| I argue that late twentieth-century developments in American immigration, family, and Constitutional law have driven Asian American identity formation, as expressed in literature, through legal idealizations of citizenship and family. I draw from the tradition of "legal fictions," as explored by legal theorists J.C. Gray, Owen Barfield, and Lon Fuller, to suggest how those legal idealizations contain fictive and imagined elements that literary analysis can illuminate and challenge. Focusing on family reunification provisions in immigration law, I dissect good faith marriage and qualifying family relationships as the central legal fictions by which Asian American immigrants have entered the United States and are subsequently constructed. The history of Asian Americans, as expressed in narrative literature referencing their initial exclusion as sexual deviants and their eventual inclusion as a sexual model minority, demonstrates how fictions of legitimate family relationships had simultaneously evolved in Constitutional law around the issues of privacy and reproductive choice, and have recently been challenged in family law through nontraditional family structures caused by divorce and advances in medical technology. |
