Suspect Policing and State Violence Against Chinese Women: 1877 and 2017
04.08 | 12 - 1:30 PM | 691 Social Sciences Building (CRG Conference Room)
with CRG's Visiting Scholar Laura Hyun Yi Kang (Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies,and 2022 - 2025 Chancellor's Fellow at UC Irvine)
This lecture attempts to make critical sense of the violent deaths of two Chinese women sex workers as they fled from state authorities, earlier in Hong Kong in 1877 and more recently in Queens, New York in 2017. A Coroner's Inquest into the 1877 case led to an expansive inquiry, which uncovered long-standing practices of surveillance, extortion, entrapment, sexual violence, indiscriminate arrests and arbitrary punishments by the British inspectors and police constables against Chinese women. By examining how the 1877 case has been selectively remembered and problematically effaced, the lecture considers the possible archival afterlives and epistemological consequences of the 2017 case. How could these two cases of state violence against Chinese women be situated in relation to the vexing origins and manifold trajectories of "anti-Asian violence"?Laura Hyun Yi Kang is Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies and a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Traffic in Asian Women (2020) and Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (2002). Kang is currently researching and writing a book titled, Sallim: Korean Women’s Diasporic Life-Making.
Event hosted by CRG’s Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories Research Initiative (AAVOT), and co-sponsored by the Asian American Research Center.