Chinese Immigrants, the Queue, and the Limits of Political Citizenship – The Public Domain Review

And yet the queue was instead a destabilizing challenge to a system built on interlocking binaries: tall versus short, female versus male, decorative versus simple, weak versus powerful. Queues behaved differently on the pages of The wasp than the other visual markers of Chinese identity, such as clothes or shoes. Queues can curl, spiral, fly or float; they extended backwards and stood completely upright from the body, as if they seemed to defy gravity. What The waspThe illustrations of the line so vividly convey the conflicting values ​​of the line: it was vulnerable to being grabbed, pulled, or pulled; yet at the same time it was also remarkably, almost unbelievably strong – strong enough, in some illustrations, to support the body weight of an entire man. These qualities—weak and strong, vulnerable and powerful—may seem incompatible, but they actually embody the same tensions evident in the way white Americans viewed Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century.