CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Arnold, Marita |
|---|---|
| Title | Sex on the Frontier: Japan's Labour Migrations And the Political Economy of Sex in Queensland |
| Summary | This thesis examines the governance of Japanese migrants in Queensland in the last decade of the nineteenth century and gives special attention to the ‘unruliest’ of them: the men and women who worked in Japanese commercial sex. Drawing on the private correspondence of colonial officials and the public debates in the radical-nationalist and the labour press, this thesis calls attention to the workings of different forms of biopolitical governance and sovereignty as well as ‘de-facto’ power of employment and labour in the colonial and national borders and spaces which migrants moved across. Bringing biopolitics and sovereignty into the same frame, this thesis argues that the colonial state of Queensland was one actor in an ‘assemblage of power’ which formed a regime of transnational governance administering the lives and labour power of Japanese migrants in commercial sex on the Australian ‘frontie r.’ L ooking at the debates about Japanese migration in the late nineteenth century public sphere, this thesis argues that the framing of Japanese commercial sex and gender relations through racialized representations of Japanese migrants as sexual despots and slaves helped produce a counter example for democratic settler-citizenship. Furthermore, it points to the role that the racialization of Japanese gender relations played in creating exclusions at the birth of Australian social democracy. Finally, this shows how Japanese immigration, and especially the border-crossing of sexually transgressive women, became a key site for imagining and strengthening popular settler sovereignty through a cultural imaginary which highlighted penetrable and insecure borders. |
| Supervisor | José Mapril, Rin Odawara |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/arnold_marita.pdf |
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