白奴書寫看中國──齊墨曼的《東方社會威脅》

White Slavery Writing Contemplates China: Jean Turner Zimmermann's ＂The Social Menace of the Orient＂

齊墨曼的《東方社會威脅》是極少數專門討論中國白奴問題的著述，顯示美國進步主義年代的除惡運動自詡道德，積極參與了當時美國擴張主義的論述，藉由批評經濟霸權支持文化帝國主義。本文細讀這本宣傳小冊，分析書中如何將白奴買賣描繪成跨國女性回收市場，並將異族的嫖妓行為類比為強暴，透露出作者交雜的白人優越意識與亞洲威脅恐慌。白奴的海外輸出與作者的跨國救援更模糊了內政與外事之分。作者最終藉由種族、階級與性別的交錯關係，護衛了美國中產階級白人女性的社會與政治權利，並在除惡運動中找到自己的利基。但是齊墨曼與中國白奴問題的邊緣化卻也透露出除惡運動對救援對象的取捨，謹防回歸的中國白奴威脅主流種族文化。

This paper looks at Jean Turner Zimmermann's The Social Menace of the Orient: White or Yellow (1921), one of the very few white slavery tracts focusing on white prostitution in China, as an example of how the anti-vice activists of the Progressive Era injected a moralistic discourse into American expansionism, advocating cultural imperialism while deploring the operations of economic imperialism. Zimmermann elaborates the white slavery tropes of big business into transnational female-recycling corporations dealing in fatal diseases and compares forced prostitution to war-time rape, thus revealing the fears of Asiatic threats lurking beneath white supremacy. The intercontinental career of the white slaves and Zimmermann's mission, however, blur the demarcation between the domestic and the foreign. The intersection of race, class and gender in her writing enables the author to assert the social and political rights of white middleclass women and find her niche in the Social Purity Movement; yet the marginalization of Zimmermann and her branch of the anti-vice campaign implies that the American prostitutes in China, should they be rescued, could become a menace to the American mainstream.