Bodies Politic Talk: American Sexual Exceptionalism: Sex, Labor, and U.S. Foreign Policy

Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the U.S. government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. American reformers successfully pushed for international anti-trafficking agreements that mirrored U.S. laws, calling for states to criminalize commercial sex and restrict migration, and harming the very women they claimed to protect. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Eva Payne is associate professor of United States history at the University of Mississippi. She is a historian of gender, sexuality, labor, and U.S. empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution (Princeton University Press, 2024) received the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize. The book has been featured in such publications as the New Yorker and BBC History. Her writing has also appeared in Foreign Policy, the Journal of Women’s History, Radical History Review, and the European Review of Books. She serves as the Co-Director of the Queer Mississippi Histories Project at the University of Mississippi.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Bodies Politic series and Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment