Mapping Interracial Sex and Hybridity across the 20th-Century Pacific

For the panel, I aim to contribute a discussion on changing understandings of interracial sex and racial hybridity across the Pacific.  In particular, I am interested in examining the ways in which the gendered and racialized body is understood as it moves across different national and imperial contexts both temporally and spatially.  Recent scholarly works have demonstrated the need to understand racial and gender formation as shaped through international politics and cultural exchange.  In addition, "mixedness" may serve different functions and contain competing meanings in different contexts and offer insights into operations of power in public and private spheres.  Recent scholarship, for example, has demonstrated the importance of the topic in analyzing military and state power in regulating sexual intimacy and women's labor.  I also want us to consider how we as historians would track these changes both materially and discursively through cultural productions as well as the actual lives of Asians and Asian Americans as these products and people circulate locally and internationally.