"Sodomites of the Worst Kind": The Specter of Sodomy in Global Anti-Chinese Rhetoric, c. 1850-1910

Abstract

In the mid- and late- nineteenth century, the United States and British Empire grappled with the question of Chinese labor migration. Stereotypes of Chinese sexual immorality animated nativist, anti-Chinese rhetoric; those who opposed Chinese immigration cast Chinese women as “lewd women”— or prostitutes— and associated Chinese men with threats like prostitution, miscegenation, venereal disease, and rape. Despite a rich body of scholarship on this discourse of racialized sexuality, historians have yet to examine the role of sodomy in the construction of the “heathen Chinee” and the “Yellow Peril.” From the rise of mass Chinese migration in the mid-nineteenth century to the cementing of Chinese exclusion in the early twentieth, the Chinese acquired a reputation in the white settler imagination as a sodomitcal race, with profound impact on the Anglo-American politics of race and labor. At the turn of the twentieth century, a massive scandal erupted over allegations of same-sex activity among Chinese mineworkers in South Africa, but that scandal was only the most explicit expression of a long-term and global undercurrent of anti-Chinese innuendo. By uncovering the trope of the sodomitcal Chinese, this article queers the history of the Chinese diaspora, troubling the assumptions of heterosexuality that have thus far defined the field.