英文摘要 |
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. |