By Michael Nishimura

As opposed to limiting the scope of anti-Asian violence to “hate,” this article frames anti-Asian violence as inextricable from U.S. empire. Building on Go (2020) American Journal of Sociology 125 (5):1193, I theorize what I call the “imperial feedback loop” to conceptualize anti-Asian violence within a postcolonial and transnational context. Using a series of life history interviews, I chart the pathways of two Cambodian American refugees along the migration-to-school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline. I find that cyclical and intergenerational trauma, the criminalization of Cambodian youth, and refugee deportability sustains the psychological and structural violence of the imperial feedback loop. I relate these findings to Du Boisian scholarship on criminality and imperialism and Asian Americanist scholarship on refugee subjectivity. I conclude by suggesting the interruption of the imperial feedback loop through anti-PIC and anti-border organizing and scholarship that critiques the roots of imperial violence and builds toward abolitionist democratic futures.

United States, Sociological Inquiry. 2023, 22pg

By Christine Stewart.

Criminalising Consensual Sex in Papua New Guinea by Christine Stewart. Papua New Guinea is one of the many former British Commonwealth colonies which maintain the criminalisation of the sexual activities of two groups, despite the fact that the sex takes place between consenting adults in private: sellers of sex and males who have sex with males. The English common law system was imposed on the colonies with little regard for the social regulation and belief systems of the colonised, and in most instances, was retained and developed post-Independence, regardless of the infringements of human rights involved.

CANBERRA. ANU Press (2014) 334 pages.

By Christine Stewart

Papua New Guinea is one of the many former British Commonwealth colonies which maintain the criminalisation of the sexual activities of two groups, despite the fact that the sex takes place between consenting adults in private: sellers of sex and males who have sex with males. The English common law system was imposed on the colonies with little regard for the social regulation and belief systems of the colonised, and in most instances, was retained and developed post-Independence, regardless of the infringements of human rights involved.

Now the HIV pandemic has thrown a spotlight, not altogether welcome, on the sexual activities of these two groups. In Papua New Guinea, a growing body of behavioural research has focused on such matters as individual sexual partnering, condom use and awareness of HIV. My work, however, has a different purpose. I chose the terms in the title to highlight a nexus which I believe exists between the criminal law and negative attitudes of society. At an international level, the argument has been put that decriminalising sex work and sodomy will facilitate HIV epidemic management, reducing the stigma and discrimination these groups encounter and making them easier to reach. I undertook my research therefore with the aim of gaining deeper understanding of the effects the current situation of criminalisation might have on the social lives of these criminalised people today, in the country generally and in Port Moresby the capital in particular, and whether these effects might provide evidence to support the argument for law reform.

Canberra: ANU Press, 2014. 394p.