In November 1881, as Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty was being assembled in France, San Francisco’s illustrated weekly The Wasp offered its own harbour monument: a Chinese man with an opium pipe, light beams reading “FILTH, IMMORALITY, DISEASES, RUIN TO WHITE LABOR” behind him, and a braid unfurling high above his shoulder. Sarah Gold McBride’s essay traces how that braid — the queue — became an index of who counted as a political subject in America.

  • Qing rule (from 1644) required Han men to wear the queue as a sign of loyalty to the emperor.
  • Hair length had long marked political standing: Puritan elites condemned long hair on men as unmanly submission. By the early nineteenth century, scientific authorities had naturalized long hair as female and short hair as male — along racial lines too.
  • From the late 1840s Chinese men arrived wearing queues. An 1876 San Francisco ordinance shaving jailed men’s hair to one inch was struck down in 1879 as a Fourteenth Amendment violation, because it so transparently targeted Chinese men.
  • The Page Act (1875) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) were the first US immigration laws drawn along racial lines. Chinese immigrants were already barred from naturalized citizenship.
  • Chinese residents never exceeded 10 percent of San Francisco’s population, but were almost all adult men — de facto competitors with white job-seekers. In 1871 Chinese workers produced half the state’s boots and shoes.
  • The Wasp, the West Coast’s most widely read paper in the 1880s, made anti-Chinese cartoons its central purpose. A Chinese figure was signalled by three signs: loose clothing, thick-soled shoes, a queue.
  • The charges were contradictory by design. Chinese men were said to be too feminized for citizenship — bachelors in feminine-coded laundry and restaurant work — and an octopus-armed producing machine draining money back to China.

The queue was the one marker flexible enough to hold both claims. It could be grabbed and yanked, yet in cartoons it was strong enough to bear a man’s whole weight: vulnerable and powerful at once, exactly the contradiction white Californians projected onto Chinese immigrants.

That is the essay’s real subject. The gendered hair-length binary had naturalized white men’s political supremacy for decades, and the queue — neither clearly masculine nor feminine by its rules — exposed the cracks in it. Gold McBride’s piece is excerpted from Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2025).