Abstract:

Following World War I medical discourse and practice increasingly concentrated on the ability to contain and channel the sexuality of young men on the move. This article examines how colonial and international authorities in the interwar period sought to contain the presumed damages resulting from soldiers’ and sailors’ interaction with prostitutes. As mobile men, this article argues, they had largest potential to carry microbes and parasites to their next station or port of call. As low-ranking soldiers or workers, they could be effectively policed and monitored. Within their military or labor hierarchies, they were subjected to measures that could not be applied to the general population. Finally, lower-class men were a convenient other for the emerging middle class and its dream of sober, hard-working men and respectable families. This article first zooms in to three examples of British and French attempts to contain venereal disease and hence the sexuality of lower-class men: British-colonized Egypt and Palestine, and French-colonized Morocco. It then turns to sailors, whose sexual interactions and their medical consequences became a matter of international policy, as embodied in the International Labor Organization. This article follows several sites – ports, BMCs and ex-pat entertainment venues, as nodes of mobility, and the ways in which different authorities tried to monitor the encounters created between prostitutes and patrons, North African and European bodies, soldiers and civilians, humans and germs.