cousins
believed that ‘parading the girls around’ and making a spectacle of their injuries—
injuries the women had gone to great lengths to try to hide—would be
‘exploitative.’ He did not believe that such a publicity tour would be effective in
molding public opinion. Although he personally thought nuclear weapons should
be outlawed, Cousins did not want to cast the project as a plea against nuclear
weapons (2006, 237).
In a gesture interpreted as considerate, the State Department waived the legal
requirement of photo identification on passports in deference to the women’s possible
feelings of shame; this maneuver, however, also kept the U.S. archive “clean” of the
evidence of their disfigured faces. It seems remarkable to the point of suspect that,
during a time when Asian immigration exclusion still prevailed in U.S. immigration law,
the U.S. State Department would bend the rules on passport identification, creating a
temporary loophole for a group of Japanese women.
Fields argues that, in order to stay in the good graces of the State Department, the
project organizers portrayed “the focus of the project” as “restoring scarred femininity,
and restoration of the maidens' bodies to a marriageable status” (2009, 42). Serlin
contends that “the Maidens project should be understood as a medical narrative of
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normalization that was galvanized by the futuristic tenor of plastic reconstructive
surgery (especially cosmetic surgery) in the postwar years” (2003, 62).
Yavenditti adds that “media coverage gave the impression that Cousins, the HPCA,
the host families, and the Mt. Sinai doctors were a microcosm of the nation as a whole”
(1982, 30). Cousins himself fostered this impression, portraying the project as an
“American benevolence” (Shibusawa 2006, 242). However, he was actually turned
down by several major American foundations, each of which “thought the project
carried a high risk for negative publicity” (Shibusawa 2006, 229). After six months,
Cousins turned to two sometimes marginalized groups in American society, Quakers
and Jews, whose members had a greater sense of personal connection to the goals of the
project because of their pacifist views (Quakers) and sense of compassion for fellow
survivors of genocidal violence (Jews). Yavenditti notes that the project—though
organized by those whose political activism put them in the minority of American
opinion—managed in shape and content to appeal to a broader American audience. In
the end, Yavenditti argues, “[n]othing about the Hiroshima Maidens program
jeopardized the government’s traditional position that it would not acknowledge moral
or legal liability for hibakusha injuries” (1982, 34).

The Hibakusha Appear on Television
The most significant and widely distributed media coverage of the Hiroshima Maidens
Project came in the form of an episode of This Is Your Life on May 11, 1955.
⁠ Among
visual media during the early Cold War period, television was an especially influential
medium given its broad distribution. Lynn Spigel recounts the swiftness with which this
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new medium penetrated U.S. culture: “During this period, the primary site of exhibition
for spectator amusements was transferred from the public space of the movie theater to
the private space of the home,” Spigel explains. “Between 1948 and 1955,” she
continues, “television was installed in nearly two‐thirds of the nation’s homes, and the
basic mechanisms of the network oligopoly were set in motion” (1992, 1). Spigel
discovers that the medium itself—apart from its programming—“came to represent so
much of the culture’s hopes and fears” (1992, 4), specifically regarding “the
reconstruction of family life and domestic ideals” following two decades of social
upheaval (1992, 2). Television also distinguished itself from other forms of visual media
by claiming to serve a pedagogical purpose (John Carlos Rowe, pers. comm.).
The program This Is Your Life aired during the years 1952 to 1961 on NBC. A
highly popular evening program, it ranked among the top 30 programs during most of
its run (Brooks and Marsh 1999, 1244–1246). At the beginning of each half‐hour
episode, the host Ralph Edwards would track down and surprise a guest and then
narrate his or her life story, including testimonials by friends and relatives. Guests
alternated between celebrities and non‐celebrities whose stories were thought to
exemplify the expression “Love thy Neighbor” (Desjardins 1997, 1663). Disability was a
recurring theme on the show from its origins. This Is Your Life began as a radio program
Truth or Consequences in 1946, and its first episode featured a World War II veteran
returning home with disabilities. The tremendous popularity of this debut episode
inspired Edwards to continue the program and eventually adapt it for television, under
the new title This Is Your Life (Desjardins 1997, 1664). The show continued to profile
“ordinary” people with disabilities who had “overcome” hardship throughout its run on
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television (Desjardins 1997, 1663). Sentimental narratives about disability clearly
struck a chord with audiences and played an important role in the show’s success.
The Hiroshima Maidens Project was featured on This Is Your Life a few days after
the participants’ arrival in the United States; the program focused on the life of
Reverend Tanimoto and his work on behalf of atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima.
Two of the Japanese women—Minowa Toyoko and Emori Tadako—accompanied him,
though their appearance on the half‐hour program was limited to fewer than 30
seconds. Reverend Tanimoto was not familiar with the format of This Is Your Life and
thought he would be participating in a news interview about the humanitarian project,
which he described for the audience in the following terms: “I have brought a group of
girls who have terrible disfigurement from the event of the atomic explosion in
Hiroshima. We are hoping to have plastic surgery for them.” After introducing the guest
by name, occupation, and home to the audience, and inquiring as to his whereabouts on
the morning of August 6, 1945, host Ralph Edwards acquaints the confused‐looking
minister with the true purpose of the show: “We have been working for weeks with
your friends . . . and members of our State Department to bring you to our stage tonight
so we could retell the story of your life.” This line offers the false impression that the
State Department had been a supportive party to the Hiroshima Maidens Project.
Holding up a bound book entitled Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, This Is Your Life, Edwards
explains that “the facts are between the covers of this book,” and that the book’s listed
author, Hazel Bishop, is the program’s sponsor. Pointing to a portal on the other side of
the stage, Edwards explains that, “through this archway will come many people who
have helped shape your destiny. We hope that at the end of this half‐hour you will have
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had some pleasant moments.” This is a particularly odd expression given the role of the
atomic bombings in Reverend Tanimoto’s life story, revealing the imperfect fit between
the show’s generic format and the particular life story brought to this evening’s
program. Turning to the audience, Edwards continues: “And that you, ladies and
gentlemen, will have a better understanding of what it means to look into the face of
atomic power.” Throughout the show, Edwards will refer to the atomic bomb with the
euphemism of “atomic power,” lending the impression that nuclear energy and nuclear
weapons are the same scientific invention.
After an announcement by the show’s sponsor promoting nail polish, the show’s
narrative resumes with a gripping description of the day of the atomic bombing and
Reverend Tanimoto’s efforts on behalf of the injured and dying. When Edwards asks
Reverend Tanimoto to share some of what he saw after the bomb’s blast, he is rewarded
with a description that probably ranks up there as one of the least “pleasant moments”
in the show’s history: Tanimoto describes “people running . . . . their skin falling off,
hanging from their faces, from their arms. But strange to say, in silence. It looked like a
procession of ghosts.” He looks up at Edwards, who responds without betraying any
emotion: “Did you know Hiroshima had been the first city to feel the force of atomic
power?” Reverend Tanimoto responds, “I had no idea what was happening.” This
moment marks an important rejoinder to American audiences who may still have been
unfamiliar with the particular horror of the moments after the atomic blast, as well as
the particular injustice that no one understood what type of bomb had hit them or why
it was behaving differently from the types of warfare with which they were familiar.

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From this grisly scene, the show briskly segues to the guest appearances of
significant figures in Reverend Tanimoto’s life. These guest appearances begin with
Bertha Sparkey, the Methodist missionary who first encouraged the minister to join the
Christian faith and who later “adopted” him (not legally, but emotionally) when his
father disowned him for relinquishing Buddhism. Reverend Tanimoto rises from his
seat to embrace Miss Sparkey and bursts into tears, one of many touching and
melodramatic moments in store for the audience of this program. This scene reinforces
the “orphan” theme identified by Klein and Shibusawa as critical to Cold War
representations of Asia and Japan in particular, with “Mama Sparkey” filling in the role
of mother in Reverend Tanimoto’s life story. Next arrives Reverend Marvin Green, who
reminisces about their days in seminary together at Emory University. After sharing a
humorous recollection about a practical joke, Green shifts to speaking about the
Hiroshima Maidens Project. The man who had so persuasively reassured the State
Department about—manages to squeeze in a rebuke of the ABCC explaining to Edwards
and the audiences that this agency has not provided medical treatment to survivors,
which is part of the impetus for his group’s humanitarian endeavors.
Green is followed by members of Reverend Tanimoto’s first congregation—a
Japanese American Methodist congregation based in Hollywood, whose members are
shown waving from the audience. Consistent with the “absent presence” dynamics
Simpson has identified, the fact that these congregants were relocated and interned
during the war is not mentioned, nor the remarkable fact that they returned to
Hollywood and rebuilt their congregation after the war. Thus, the show offers the
illusion that, while Reverend Tanimoto went back to Japan, they never left Hollywood
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and have been waiting patiently for this special day when he would return to visit them.
The next guest is Captain Robert Lewis, who flew with Colonel Paul Tibbets on the
mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Edwards asks Lewis to recount his
activities on the morning of the bombing, and Lewis describes how, “[i]n front of our
eyes, the city of Hiroshima disappeared.” He then explains that he recorded in his flight
logbook, “My God, what have we done?” Lewis chokes up, nearly breaks down in tears,
the second time a man has displayed this level of emotion during the program. In many
ways, the program contrasts Edwards’s brisk and unflappable masculinity—the
epitome of the Cold Warrior—with the emotive masculinity embodied by Reverend
Tanimoto and Captain Lewis. Tanimoto’s “excessive” emotiveness thus signifies his
racial difference, while Captain Lewis’s emotiveness signifies his status as an
emotionally wounded war veteran. Edwards summarizes the scene in terms
maddeningly neutral: “So Reverend Tanimoto, you on the ground, and you, Captain
Lewis, in the air, both appealed to a power greater than your own.” Captain Lewis
extends his hand to Reverend Tanimoto, who shakes it vigorously and then lets Lewis
leave the stage. The live program is suspended temporarily so that photographs of a
destroyed Hiroshima can be shown, the familiar landscape shots that had been
circulated in the media since the war.
After this gripping segment, Reverend Tanimoto’s wife and children appear on
stage, a surprise appearance that required the State Department’s blessing, bringing to
heteronormative completion the life narrative Edwards has so painstakingly
reconstructed. Mrs. Tanimoto wears a kimono, at the producer’s request, rather than
her usual Western garb, offering viewers an exoticized portrait of the family’s
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appearance. Further, the happy family scene of the Tanimotos frolicking on the couch
represents the future promised by the Hiroshima Maidens Project to the until‐now
hidden hibakusha.
Finally, the two hibakusha who traveled with Reverend Tanimoto make their
appearance. Although the purpose of the show is to raise awareness of and funds for the
Hiroshima Maidens Project, the television program’s focus on the life narrative of the
minister renders the hibakusha both central and marginal simultaneously, a poignant
part of Reverend Tanimoto’s “story” of heroism and Captain Lewis’s story of atonement.
The two women remain hidden behind a screen on the far edge of the stage, shown only
in silhouette while they speak into a microphone for less than 30 seconds. As Serlin
argues, the silhouette has the perverse effect of sexualizing the women, calling up a
burlesque performance. The message conveyed by this shadowed appearance is that
the women are unrepresentable. Their bodies are too horrifying to represent onscreen;
their bodies are the problem that American plastic surgery will resolve. The program
ends with a fundraising appeal and directions for where viewers can send contributions.
Captain Lewis returns to the stage and offers the first donation. Edwards announces
that the show’s sponsors will contribute as well and encourages the audience to
contribute generously, “for this is the American way.”

Comparisons: Disability Telethons and Newsreels
Although this episode of This Is Your Life included a fundraising appeal, the program
differentiated itself in style and format from the popular charity telethons that also
arose during the early Cold War period. These differences in style and format—the
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former fashioning itself as a “tasteful” family program organized around the
construction of a life narrative—explain why This Is Your Life was considered an
acceptable media option by the State Department and why a charity telethon would
likely have been rejected as a means to raise funds for the Hiroshima Maidens Project.
The first charity telethon, hosted by comedian Milton Berle, took place in 1949,
soon after the advent of television (Kassel 2004, 1641). Telethons, which were filmed
live and often lasted for 16 or more hours, relied on what film historian Tom Gunning
calls the “cinema of attractions,” a form of cinema characterized by exhibitionism,
spectacle, and lack of plot (1990). Early Cold War era reviews of telethons (which
appeared in Variety, the daily show‐business newspaper) suggest that the telethons
exhibited disabled people as victims whose spectacular impairments made them
deserving of pity and funds. For example, one reviewer reports that, “Sandwiched
between the talent array were some of the palsy victims. Their pitches were the most
effective of all” (Variety 1953). After praising the quality of the talent show
performances, another reviewer echoed this refrain, observing that the “Best pitchmen,
however, were the palsied kids themselves. Just watching them in front of the camera is
enough to soften a hard heart and open a tight pocketbook” (Variety 1954). Telethons
conferred a benevolent status on celebrity emcees and performers, while also offering
individual viewers the satisfaction of “making a difference” through their
contributions.
40 ⁠ While the reviewers do not specify, it is likely that the majority of

40
Since their inception as a genre, telethons have raised billions of dollars from U.S. viewers (Kassel
2004, 1642) to support organizations such as the March of Dimes, United Cerebral Palsy, and the
Muscular Dystrophy Society that provide services to people with disabilities and conduct research
into possible “cures” and treatments.
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people with disabilities who appeared on telethons were white, given the
representational trends of television during this era.
Paul Longmore critiques the role charity telethons have played in shaping public
perceptions of people with disabilities (2005, 503). Purporting to help children with
disabilities lead “normal” lives, the telethons confirmed the medical model of disability,
which identified the disabled body as the problem rather than the inaccessible and
unaccommodating society. Further, according to Longmore, they “authorized
uninhibited staring, even while they precluded the possibility of actual interaction
between nondisabled and disabled persons” (2005, 503). Through these
representational strategies, telethons constructed people with disabilities as helpless,
pitiful, and childlike, even when adults were also the intended recipients of the services
of medical technologies for which funds were being raised. The programs thus
cultivated in television viewers a sense of moral responsibility for the disabled.
In this way, the telethons created a template for the charitable programs and
projects designed to benefit the survivors of the atomic bombings, who, as Shibusawa
points out, were portrayed as being childlike and in need of paternalistic oversight.
There were important differences, however, that suggest the emergence of two
different standards for representing people with disabilities during the early Cold War
period. Because people with disabilities on telethons were portrayed as victims of
chance circumstances or bad luck rather than as victims of American military violence,
the telethons cultivated a sense of responsibility without stretching to the point of
culpability. In contrast, Shibusawa argues that the humanitarian programs aimed at
Japanese survivors channeled American “guilt” (2006, 213). Because U.S. culpability
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was at stake in representations of the hibakusha, the State Department impressed on
the project organizers that the spectacle of the injured and dying could not be shown,
because to do so might inspire something other than a sense of “responsibility” or
sentimental attachment among American audiences for the women hibakusha.
This difference is illustrated in a comparison of other visual media from the early
Cold War period, newsreels in particular. A March of Dimes newsreel report on the
polio epidemic from 1955 features many dramatic images of human suffering and
disability caused by polio: feverish, partially nude bodies, bodies connected to iron
lungs, limping bodies, bodies in wheelchairs. These images reinforce the dramatic
statistics put forward in each of these newsreels about the rising numbers of people
infected each year. The images of the patients assisted by iron lungs emphasize the
importance of medical technology in treating polio patients, while images of children
lining up to take the trial vaccine convey the importance of biomedical research to
prevent future cases. The polio survivors shown in the newsreel belong to all races,
genders, and ages, yet some striking discrepancies arise depending on the narrative
segment. During the coverage of the vaccine trials, more children of color are shown as
the participants, communicating to the American public that they are the experimental
subjects upon whom this early research is being conducted. In the final segment, when
the March of Dimes makes its appeal for funds, it shows two young white children while
the voiceover narrator concludes: “Frail hands depend on stronger hands . . . Don’t let
the polio patients down. If this little girl can smile at you, and this boy, then give extra to
the 1955 March of Dimes” (March of Dimes 1955).

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In contrast to the portrayal of bodily suffering in the polio newsreels, a newsreel
regarding the arrival of the women hibakusha in New York portrays them as modern,
able‐bodied women whose disfigurements are barely detectible. Shown debarking from
an airplane, the women are dressed in identical Western‐style women’s suits and wave
and smile for the press cameras. The shots of the women are taken from a far enough
distance that it is nearly impossible to tell that any of them are disfigured; their clothing
and makeup likely also concealed some of the evidence of their injuries. In a second shot,
the women are shown seated inside the airport, again from a far enough distance that
the only detectible injury is one woman’s eye patch. One of the hibakusha is showered
with two bouquets of flowers, presented to her by a white man who kneels before her.
This moment makes evident another important different in the portrayal of people with
disabilities on telethons and in newsreels as compared to the portrayal of the women
hibakusha. While disability studies scholars note that mainstream representations of
people with disabilities, including telethons, usually portray the subjects as asexual, the
newsreel dedicated to the women hibakusha emphasizes their potential sexual
desirability, following the themes articulated by Shibusawa regarding Japan as the
“geisha ally” (2006). This aspect of their representation is encapsulated by the media’s
name for the group, “Hiroshima Maidens,” which was not how the participants referred
to themselves or how the project’s organizers referred to them (Barker 1985). This
anachronistic terminology characterized the women as virginal and innocent and
acquiescent, all qualities that white women were believed to have lost during their
wartime periods of service and independence (Simpson 2002, 116). Paying close
attention to these kinds of details makes clear that different ideological frameworks are
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necessary for interpreting atomic bomb disability representations versus other
disability representations during the early Cold War period.

Conclusion
Thus, the Hiroshima Maidens Project marks a particular crisis of representation
concerning imperial disablement, insofar as it inspired a different standard for visual
representation of nuclear disability from the standard applied to white Americans with
disabilities. It is important and necessary to consider the full range of possible
representations when evaluating those gathered in the archive. In this case, I have
argued that it is necessary to consider media coverage of the Hiroshima Maidens Project
in relation to the suppressed images of atomic violence, and in relation to other
representations of disability during the early Cold War period.
Further, medical humanitarianism, or the humanitarian uses of medical scientific
knowledge, must be understood as a critical component of U.S. scientific imperialism—a
component that was being worked out during the early Cold War period. The
humanitarian applications of scientific knowledge demonstrate its healing potential,
which is supposed to counterbalance the harming potential of military applications of
scientific knowledge. There are a variety of ethical problems inherent in this. First and
foremost, the engine that drives biomedical research is often military—the needs of
wounded and sick soldiers are deemed top priority, and the benefits later trickle down
to the general public, as took place with the advent of plastic surgery and prosthetics,
which were originally developed for disfigured veterans. Without war as a justification
for such research, where would the United States be in terms of biomedical innovation?
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Further, as earlier noted, people of color have often been recruited or compelled under
compromised circumstances to participate in early studies that result in the
development of biomedical technologies that later benefit white, middle‐class
Americans. Finally, in some cases, the humanitarian applications of biomedical research
can never repair the extent of the damage inflicted by scientific weapons. The scale is so
vastly disproportionate between injured bodies and healing resources. Thus,
humanitarian applications of scientific knowledge diminish the apparent need for
reparations but not the actual need and are therefore distracting from the genuine
scope of the problem. Thus, it is important to consider that, however well intentioned,
humanitarian projects primarily serve a representational purpose more than a
remediation purpose. They are expensive forms of communication about the role of the
United States in the world and the power of individual charity to foster human
connection and overcome wartime enmity. Unfortunately, while the architects of such
projects sometimes hope that the narratives that arise from the projects will change
hearts and minds in favor of peace or justice, the case of the Hiroshima Maidens Project
suggests that such programs often have the effect of inducing complacency: I’ve done my
part. Further, although the U.S. government did not sponsor the project, and did not
require the participants to make a public statement (as the Soviets requested)
denouncing communism, the “success” of the Hiroshima Maidens Project served to
bolster support for “the American way.”
This does not mean that the individuals involved don’t genuinely benefit, or that
we shouldn’t care if only a single life or a few are changed by an act of humanitarianism.
But we should not forget the thousands of others who are left behind/out of such
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projects, why they were left out, and the ideological messages conveyed by those
projects, which may be more long lasting than the effects of the charitable undertaking.
Many of the women who participated in the Hiroshima Maidens Project continued to
experience health complications, economic hardship, discrimination, and other
problems when they returned to Japan, because the world their surgeons returned
them to was still damaged.
Finally, it is important to consider that the Hiroshima Maidens Project may also
have contributed to the suppression of Japanese imperialism from that nation’s
historical record. Yoneyama identifies the troubling erasure of Japan’s imperialist
aggressions from that nation’s official national history (as codified in textbooks and
memorials) and the recasting of the Japanese as defenders of “the Asia Pacific region
against the Western superpowers” and, ultimately, as victims of Western imperialism
(1999, Kindle Loc. 342, 357). “That the Japanese were humanity’s first named victims of
atomic age warfare,” Yoneyama explains, “decisively contributed to [the] equation of
Japan’s and the rest of Asia’s experience of Western imperialism and racism” (1999,
Kindle Loc. 478). While Yoneyama focuses primarily on discourses within Japan, one can
argue that the United States postwar effort to reconstruct the image of Japan from
enemy to ally contributed to obscuring or downplaying Japan’s imperial past and
minimizing the culpability of Japanese civilians. Since much attention was given to the
fact that the Japanese women who participated in the project had been children at the
time of the bombings, they served as emblematic “innocent victims” of atomic warfare,
and thus perhaps contributed to the suppression of Japan’s imperial legacy. This
contributed to that nation’s assuming an identity as a demilitarized nation dedicated to
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peace, which would belie its eventual cooperation with the United States during the
Vietnam War.
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Chapter 4
Maquilapolis: Mobilizing Resistance to Global Capitalist Violence
in the Global South

While the previous chapter focused on the injuries sustained by the Japanese and
other survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings during World War II, this chapter moves
forward to the contemporary era of economic globalization, in which the United States
and Japan have partnered with other global leaders in the imperialist labor exploitation
and environmental devastation of regions variously described as “developing,” “Third
World” or the “global South.”
41
The shift in capitalist political economy following the
global recession of 1973, described by David Harvey as a “transition in the regime of
accumulation” from “rigid Fordism” to “flexible accumulation” (1989, 121, 147), has
benefitted First World economies, investors, and consumers at the expense of the lives
and health of Third World workers and their environments, already vulnerable from
centuries of colonialism and imperialism.
Severe structural adjustment policies (SAPs) imposed on Third World
governments by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have
facilitated this transition in global political economy. These policies of rapid
industrialization and economic restructuring have compelled Third World nations to
divert funds from social services to debt repayments to already wealthy creditor

41
Setting aside the term developing with its connotations of progress, I use global South or “Third
World,” in the sense Nirmala Erevelles describes; she “deploy[s] the term . . . in a much more
expansive way” than those who “geographically situate the Third World [only] in the former colonies
of Europe located in Asia, Africa, and South America.” Rather, she uses the term “to expose how the
social, political, and economic conditions of global capitalism produce spaces of extreme exploitation
and oppression in both the imperialist states and their former colonies” (2011, 122).
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nations. Michael Davidson reports that many governments in the global South "transfer
to northern creditors four times more in debt payments than they spend on the health
and education of their citizens” (2006, 117). From these repayments, the United States
receives $200 million weekly (Davidson 2006, 117). This diversion (theft) of resources
from global South to North helps to explain the fact that the global South is home to 80
percent of the world’s population of people with disabilities, yet has access to only 10
percent of the world’s health resources (Davidson 2006, 117).
Beyond diverting the resources that Third World nations might otherwise expend
on social services, education, and health care, the IMF and World Bank austerity
programs have also coerced these nations into signing free‐trade agreements that
provide multinational corporations with “cheap, controllable labor,” sizable tax breaks,
and relaxed import/export restrictions (Ho et al 2000, 380). Grace Chang argues that
the IMF and World Bank’s policies “effectively create situations of debt bondage such
that these indebted nations must surrender their citizens, especially women,” to the
economic exploitation of First World nations and corporations (2000, 4). Garrett Brown
points out that the 500 largest multinational corporations now “control 70% of world
trade, one third of all manufacturing exports, three fourths of all commodity trade, and
four fifths of technical and management services,” affording them “immense . . . power
to intervene in the political actions of any country to prevent the promulgation of new
regulations and to weaken or eliminate enforcement of existing laws” (2005, 207).
Further, because free‐trade agreements give multinational corporations license to
“scour the globe for the cheapest sources of labor in developing countries” (Ho et al.
2000, 380), these corporations can threaten to decimate a particular nation’s economy
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if it does not keep its labor costs competitive with those in other Third World countries
(Ho et al. 2000, 380).
Focusing specifically on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
Brown describes the protection of worker safety and health as a “near‐total failure”
resulting from the “limited scope” of the labor side agreement attached to NAFTA, the
North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) (Brown 2005, 207).
Although NAALC was considered by some a landmark in free‐trade negotiations for
raising the issue of workers’ rights at all, as Mary Jane Bolle discusses in a report to the
U.S. Congress, it “does not require any country to adopt any new worker rights laws or
conform to any international standards—only to enforce what it already has on the
books” (Bolle 2001, 3). While Canada, the United States, and Mexico all have significant
worker protections “on the books,” and pledged in NAALC to “promote” international
principles they don’t already have on record (Bolle 2001, 3), the consequences are
minimal if they fail to enforce or promote these principles. In most cases, if a
multinational corporation violates a nation’s labor laws and that nation fails to take
action, the “punishment” outlined under NAALC is a series of inter‐governmental
“discussions” (Bolle 2001, 4). Only three types of labor violations can, in theory, be
punished through economic sanctions: violations of child‐protection laws, minimum‐
wage laws, and laws preventing occupational injuries and illnesses (Bolle 2001, CRS‐4).
However, the process established by NAALC for investigating such violations is lengthy,
complicated, and lacks transparency (Brown 2005, 207). Further, because the
infringement of workers’ right to unionize is not among these economically
sanctionable violations, and unions have historically proven the most effective
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mechanism to protect workers on site from health and safety threats (Brown 2002, 15),
NAALC ultimately offers very weak protection and support for worker safety and
health, despite seeming to elevate these elements to the highest status. Finally, NAALC
places the burden of enforcement on national governments, which in the case of Mexico
experiences simultaneous pressure from the IMF and the World Bank to ignore its own
labor laws in order to keep up with debt repayments to creditor nations. Meanwhile,
there is no mechanism outlined in NAALC for holding multinational corporations
directly liable for labor violations.
Chang paraphrases former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari who,
during negotiations in 1991 over NAFTA, announced that “Mexico would either export
its people or its products to the United States, although the latter was preferable” (2000,
4). Such attitudes and policies, Chang argues, reflect the “commodification of Third
World women” (2000, 16). This commodification is also reflected—though obscured by
insidious bureaucratic abstractions—in Mary Jane Bolle’s report to the U.S. Congress
synopsizing the “controversies” that have arisen over the labor‐side agreement that was
attached to NAFTA, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC). She
explains that multinational corporations “argue that . . . the promotion of respect for
worker rights provisions through trade agreements might hamper their ability to tap
the natural comparative advantage of low‐wage, labor‐abundant countries in producing
labor‐intensive goods, and thereby compete successfully in the international
marketplace” (Bolle 2001, CRS‐2). Inherent in this argument is that multinational
corporations are entitled to “tap” the “low‐wage, labor” in Third World countries for
their own “advantage” or profit, and that the existence of this “abundant” labor force
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has arisen “naturally” rather than through centuries of colonialist and imperialist
violence and deprivation. Bolle then summarizes the counter‐arguments of worker‐
rights advocates, after which she turns to the analysis of economists, who argue that
“imposing worker rights destroys the basis for trade in these countries and generally
dampens income growth and economic development” (2001, CRS‐2). Further, they
“point out that as nations develop economically and production rises, they tend to adopt
worker rights protections as workers shift their focus and their demands from merely
wages and holding a job to broader concerns over the quality of their work
environment” (Bolle 2001, CRS‐2). The economists’ language of “destruction” cannily
positions global capitalism as the potential “victim” of worker‐rights provisions,
conveying that successful trade depends on the exploitation of desperate nations and
their desperate workers who are willing (or compelled) to exchange their own health
and longevity for the merest provisions of existence.
Lupita Castañeda, a factory worker and labor activist interviewed in the
documentary film Maquilapolis (2006), echoes Chang’s point about commodification
when she explains: “Under globalization, a woman factory worker is like a commodity.”
This commodification, the film reveals, renders such a worker vulnerable to
occupational hazards and chronic illness. Maquilapolis documents on a local level—in
Tijuana, Mexico—the global pattern of exploitation Chang describes, in which women of
color are treated as laboring machines who can be discarded and forgotten when their
bodies no longer perform to an able‐bodied standard. The film also portrays how local
communities are treated as dumping grounds for the toxic by‐products of multinational
corporations, leading to a cascade of environmental‐related health issues.
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Maquilapolis represents the day‐to‐day lives of several women maquiladora
workers in Tijuana, as well as their collective, grassroots activism to obtain restitution
from multinational corporations and the Mexican government for labor and
environmental violations. Produced over five years, the film represents a binational and
bilingual partnership among nearly 20 women worker‐activists, a U.S.‐based
independent filmmaker (Vicky Funari, who spent part of her childhood in Mexico City),
and an artist (Sergio de la Torre, who was raised in Tijuana but now lives in San
Francisco). Artistically, it represents a collage of different documentary and
experimental film techniques, including selections from video diaries filmed by the
activists; traditional talking‐head‐style interview segments with activists and other
community members; video essay segments that inform the viewer about the rise and
decline of the maquiladora industry in Tijuana, with voice‐over explanations provided
by the activists; and performance art sequences performed by the activists that
dramatize the labor they perform and its bodily and environmental effects, all
accompanied by an original musical score that incorporates the clicking and clattering
sounds of factory machinery.
Through this complex and compelling assemblage, Maquilapolis suggests that the
experience of becoming sick—as a result of environmental and workplace hazards—
engenders new identities for some of the women, not necessarily as disabled or
chronically ill people but as labor and environmental justice activists, and later as
filmmakers, educators, and performers.
⁠ Disability and chronic health issues, the film
suggests, are bodily manifestations of a wide range of global capitalist abuses. These
abuses include the lack of accountability for bodily injuries and the fact that the U.S. and
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Mexican legal systems are unlikely to recognize or compensate workers for bodily
injuries, only—at best—for economic or environmental injuries. While the activists
emphasize the importance of health issues in their spoken narratives, the legal
structures they engage with obscure the significance of illness in their lives and in their
activism.
Although this is not explained in the film, I would venture that this obscurity
results from the fact that there are few legal avenues under NAFTA for addressing
occupational and environmental safety hazards or for obtaining compensation for
occupational injuries and environmental violations. Further, it can be extremely difficult
to prove culpability for workplace and environmental illnesses in a court of law, as
environmental justice advocates have discovered over the past few decades. For these
reasons, it seems likely that the activists in Maquilapolis chose a strategy based on its
legal viability—pursuing compensation for a precise, collective moment of economic
injury (unpaid severance pay) and for a precise moment of environmental injury (the
abandonment of a battery‐processing plant) in place of compensation for long‐term
bodily injury. Thus, the film implicitly demonstrates that activism related to health and
disability issues may necessarily be waged under different names and with different
goals in global Southern contexts from disability activism in the North, where issues of
stigma, discrimination, and access are prioritized over the prevention of future
disabilities and the provision of economic assistance and medical care (Davidson 2006,
121; Meekosha 2011, 667); or from environmental activism in the North intended to
secure massive compensation to individuals for environmentally induced illnesses, such
as the lawsuit portrayed in the film Erin Brockovich.
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Further, in some ways and in some instances, the film visually downplays illness
and disability as identity‐defining experiences, perhaps at the behest of the activists
themselves, who collaborated in its design. In particular, the film departs from common
visual disability tropes such as the visual presentation of “deformed” children in the
service of charity appeals intended to inspire pity and sentimentality in viewers. This
suggests a deliberate avoidance of what Wendy Brown refers to as a “politicized
identity,” the kind of identity required, for example, in civil rights lawsuits or petitions
for Social Security Disability Income. This is the “abstract, atomized type of
individuality” and identity “favored by American capitalism,” Viet Thanh Nguyen
explains; instead, the film offers what Nguyen might describe as “an antiracist form of
identity that is resistant to a capitalism that exploits racial differences” (2002, 1).
Indeed, the film’s emphasis on collective action supports what Davidson has described
as a new critical turn in disability studies. He argues that “[w]hen we consider disability
as a global phenomenon we are forced to reevaluate some of the keywords of disability
studies—stigma, normalcy, ableism, bodily difference—from a comparative cultural
perspective. We must ask to what extent the discourse of ‘disability’ is underwritten by
a Western, state‐centered model that assumes values of individual rights and equality
guaranteed by legal contract” (2006, 118).

Embodied Knowledge in Maquilapolis
We are taught that the body is an animal; intelligence dwells only in the head.
But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli
from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination
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as it does to ‘real’ events”—Gloria Anzaldúa (1999, 59–60).
In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa challenges the mind/body split
privileged within Western philosophy, which has often ascribed physicality as a sign of
inferiority to people of color. Anzaldúa encourages women of color to claim the body's
knowledge (pain, pleasure, and beyond) as an inspiration for political questioning and
action. Many of the activists profiled in Maquilapolis foreground the body as a source of
knowledge, explaining how they were inspired to take action against the maquiladoras
because of the obvious physical effects on their own bodies and their loved ones.
Informed by women of color feminism, medical anthropologist Víctor M. Torres‐
Vélez argues that peoples’ “embodied understandings of the relationship between
environment and disease trigger—in militarized or industrialized landscapes—
powerful cultural critiques that offer insights into both modernity’s failures and the
emergence of social movements” (2007, Abstract). The particular people he refers to
are the residents of Vieques Island, Puerto Rico, whom he interviewed as part of his
ethnographic study of the activist mobilization that forced the U.S. Navy off the island in
2003, after a half‐century’s occupation. This social movement was galvanized by two
events—the death of a Puerto Rican guard by an errant bomb, and the dramatic rise of
cancer rates on the island, which residents were able to link to the Navy’s decades‐long
testing and storage of weapons, including depleted uranium (Torres‐Vélez 2007, 68).
Torres‐Vélez points out that “‘new social movements, especially those organized
around environmental justice concerns, are also health movements, although they are
not usually regarded as such in medical anthropology’” (Ferguson qtd. in Torres‐Vélez
2007, 37). This observation extends beyond medical anthropology to many fields
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including American studies and disability studies. Torres‐Vélez adds that, “by the same
token, the literature on new social movements” has “overlooked what I will call the
health/identity nexus as a pivotal element in the formation of such movements” (2007,
37). In his research, Torres‐Vélez paid particular attention to “narratives that illustrated
embodied understandings of the rapidly changing health and environmental landscape”
(2007, 71). Because “the established medical regime was not able to satisfy people’s
quest for an explanation of the high incidence of disease,” he explains, residents of
Vieques “started to organize around that issue. This organizing put pressure on the
medical institutions in place to investigate people’s ‘suspicions’ about the negative
impact of the military practices on people’s health” (2007, 64). Thus, he argues, “it was
through the body—as the eventual register of epidemiological changes—that people’s
political awareness awakened” (2007, 71).
Focusing on the “relationship between illness and identity,” Torres‐Vélez argues,
“we can gain insights into the emergence of environmental movements as processes of
identity formation” (2007, Abstract). He adds that “the constitution of subjectivity, far
from being understood as exclusively taking place through discourse, emerges from a
historically situated body entangled in complex social, economic, political and
environmental relations” (2007, 38). Further, he argues that “consciousness cannot be
separated from the experiential body because it is in the body that environmental
contradictions get expressed and from the body that any awareness of, and action
against, such contradictions might emerge” (2007, 38). Significantly, Torres‐Vélez
contends that “the experience of disease can, instead of victimizing, be empowering for
it forces the subject into a re‐evaluation of his/her place in the social scheme that in
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most cases is political” (2007, 6).
While Torres‐Vélez focuses on a community that has been formally colonized
and militarized by the United States, his insights and analysis shed light on the rise of
activist movements among maquiladora workers in Tijuana, a region that has been
subjected to the overlapping and mutually reinforcing violences of global capitalist
industrialization and border militarization. What relationship does Maquilapolis posit
among health, identity, and activist movements in this geopolitical context? Although
Maquilapolis includes testimony from several activists, it focuses primarily on two
women—Carmen Durán and Lourdes Luján—each of whom identifies health issues as a
significant factor motivating her activism. Neither woman identifies herself as disabled.
Instead, both women identify as promotoras, which literally means “promoters of the
law,” but which in practice conveys enforcers of the law, as the activists seek to educate
themselves and their communities about what laws exist to protect them and their
environments and to hold multinational corporations and the Mexican government
accountable for violations of those laws. Durán and Luján undertake different
trajectories toward this shared activist identity: Durán arrives through her participation
in a women’s labor‐rights group, while Luján participates in a women’s environmental
justice coalition. Becoming a promotora, the film demonstrates, involves a practice of
collaborative education, as the film includes scenes of the women gathered at a
workers’ rights center, giving presentations to each other about the law. “What little
you know you pass on. I can’t stay quiet,” explains Durán of her involvement in the
women’s labor group. Thus, through the video diaries and interviews profiling these
women, the film represents two different but complementary processes of activist
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identity formation that share health concerns as a point of origin and that meet up again
at the site of promotora.
Viewers are first introduced to Luján in ways that emphasize her identities as a
promotora and as a resident of a particular neighborhood. In the first scene, she is
shown at a gathering of activists. She smiles at the camera, centered in the frame while
other activists mill about in the background. She appears in this shot to be a paragon of
health. In the next scene, Luján is shown at a distance, standing at the edge of a small
river, as she introduces us to the landscape of her colonia / neighborhood,
Chilpancingo—the river, a school bus crossing the river, goats trotting over the rickety
bridge. She explains that she has witnessed dramatic environmental changes in
Chilpancingo over the course of her lifetime, corresponding to the rise of the
maquiladoras. In particular, she explains that the river, which appears muddy, used to
be clear enough that she could bathe and swim in it. Through this scene, which appears
to be an assemblage of shots from her video diary, Luján and the filmmakers establish
what environmental justice scholar Devon Peña identifies as a place‐based identity, a
form of “resistance identity” that arises when “[p]lace‐based knowledge of locality is
combined with critical consciousness of the threats posed by the modernist projects of a
globalized political economy” (2002, 65). Interspersed with these images, the
filmmakers inserts shots from an interview segment with Luján, in which she is shown
in close‐up, a red sore visibly apparent above her lips. Thus, though Luján doesn’t yet
make this connection narratively, the film forges it for us visually—implying that the
changes in the river are linked to the changes on her face from the opening scene at the
activist collective to this interview scene.
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Returning to the video diary, Luján introduces us to her children and husband,
establishing her identity as a mother and wife; and then shares with the viewers her
chronic health issues. The multi‐phased introduction to these different aspects of her
identity reveal the intersectionality of her life experience as well as, perhaps, her
prioritization of elements within that intersectional constellation.
However, in a subsequent interview segment, Luján and a neighbor woman talk
about the increasing urgency of their health issues and those of their children, which
they correlate with the presence of the maquiladoras and which has inspired them to
take action. Luján points to sores on her face and arms and explains that she also
experiences chronic sinus congestion. The neighbor reports that her daughter
experiences these effects as well. They point out that these health effects increase each
time the nearby maquiladoras release toxins into the local water supply. The scene
moves from a shot of their faces and torsos—Luján appearing with visible sores on her
face and arms—to a shot of a stream close by, which appears silty. Luján explains that
the problems they describe among their family members are much more widespread
across the community, which she discovered when she volunteered to take a health
survey sponsored by the San Diego Environmental Health Coalition. She explains that
her neighbors reported disabilities and health problems ranging from hives to cancer,
lead poisoning to babies being born without brains and other body parts. She also
determines that an abandoned battery recycling plant is leaching lead into her
neighborhood’s ground water.
“I don’t want my children to live with this,” explains Luján. “That’s what
motivates me to find a solution.” Thus, she frames her activism as arising from the
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intersection of health, gender, and place as a mother and as a long‐time resident of
Chilpancingo working to secure a healthier future for the next generation.
Carmen Durán frames her activism somewhat differently—as a quest for justice,
in the form of compensation for the health and wages she has lost to the maquiladoras.
Durán characterizes herself, through her video diaries and in interviews, as a resilient
worker and devoted single mother. The film’s opening scene comes from Durán’s video
journal, which shows her at work in a factory with other women colleagues. The labor
appears both physically demanding and technically precise, requiring teamwork as well
as individual specialization, contrary to the common characterization of sweatshop
labor as “unskilled.” As Durán invites viewers to join her at work, she recounts how she
moved by herself to Tijuana at the age of 13 and has supported herself ever since,
working in nine different maquiladoras over the past two decades. At the end of this
scene, Durán films her face from below, her head almost entirely filling the frame,
creating an intimidating and a powerful first impression of a woman who is proud of the
work she has done, and proud that she has survived on her own all these years.
As the film proceeds with more selections from her video journal and traditional
“talking‐head”‐style interview segments, Durán shares that she is a single mother of
three living in a house constructed from recycled garage doors, cast‐offs from the
United States. Walking the viewer through a typical day in her life, Durán explains that
she works the graveyard shift in order to be able to spend daytime hours with her
children; while at home, she spends several hours each day cooking meals and heating
water to bathe her children and preparing them for school. At best, she manages to
sleep a few hours each day. She tells viewers about one of her former jobs, in a Sanyo
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maquiladora making a TV part called a “flyback.” At this job, she developed kidney
damage because the workers were not allowed to take bathroom breaks; however, she
explains, she continued working there for six years because she was, in her own words,
“hard‐headed” and because she valued the time with her friends. However, when Sanyo
closed the plant suddenly, explaining that the flyback could be made for less money in
Asia, Durán and her fellow workers were laid off without notice or severance. This
betrayal inspires Durán to get involved in a labor rights organization, assisted by a
volunteer lawyer, that takes Sanyo to court.
The implied message conveyed by Durán’s narrative about why she pursued the
lawsuit is that Sanyo not only violated her right to lost wages, but also threatened her
identity as a resilient and “hard‐headed” worker. By endangering her health, Sanyo
betrayed a basic, implicit contract she believed she had entered into, different from the
one officially represented by NAALC. This implicit contract went something like this: “I
sacrificed my health for this job; the least you, Sanyo, could have done in return is give
me proper notice and severance for that sacrifice.” Such a sacrifice shouldn’t be
necessary at all, of course, but it reflects the severe compromises workers—often single
mothers who have migrated from other parts of Mexico—are coerced into making to
stay employed at all under the lax labor conditions tacitly allowed by NAFTA and
NAALC. By endangering her health, Sanyo has already violated many more labor laws
than just those pertaining to lay‐offs and severance, but severance pay is what Durán
and her fellow promotoras pursue, perhaps on the advice of their volunteer attorney,
who explains that their case may be precedent setting for the industry.

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Over the course of the film, the lawsuit winds its way through various legal
channels, and Durán gets a new job at a Panasonic factory. The cycle of illness begins
again. In one scene, Carmen is interviewed at her home, explaining how she was
exposed on a daily basis at Panasonic to fuming clouds of chemicals that she could see
and smell. Panasonic provided no warnings or protections, she explains, and soon, she
grew extremely ill. Her doctor then diagnosed her with lead poisoning. In the next
scene, Carmen is shown in profile, her face filling the right third of the screen as she
looks down at the Panasonic factory from above. As she (and we with her) watch
miniature‐size workers exiting from the single factory door, Carmen explains that she
worked there for 6 months, until she became too sick to continue. “I got medical
treatment,” she explains, “but it didn’t help.” Her size and placement above the factory,
looking down at the miniscule figures of the workers below, suggests her expanded
perspective and knowledge that they too are probably carrying lead and impending
sickness home with them. In the next scene, she is at home again, which reinforces her
next statement: “So Panasonic fired me because I kept missing work,” thus sending her
home semi‐permanently.
As this scene shifts back and forth from her face to her young daughter playing in
the dirt, she explains: “My doctor told me that I had to choose whether I wanted to die
or live and take care of my kids.” In framing the situation in such terms, the doctor faces
Durán with a choice between her identity as a worker and her identity as a mother—a
“choice” she wouldn’t have had to make if Panasonic had not recklessly endangered her
health. Thus, she “chooses” not to work for a year, in order to recover her health and
fulfill her role as a mother, losing her livelihood and her identity as a worker. She
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doesn’t explain how she managed to support herself or her children, though it is clear
she belongs to a generous community of friends, family, and fellow activists. Thus, the
film implicitly conveys that the costs of Durán’s occupational illnesses are borne by her
community as opposed to the multinational corporations or the federal governments
that have rendered her vulnerable to life‐threatening and chronic illnesses. Three
months into her unpaid and forced “medical leave,” Durán has a lucky break: she
receives her severance check from Sanyo—an unexpected but timely legal victory. With
these funds—an amount equivalent to US$2,500, much higher than the usual US$300 or
US$400 the Labor Board usually awards, she is able to continue recovering from her
chronic health issues and put down a floor in her home.
Though the film celebrates Durán’s victory, showing her holding up a photocopy
of the severance check, her somber tone in this interview segment, paired with the
film’s documentation of the cycle of illness and unemployment she endures, temper the
sense of triumph. The film reminds viewers of the larger injustices of the situation: a
severance check designed to compensate Durán for temporary lost wages must instead
be used to cover the expenses she incurs during her forced medical unemployment. As
such, given its modest amount, it doesn’t even come close to compensating her for the
lost wages of health she has incurred from her years of working in the maquiladoras, or
the future costs she may experience down the line. While she indicates that she has
recovered her health, she also explains that anytime she enters a factory where there is
lead, she instantly gets sick again. Stacy Alaimo refers to illness as a form of bodily
protest against labor and environmental violations (2010, 31). But the costs of this
resistance are borne by Durán and her community rather than by the multinational
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corporations that make such resistance necessary. One cannot help but wonder what
repercussions she will experience in the years ahead, particularly if she continues
working for maquiladoras that disregard worker health and safety. Who will pay for
Durán and her children if at some point she is no longer able to do the work of the
maquiladoras at all? Further, if she eventually qualifies for some kind of government‐
sponsored disability assistance, will it cover her actual needs and expenses? Will she
have to perform an injured identity to obtain this assistance?

Limits of Visibility
By focusing on the stories of workplace and environmental illness such as those
experienced by Durán and Luján, the film exposes the limits of vision and the visible for
capturing and conveying the full extent of global capitalism’s impact on human health.
In contrast to many Western media representations that voyeuristically focus on visible
disabilities, Maquilapolis draws attention to the sometimes‐invisible disabilities created
by global capitalism, reminding viewers that disability is more than what meets the
privileged eye.
Robert McRuer argues that, within global capitalism, “long hours and hard labor
ensure that a system that wants ‘young and strong workers’ is always haunted by
disability, and the need for surplus profit ensures that a system that generates disability
must immediately conjure it away when it appears” (2006, 204). In other words, while
the system surely creates disabilities, it also renders them invisible by immediately
replacing injured workers with those who have yet to be injured, hiding the disabling
effects of global capitalism from view. Further, in a more literal sense, many of the
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disabilities that result from labor and environmental exploitation are invisible, slowly
destroying the body from within instead of manifesting dramatically on the surface of
the body.
In highlighting the invisibility of many of the workers’ disabilities, Maquilapolis
challenges the common Western media convention of exploiting individuals with visible
disabilities to solicit pity from audience members. Call to mind, for example, images of
children with cleft palates or missing limbs used in fundraising appeals for world
charity organizations. In contrast, when Luján describes the many disabilities that were
reported by community residents, the scene shifts back and forth from a talking‐head
style interview to shots of a young girl playing in her neighborhood. The child appears
to be healthy, but Luján’s voice‐over narration implies that this child too might have a
disability despite visual evidence suggesting her able‐bodiedness. What this suggests is
that disability is sometimes an invisible yet toxic effect of other forms of oppression
such as racism that rely on and exploit the notion of visible differences.

Not Another Rescue Narrative
There is another way in which Maquilapolis revises Western media conventions
surrounding disability. Whereas the visual media coverage of the humanitarian
Hiroshima Maidens Project (discussed in Chapter 3) aimed to generate an outpouring of
sympathy and charity on behalf of the wounded women from Japan, who were framed
as helpless victims of atomic violence, the political documentary Maquilapolis
represents the wounded women workers as capable and determined activists who do
not need to be rescued, but whose efforts need to be supported by First World viewers
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who have the power to change their consumption practices and to challenge their
government’s policies that perpetuate “situations of debt bondage” in Third World
contexts (Chang 2000, 4).
To more fully appreciate the intervention Maquilapolis makes in the
international field of disability representations, it is helpful to compare it with another
transnational documentary, The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991, directed by Dennis
O’Rourke), which Eunjung Kim and Michelle Jarman critique in their article
“Modernity’s Rescue Mission.” Kim and Jarman discuss how recent international films
have represented disability to global audiences, arguing that “Western or modern
gestures to rescue people with disabilities in non‐Western or ‘premodern’ locations
strategically function to produce hierarchies between different societies and nations.”
The Good Woman of Bangkok purports to document the life of Aoi, a Thai prostitute with
a disability whose sexual services were solicited by O’Rourke himself, a white
Australian filmmaker‐turned‐sex‐tourist. Kim and Jarman argue that the film “deploys
the powerful logic of cultural superiority to blur the issues of gender exploitation within
the international sex market through the process and promise of ‘rescuing’ the disabled
protagonist.” Further, Kim and Jarman argue that, “the director . . . strategically
manipulates Aoi's visual (and visible) impairment to evoke a specific response from his
audience as to the ‘double tragedy’ represented by her ‘imperfect’ body and her
participation in sexual labor.”
Maquilapolis counters many of the representational tropes in The Good Woman
of Bangkok, offering a narrative of mobilization rather than rescue. First and foremost, it
portrays the women workers as active agents capable of transforming their own lives
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and becoming leaders in their communities. Further, the film does not offer another
kind of rescue narrative in which Western‐style liberal democracy saves these
women—but instead places their legal battles and victories into a broader, more
ambivalent perspective. Though the narrative arc of the film seems at first to align with
the women’s legal battles and victories—for example, Durán visiting a lawyer, taking
her case to court, and finally receiving a severance check; Luján organizing a protest in
front of the attorney general’s office and then participating in a ceremony to launch the
cleanup of an abandoned lead site in her neighborhood—by the end of the film, they
(and the viewers) recognize the limits of this approach. As Luján explains, for every one
victory the women achieve, there are hundreds more factories still polluting their
communities and still committing labor abuses. Indeed, the filmmakers explain in an
interview with Rosa‐Linda Fregoso that, throughout most of the shooting, they did not
expect either of the lawsuits to succeed (Fregoso 2010, 180–181). Further, the film
shows the entire Tijuana economy in flux, as many of the transnational corporations
begin to close up their factories and move to Asia in search of ever‐cheaper labor,
disappearing before they can be held accountable for their crimes, the evidence of
which will reveal itself for decades to come, but long after statutes of limitation expire.
Among those long‐term effects will be those pertaining to health. While Durán’s
story raises questions about her long‐term health and the costs associated with it, the
film avoids visually representing Durán as a sick or disabled person. Though her
illnesses defy visual representation, since they lurk behind the surfaces of the body,
filmmakers have found ways of rendering an “invisible” illness visible, such as in Todd
Haynes’s independent narrative film Safe, which shows a woman with environmental
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illness going to the doctor for tests, wheezing during an allergy attack, collapsing at the
dry cleaners. Maquilapolis does not include similar scenes and re‐enactments, which
would likely shift the film into the melodramatic mode, seeking to evoke sentimental
feelings of pity for Durán.
Luján takes a different approach, attempting to use the visual evidence of her
body’s response to environmental contamination to inspire outrage and action. In the
interview segments and in a scene showing Luján at a political demonstration outside a
government environmental protection office, she holds her arms out for spectators to
see the chronic rash on her skin. This gesture harkens back to similar images used in
labor activism pamphlets, which depict disabled workers holding out their arms or
hands to show the evidence of their occupational injuries. As discussed in Chapter 3, not
all survivors of imperial injury feel comfortable showcasing their bodies as evidence in
a larger activist campaign for social justice. Durán, perhaps, is one such person. Luján,
on the other hand, invites spectators to stare. The defiant expression on her face and
stance of her body in front of the building minimize the possibilities of a sentimental
response.

Commodities Who Talk Balk
Similar to Luján’s stance at the demonstration, the women in the film present
themselves as commodities who talk back to the system, refusing the degrading labor
practices of their employers and presenting their own experiences as evidence for the
public court of opinion. Rather than calling on affluent Western audiences to “rescue”
the women, the film places the blame for the women’s injuries squarely on the
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multinational corporations that supply consumers with cheap commodities, the
national governments that cooperate with those corporations, and the consumers who
take advantage of those affordable goods without regard to how they are produced. The
film educates and implicates audiences through multiple visual techniques, including
one scene in which a series of women workers appear, each naming and holding the
product she builds—cell phones, batteries, medical supplies, televisions. In another
sequence, the women activists are presented one at a time in a showroom, mirroring an
earlier scene in which a TV set rotated in front of a curtain. As she rotates, each woman
recites the name of the company she works for: Panasonic, Sanyo, Estrella, Tocabi,
Nellcor, and so on. In tandem, the logos of the companies appear on screen and remain
hovering against the background, surrounding the women’s heads. Appearing
immediately after Castañeda’s comment about women being commodities under
globalization, this scene at first seems to suggest that the activists identify themselves
as commodities produced by these companies, or take on the identities of the
companies themselves. But naming the companies actually serves to indict them for
their exploitative labor practices, strategically “mobilizing shame” against them, a tactic
Fregoso discusses in a related article on feminicide in U.S.‐Mexico border towns (2006).
This strategy also reminds First World viewers—who likely recognize the names of
those companies among their possessions—how much our/their lifestyle depends on
the labor of the women like those in the film and gives us/them an instruction in
grassroots activism. The film invites us, like the border activists portrayed in one
segment of the film, to partner with the promotoras, to support their efforts, not to
rescue them.
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Performing Labor, Labor as Performance
This message is reinforced in the performance art pieces, which the women activists
carry out in a vacant dirt lot adjacent to a maquiladora. In one segment, the women turn
the mechanical motions of the factory into a graceful dance of hands, emphasizing that
no matter how alienating and repetitive the work is, they bring to it an individual
artistry and humanity that is neither recognized nor valued by the maquiladoras. Part of
that artistry is the creation of an activist community, symbolically represented by the
line of nine women performing complementary but non‐identical movements. In this
scene the camera often zooms in on the arms and hands of the women, seeming to
render their body parts anonymous and interchangeable much as the maquiladoras
seek to do, demonstrating why the women workers—with their “agile” and “graceful”
fingers—are so coveted by the maquiladoras. However, these scenes reclaim that
artistry as testimony of their individuality and their bonds with each other. By the end
of the film, one begins to recognize the individual women’s hands from various
interview and video diary segments, which likewise render familiar and specific the
body parts that are supposed to be, under global capitalism, anonymous and
internationally interchangeable. Yet, by showing the women together in a line, the film
continues to emphasize the importance of community, their individual identities as
parts of a whole activist collective. Further, the location of the performance conveys
that the women have escaped the walls of the factories, literally taking their labor
“outside the box” of the box‐like factories, as their labor becomes the labor of activism
instead of manufacturing.

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Stepping Out of Global Capitalist Time
Stepping out of the box involves changing tempos as well as physical locations. Another
experimental sequence reinforces a comment made by Durán that, in Tijuana,
everything moves at the speed of light, “a hundred years a minute.” In voice‐over, an
activist explains the meaning of promotora while on screen we are introduced, one‐by‐
one, to the nine activists interviewed in the film. The film does not introduce them by
name in this sequence, though in other segments their names appear in captions.
Instead, in this sequence, each woman is shown standing in the foreground of a bustling
scene of industrial urban life. Some women appear alone; others appear with a group of
people, seemingly her family members. Each of the women remains still while the world
behind her moves in hyper‐fast motion. Through this experimental technique, the
filmmakers do more than the standard compression of “real” time (in this case 5 years)
into cinematic time (68 minutes). In this sequence, the seeming acceleration of time
represented by the fast‐motion cinematography suggests that those working in the
maquiladoras live something more like 25 years in the space of five. No wonder then
that workers’ bodies age prematurely, begin to wear out in their late 20s.
Though this segment does not reference health visually or in voice‐over, the
previous discussions of labor‐ and environmental‐related illnesses, combined with this
experimental sequence, imply that some of these women may have been compelled by
their bodies to slow down and step out of the fast lane. But these segments convey that
the body’s refusal to continue moving at the pace of global capitalism may be a sign of
the body’s resistance, the first step toward becoming an activist. This segment suggests
that, to become a promotora, one must step out of the fast lane long enough to develop a
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newfound identity as an activist, long enough to mobilize with other promotoras, long
enough to slow down the reckless forward momentum of global capitalism. In this way,
the film visually represents illness and disability through the body’s decreased speed
rather than through visual images that would be more immediately recognizable as
representations of illness or disability.

Implications
When I have spoken with academics and students about this film, they have balked at
the idea that it is a film about health or disability at all. It is recognizable to them as a
labor film and/or as an environmental justice film. “But they look so healthy,” a student
said to one my colleagues when she taught Maquilapolis in her undergraduate course on
environmental justice cinema at the University of Alaska, and raised the issue of
environmental illness. Though foregrounding issues of chronic illness and disabilities in
the lives of these maquiladora workers and their families, the film departs from
common visual disability tropes including the visual presentation of “deformed”
children in the service of charity appeals intended to solicit pity.
By turning away from such representational trends, the film also turns away from
disability identity. Again, compare its effects to Haynes’s film Safe, in which the affluent,
white homemaker develops an identity as a chemically sensitive person that inspires
her to abandon her suburban life for a remote New Age retreat center. Meanwhile, the
proliferation of disabilities around the globe resulting from global capitalism raises
questions about the emphasis on disability identity in U.S. disability activism and
scholarship. The concept of disability as an identity emerged with the first wave of
198
disability activism in the 1970s and 1980s, waged by activists who demanded equal
access and opportunities in society, accommodations in place of or in addition to
rehabilitation, and the de‐institutionalization of people with disabilities (Longmore
2003, 219). For the first time, people with different disabilities who had formerly
initiated political action via organizations devoted to specific impairments (such as the
National Federation for the Blind) joined forces to advocate for social transformations
that would benefit all people then defined as “disabled.” Susan Snyder and David T.
Mitchell describe this collaborative activism as the emergence of a “politically informed
disability‐subculture” that “define[s] itself against devaluing mainstream views of
disability” (2006, 9). This disability subculture and its activism led to the independent‐
living movement in Berkeley, California; as well as the passage of the landmark
Americans with Disabilities Act (1990).
However, the passage of the ADA—like the passage of Social Security Disability
Insurance legislation in the 1950s—has institutionalized a restrictive definition of
disability identity that in turn has shaped the emergence of disability identity politics
and the focus of disability studies scholarship. Wendy Brown cautions against this
trajectory, questioning the role that injury and victimization have played in activist
campaigns for justice as well as in the formation of identity‐based fields of study (1995).
This notion of injury and identity is reflected in the language of the landmark Americans
with Disabilities Act:
Congress finds that . . . individuals with disabilities are a discrete and insular
minority who have been faced with restrictions and limitations, subjected to a
history of purposeful unequal treatment, and relegated to a position of political
199
powerlessness in our society, based on characteristics that are beyond the
control of such individuals and resulting from stereotypic assumptions not truly
indicative of the individual ability of such individuals to participate in, and
contribute to, society (U.S. Congress 1990, Section 12101).
According to the U.S. legal system, one must be recognized as having a distinct—and
injured—identity before discrimination can be recognized, but this formal recognition
obfuscates the many differences among people with disabilities and defines them as
sharing a coherent and fixed identity based around the experience of “powerlessness”
(U.S. Congress 1990, Section 12101). It thus contributes to what Brown describes—
influenced by Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power—as a disciplinary “configuration”
of a minority subject, a “politicized identity” that “becomes attached to its own
exclusion both because it is premised on this exclusion for its very existence as identity”
(1995, 65, 73). Such a configuration forecloses the possibility that the “injured” have at
times enacted forms of resistance and not been entirely “powerless.” And it presumes
that disability is the primary or only site of oppression for its subjects, a presumption
that generally applies only to white men with disabilities. Finally, it affirms
“participation” in liberal capitalist society as the goal of social justice activism (U.S.
Congress 1990, Section 12101), seemingly negating a more radical “critique of
capitalism” (Wendy Brown 1995, 61).
Two decades after its passage, the ADA has by no means ended workplace and
other forms of discrimination against people with disabilities in the United States
(Golden 1991). Achieving “rights” is not the same as achieving “justice.” Within the
United States, poor people with disabilities rarely have the resources to wage lawsuits
200
against institutions committing ADA violations. Further, undocumented workers—the
most vulnerable to labor exploitation and premature disability—are not entitled to ADA
protection, Social Security Disability Insurance, or, in most states, Worker’s
Compensation. The emphasis on civil rights for people with disabilities not only
neglects those within the United States unlikely or unable to benefit from legal redress,
but also neglects the needs of those outside the United States who have become
disabled as a result of U.S. and other imperialisms. As Helen Meekosha explains, 400
million disabled people reside in the global South, their disabilities often stemming
from warfare, environmental devastation, and labor exploitation, yet their perspectives
are the least likely to be reflected in the field of disability studies and U.S.‐based
disability activism (2011, 668).
Thus, I return with skepticism to a line in McRuer’s discussion of global
capitalism that unsettles me for being perhaps too briskly optimistic. He writes: “I’m not
arguing that disability . . . [resulting from labor exploitation] should be understood once
again through a rubric of loss, lack, or pity; a vibrant disability identity politics has
successfully challenged those able‐bodied notions” (2006, 204). I agree that pity and
lack are inappropriate responses to any body’s disability. However, I wonder to what
extent the “disability sub‐culture” and “vibrant disability identity politics” Snyder,
Mitchell, and McRuer extol is accessible and/or relevant to the women profiled in
Maquilapolis. It’s not my place to say, but the film certainly doesn’t seem to suggest such
relevancy. The film reminds us that for many women of color in contexts of global
capitalist exploitation, disability may be one component, or one symptom of a much
larger cluster of issues including racism, sexism, and imperialism, which may
201
overshadow the singular emphasis on disability as a uniquely defining aspect of
identity. The disability identity politics McRuer describes is, ironically, currently bound
up with diagnostic, legal, and social service processes that disability studies scholars
often critique, yet which also shape our very senses of self and community. These are
the processes that classify and make our disability identities recognizable and then,
once visible, into sites of injury, redress, and/or organization. In this way, disability
becomes the end rather than the beginning of politics, a movement Maquilapolis
reverses.


202
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