The Chinatown trunk mystery: The Elsie Sigel murder case and the policing of interracial sexual relations in New York City's Chinatown, 1880-191

On June 18, 1909, New York City police discovered the body of Elsie Sigel in an apartment jointly rented by two Chinese men, Leong Ling and Chong Sing. The granddaughter of the famous Civil War general Franz Sigel, the victim was rumored to have worked as a missionary among the city's Chinese residents. As police and news reporters worked to make sense of her murder and her relationship with the missing Chinese suspect, Leon Ling, New Yorkers confronted the issues of interracial sexual and social relations between Chinese men and white women and the place of Chinese in New York society. While reports of interracial marriages had appeared since the mid-nineteenth century, the Sigel case marked the first time that an entire city---and, to some degree, the nation---was engaged in a public discourse about the meaning and place of such relationships in turn-of-the-century American urban life.;The dissertation demonstrates how social reform activities, police arrests, court trials, and popular cultural representations worked informally and formally to create categories of sexual and moral deviance, checking Chinese men's and non-Chinese women's social and physical mobility. While a significant number of interracial couples resided in that city's Chinatown, these relationships were far from accepted by the wider society. The New York press frequently commented on these marriages and those women of Euro-American descent who chose to marry Chinese men as socially and sexually deviant and threatening to the urban moral order, situating their descriptions within the larger critique of Chinatown's vice activities to discredit and delegitimize these marriages. These same sources and Chinese language newspapers and writings show that Chinese men and non-Chinese women did not passively accept these intrusions into their lives, but often devised means to contest their physical and social containment. The policing of interracial sexual relations was critical in the formation of Chinatown's racial and geographical borders.;This study shows the possibilities for bringing together Asian American and U.S. women's history, treating race and gender as equally meaningful categories of historical analysis. I have continued to draw upon the tools offered by both fields in documenting and interpreting the lives of subaltern groups, while simultaneously interrogating the socially-constructed categories of race and gender. Uniting these two subfields in this study, is the study of spatial relations developed by urban geographers in understanding the production of social relations in urban spaces. Past urban studies have often privileged class, race, or gender in studying the rise of the modern city. This study shows the degree to which these unstable, social categories are not as separate as they may appear, but often mutually reinforcing, and critical for understanding urban spatial formation.