Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality At The Border

by Eithne Luibhéid

Lesbians, prostitutes, women likely to have sex across racial lines, "brought to the United States for immoral purposes, " or "arriving in a state of pregnancy" -- national threats, one and all. Since the late nineteenth century, immigrant women's sexuality has been viewed as a threat to national security, to be contained through strict border-monitoring practices. By scrutinizing this policy, its origins, and its application, Eithne Luibheid shows how the U.S. border became a site not just for controlling female sexuality but also for contesting, constructing, and renegotiating sexual identity. Initially targeting Chinese women, immigration control based on sexuality rapidly expanded to encompass every woman who sought entry to the United States. The particular cases Luibheid examines -- efforts to differentiate Chinese prostitutes from wives, the 1920s exclusion of Japanese wives to reduce the Japanese-American birthrate, the deportation of a Mexican woman on charges of lesbianism, the role of rape in mediating women's border crossings today -- challenge conventional accounts that attribute exclusion solely to prejudice or lack of information. This innovative work clearly links sexuality-based immigration exclusion to a dominant nationalism premised on sexual, gender, racial, and class hierarchies.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Queer, Academic, Research, Gender and Sexuality, Sociology

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good analytical book that explored the relationship of sexuality of women to entry within the United States in a way that provided new ways of viewing the existing hierarchical and inherently exclusionary system of immigration and began to posit discursive pedagogies for the elimination and reduction of these inequalities. I think its major feature is in its unique compendium of significant immigration cases, laws, and patterns of migration in order to produce a unified conclusion on each section and in the total conclusion of the book-- no other immigration-law author I know of has focused so significantly on this particular aspect of the immigration system or has produced so critical a pedagogy on hegemonic systems of identity-making within the nation that simultaneously incorporates elements of "real history" in the specifications of individual court hearings, applications of laws, and periodic social movements and attitudes. However, I think this book relies heavily on Foucault and other theoretical philosophers and falls slightly short of producing conclusions beyond the original and general: that immigration law is simply a system where the government gets to ascribe value to the individuals that pass through it, and that any attempts to resist this are violently oppressed. I would like to have seen more exploration, for example, of the role of community resistance and the inclusion of other queer women than lesbians in the book. Overall, a significant and informational read with a refreshingly critical view on the immigration system (17 years before the modern backlash surrounding the most visible forms of border oppression, like detention centers and family separation, occurred.)

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very accessible exploration of the ways that the border shapes gender and sexuality.

[Meilana Elkington]

read for school, really really interesting. had to take lots of breaks because it made me so emotional

[Stella ☆Paper Wings☆ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super interesting and one of the few books I've seen on this topic!

[Mostly on Storygraph · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well-researched and thorough look at specific cases and how these spoke larger truths about immigration law and its enforcement, and how this affects the nation's rights and histories as a whole. The first chapter makes a compelling argument of how early immigration laws targeted women - often non-white and often lower class - in an attempt to create a very specific American populace in the face of perceived threats from outside the borders. This is an argument that she carries throughout the book through increasingly specific - and often increasingly disturbing - case studies and histories that aren't likely to be heard in survey history classes. She uses data to make a convincing argument on how the government essentially created and/or enforced specific classes we now know today as prostitutes, homosexuals and heterosexuals, in part by an enforced (and often subjective) judgment of the moral character of people screened for entry into the U.S. She also does a good job of showing how the control of immigration connected to a control of what was deemed the American character - how, e.g., federally inscribed moral preferences for heteropatriarchal families led to an increase in first immigrant wives and then (non-white) children which led to a perceived menace that led to laws singling out and eventually excluding immigration from certain countries that were deemed threatening.

The book is very well-organized, making it easy for researchers to read the beginning of each chapter to see what she plans on discussing, but a cover-to-cover reading is even more beneficial since she does a great job of giving theoretical and historical foundations for her assertions. She also makes great use of Michel Foucalt's works, particularly Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, but graciously doesn't make it required for you to read them as she quotes where necessary.

Ultimately, Luibheid seeks to challenge the notions of immigrants as inferior due to aspects of race, class, sexual orientation, etc. and to suggest that the debate over immigration goes much deeper than the commonly touted stories that fill the news rooms. It is an important work that compiles a lot of historical data in ways that hasn't quite been done before.

[Sam Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uses Foucault (The History of Sexuality An Introduction and Discipline and Punish) to make the point that "sexual regulation at the border matters, not just on its own terms but also because it draws on and reinforces systems of sexual regulation that are directed at populations living in the United States" (xviii).