Chinese Immigrants, the Queue, and the Boundaries of Political Citizenship — The Public Domain Review

And yet, the queue was, instead, a destabilizing challenge to a system built on interlocking binaries: long versus short, feminine versus masculine, decorative versus plain, weak versus powerful. Queues behaved differently in the pages of The Wasp than the other visual markers of Chinese identity like clothing or shoes. Queues could curl, spiral, fly, or float; they extended backward and stood up from the body completely erect, seeming to defy gravity. What The Wasp’s illustrations so vividly capture is the queue’s conflicting valences: it was vulnerable to being grabbed, yanked, or pulled; yet at the same time, it was also remarkably, almost unbelievably strong — strong enough, in some illustrations, to support an entire man’s body weight. These qualities — weak and strong, vulnerable and powerful — may seem irreconcilable, but they actually embody the same tensions evident in the way white Americans perceived Chinese immigrants during the nineteenth century.