What makes a place “forbidden”? Is it danger, deviance, disease, secrecy, or the anxieties of those who seek to regulate it? This panel argues that “forbidden space” is not a natural category but a political and cultural construction. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American authorities and reformers designated particular sites as dangerous, immoral, or contaminating. Yet these spaces were not inherently threatening; they became so through processes of racialization, surveillance, moral panic, and state power. By examining sites marked by vice, disease, and national security, this panel demonstrates how the labeling of space as off-limits reveals deeper struggles over race, empire, bodily autonomy, and governance.

Two papers examine San Francisco’s Chinatown to show how racialized interiority and sexuality were rendered spatial threats. Yingying Sun reinterprets the Chinese opium den as a sensory refuge for laborers enduring industrial and environmental hardship. Through mapping practices and visual surveillance, city authorities transformed these intimate, dimly lit interiors into symbols of racial contagion, institutionalizing spatial prohibition as part of broader exclusionary regimes. Reanne Zheng extends this analysis by interrogating how prostitution constructed Chinatown as a bounded zone of deviance. While white brothels operated within its borders, archival narratives amplified Chinese women’s alleged immorality while erasing white participation, producing a racialized geography of vice that reinforced imperial hierarchies.

Jackie Wu shifts the focus to sites of disease, examining mainland leprosy quarantines between 1871 and 1921. From islands and pesthouses to urban hospitals, leprosy sufferers were confined in improvised spaces shaped by fear, missionary paternalism, and racial stigma. These sites repelled and attracted Americans simultaneously, illuminating how contagion and empire intersected to redefine jurisdiction, civil liberties, and federal authority.

Finally, Rahima Schwenkbeck analyzes the Nevada Test Site as a Cold War landscape constructed as secure and isolated. Though physically restricted, radioactive fallout drifted far beyond its perimeter, exposing communities such as St. George to long-term health consequences. The site reveals how boundaries designed to contain danger functioned rhetorically rather than materially.

Taken together, these papers demonstrate that “forbidden spaces” were rarely sealed or static. They were porous, contested, and deeply embedded in structures of race, empire, public health, and national security. By interrogating how Americans produced and policed spatial danger, this panel illuminates the ways power operates not only over people, but through the landscapes they inhabit.