Uncoupling American Empire: Cultural Politics of Deviance and Unequal Difference, 1890-1910

Yu-Fang Cho

Jan 2014 · State University of New York Press

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A radical revision of the politics of race and sexuality within racial capitalism, Uncoupling American Empire provides an original cultural genealogy of how the institutionalization of marriage shaped imagined relationships among working people who were seen as sexually deviant in nineteenth-century U.S. imperial cultures. Departing from the longstanding focus on domesticity as a middle-class white women's imaginary construct of home, nation, and empire, this book foregrounds the relationship between marriage and subjects marked by slavery, prostitution, indentured labor, and colonialism through tracing overlooked linkages among the period's fiction texts, journalistic accounts, pictorial illustrations, and missionary narratives. Yu-Fang Cho's feminist intersectional approaches illuminate the complex web of social difference that uneven access to marriage has historically produced; the cumulative effects of the ironic—and indeed cynical—promise of freedom, equality, and inclusion through sexual conformity; and the central role that cultural imagination plays in forging alternative relations among minoritized subjects.

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Yu-Fang Cho is Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and a founding member of the Asian/Asian American Studies Program at Miami University of Ohio.