At its annual meeting in April, the Organization of American Historians awarded the Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History ("given annually for the most original book in U.S. women’s and/or gender history") to Sonia C. Gomez (Santa Clara University) for Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America (New York University Press). The citation:
Picture Bride, War Bride is an understated yet powerful new take on the gendered politics of immigration, racial formation, and interethnic relationships. Looking at the immigration of Japanese brides, the book analyzes the role of marriage in producing a dialectic of exclusion and “differential inclusion” in federal immigration laws, from the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908 to the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. Sonia Gomez persuasively argues that compulsory heterosexual marriage enabled Japanese wives to achieve degrees of inclusion in U.S. society.
This graceful and wide-ranging book spans periods, geographies, and gendered identities, deftly linking national and international governance, politics and war, to intimate details of Japanese and American lives. Impressively researched, this compassionately written account of Issei bachelors, Japanese wives, and wartime interracial relationships reveals the dynamic role that gender and family played in the deployment of cultural difference and attitudes toward assimilation. Finally, this boo realizes the long stated but rarely attained goal of using gender as a category of analysis: it tacks between women’s and men’s experiences and the intersecting impact of masculine and feminine ideations.
To the literature on “war brides,” Gomez contributes three original narratives. First, marriages between Japanese women and U.S. servicemen transformed postwar immigration laws. Second, African American GIs who fought to marry Japanese women pushed civil rights organizations to challenge antimiscegenation laws. Finally, these marriages changed the postwar racial landscape by troubling, even eliding, the Black/white binary. “War brides” navigated layers of white supremacy, interethnic tensions within communities of color, and a legal regime structured to privilege heterosexual masculinity. Much more than a community study, Picture Bride, War Bride presents a fresh, multiethnic narrative of gender, race, sexuality, law, politics, and culture in the twentieth-century United States.
Congratulations to Professor Gomez!
-- Karen Tani
