Event details

In November 1969, American serviceman Jerry Harlowe spent seven days on rest and recreation leave in Hong Kong, where he took numerous photographs of a “Hong Kong prostitute” named “Jenny.” While Harlowe’s archive bears witness to the possibilities of US empire for masculine pleasure, his photographs of Jenny show a self-assured young woman with style to burn. They also testify to the political arrangements of dependency that bound American imperial infrastructures of social reproduction to both Hong Kong and women like Jenny. In this talk, I will reflect on the affordances of American photographic archives like Harlowe’s as sites of encounter with the many Asian women whose reproductive labour, including domestic, clerical, entertainment, and sex work at once sustained and disrupted US dominance across east and southeast Asia during the early decades of the Cold War. Asian women’s participation in the sex trades and vulnerability to photographic capture is often read as evidence of the extractiveness of colonial economies as well as the violently gendered ways in which they work. How might we read Harlowe’s photographs so as to also center Jenny and her colleagues as complex, knowledgeable historical subjects embedded in working-class, migrant, and refugee social worlds stretching across and beyond Hong Kong? What might we learn through doing so?

Speaker Bio:

Between 2000 and 2020, I studied and worked in English departments across the United States and Canada, including Cornell University, Macalester College, the University of Nevada at Reno, and McMaster University. In 2021, I returned to the Lower Mainland, where I was born and grew up (on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm land/in Richmond), to teach at SFU in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies as well as the Global Asia Program.

As a scholar of empire, reproductive labour, and Asian and Asian diasporic life, my work is feminist, queer, anticolonial, and antiracist in methodology and orientation, and informed by my positioning as a second-generation settler of Chinese descent. My first book, Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire, investigates the centrality of reproduction to postimperial projects of governance and nation-building through readings of twentieth-century literature and policy from Australia, Britain, and New Zealand, and was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2014. I’m currently completing a SSHRC-funded second book, entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949, about Chinese practices of interracial intimacy and multiracial community under British colonial rule, that will appear with Stanford University Press in 2026. Here, I delve into the heterogeneous social worlds that flourished in port cities like Hong Kong, London, and Liverpool during the first half of the twentieth century, developing vivid accounts of port city life pieced together from a range of archival materials, including photography, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, that testify to the reach and limits of empire as a structure of meaning. Finally, I’m working on a collaborative book project with my geographer sibling Wesley Attewell. Entitled Cold War Relations, the book turns to the vernacular photographic archives of American Vietnam War workers to explore Asian women’s wartime domestic, clerical, entertainment, and sex work across decolonizing southeast Asia. Between 2016 - 2019, I participated in the SSHRC-funded Family Camera Network; and currently serve on the editorial boards of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas and Trans Asia Photography.