Strangers at the Gate: Race, Sex, and Immigration in America

3 units

This course examines the history of U.S. immigration through the intertwined lenses of race, gender, and sexuality. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Muslim Ban of the 21st century, U.S. immigration law has repeatedly codified who may enter, remain, and belong—and who is cast as perpetually foreign, “deviant,” or threatening. While the United States often celebrates itself as a “nation of immigrants,” its policies reveal deep contradictions in how citizenship and national identity are constructed. This course foregrounds the ways immigrants have been racialized, pathologized, and sexualized through law, medicine, and culture, paying particular attention to how notions of morality, disease, reproduction, and queerness shaped exclusion and belonging. We will also consider the strategies migrants and their communities have used to resist exclusion, forge alternative forms of belonging, and expand definitions of citizenship. By situating contemporary debates on immigration, asylum, and detention within a longer history of racial and sexual governance, this course interrogates the ongoing struggles over who counts as “American,” and how the line between stranger and citizen is continually redrawn.