ABSTRACT

This chapter draws upon historical and contemporary policies and practices to explore the complexities of gendered racialization and racialized gendering. It illuminates state practices of embodied power that sustain hierarchies of difference despite guarantees of formal equality. The chapter demonstrates how embodied power operates in realms that span the intimate, the national, the transnational, and the international by drawing attention to racialization, gendering, and sexualisation. It focuses on the construction of boundaries of citizenship associated with nation-building, immigration, policing, and securitization. It also demonstrates that many social forces contribute to racialization, gendering, and sexualisation as scholars working in the disciplines of anthropology, critical race studies, cultural studies, gender and sexualities studies, literary criticism, media studies, postcolonial studies, and sociology. In the United States, racialized gendering involved multiple groups and various policy instruments from the earliest days of the new republic. Immigration and naturalization policies have long been used to police both national borders and the boundaries of citizenship.