Breeders on a golf ball: normalizing sex at Ellis Island

The primary offerings at Ellis Island Immigration Museum do little to indicate that the millions of immigrants and, later, tourists who have passed through Ellis Island cannot all have been reproductively focused and gender normative; the site, too, seems oddly unembodied. In this paper I consider representations and absences around sex at Ellis Island, arguing for strategies of embodiment that attend to the particular bodies inhabited and to the complexity, messiness, and contradictions of sexed bodies in their historical specificity.