Sexuality and intimacy are often conflated with the micro-scale realms of social life: the marriage bed, domesticity, the household, the family. Archaeologists studying sexuality and colonization have consequently focused directly on household deposits and personal identities. This study, like many others in this volume, rejects this simplistic equation between sexuality and the micro-scale. Rather, I understand sexuality and intimacy to be points of articulation among personal, familial, institutional, economic, religious, and governmental fields of social practice. In this, I take inspiration from Foucault's observation that sexuality is “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power…useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies” (Foucault 1978: 103).

In this chapter, I explore multiple scales of intimacy and sexual politics by juxtaposing two historical contexts that have rarely been considered related. One context is the Spanish “discovery” and subsequent settlement of the San Francisco Bay in California in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – events that were, without question, colonial. The other is the influx of Chinese immigrants to the same region in the mid- to late nineteenth century, following the U.S. annexation of California. Although immigration policies during this period are rarely interpreted as “colonial,” attention to macro- and micro-scale sexual politics exposes the “imperial effects” (Coronil 2007) of sexual regulations aimed at Chinese immigrants to the United States during this period.