An in-person talk hosted by the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Asian American Studies Program at Princeton University. Postponed until September 2026.

In November 1969, American serviceman Jerry Harlowe spent seven days on rest and recreation leave in Hong Kong, where he took numerous photographs of a “Hong Kong prostitute” named “Jenny.” While Harlowe’s archive bears witness to the possibilities of US empire for masculine pleasure, his photographs of Jenny show a self-assured young woman with style to burn. They also testify to the political arrangements of dependency that bound American imperial infrastructures of social reproduction to both Hong Kong and women like Jenny. In this talk, I reflect on the affordances of American photographic archives like Harlowe’s as sites of encounter with the many Asian women whose reproductive labour, including domestic, clerical, entertainment, and sex work at once sustained and disrupted US dominance across east and southeast Asia during the early decades of the Cold War. Asian women’s participation in the sex trades and vulnerability to photographic capture is often read as evidence of the extractiveness of colonial economies as well as the violently gendered ways in which they work. How might we read Harlowe’s photographs so as to also center Jenny and her colleagues as complex, knowledgeable historical subjects embedded in working-class, migrant, and refugee social worlds stretching across and beyond Hong Kong? What might we learn through doing so?