Disease, Disability, and the Alien Body in the Literature of Sui Sin Far

Abstract

This essay discusses the central role that health and disability prejudice played in the passing of the American and Canadian Chinese exclusion laws, which barred the entry of Chinese laborers from the 1880s through the 1940s. Lawmakers justified these policies in part by referring to scientific and public health reports that characterized Chinese immigrants as “feeble-minded” and prone to sickness and therefore as a threat to the health of white North Americans. Using this historical backdrop as a critical context for interpreting the literature of Sui Sin Far, a founding figure of Asian North American literature, I demonstrate the ways her writings on disease and disability challenge the racism, sexism, and health-related prejudice underlying the exclusion laws. Specifically, she reminds readers through her essays and short fiction that 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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.