Xenophilic spectacle in films about sex slavery

ABSTRACT

This article considers how films about sex slavery produce the figure of a foreigner as commodity in both the sex trade and the humanitarian rescue industry. The author compares contemporary sex slavery films to early Hollywood’s vice films that showcased and spectacularized ‘white slavery.’ The concept of xenophilia provides the theoretical tool in the discussion of mediating otherness. Formal and aesthetic aspects of eroticized spectacle are analyzed within the history of modern vision and visuality.

KEYWORDS:

• Xenophilia
• spectacle
• sex slavery
• mobility
• sexploitation

Notes

1. For a critical discussion of the term ‘modern-day slavery’ in the context of contemporary sex trafficking, see Anca Parvulescu’s excellent study on traffic in Eastern European women’s work (2014, 81).

2. In her study focused on contemporary American investigative journalism, Roxana Galusca (2012) exposes the sensationalism and gendered rescue rhetoric in accounts that disclose the journalists’ libidinal attachments to vulnerable foreign female bodies. Galusca confronts the often dubious truth-making strategies involved in the production of humanitarian fantasies.

3. For discussions of this scene, see for example Vetri Janak Nathan (2010) or Francesco Pascuzzi (2015).

4. In The Brave New World, Huxley describes the character Lenina as a woman who is ‘wonderfully pneumatic’ to signal her erotic appeal and readiness. According to Hitchens (2005), Huxley borrowed the term from T.S. Elliot’s ‘Whispers of Immortality,’ where the Russian woman promises ‘pneumatic bliss’ with her ‘uncorseted’ and ‘friendly bust.’

5. For discussion of the ‘slave mattress’ as such a trope, see Aga Skrodzka (2016), ‘Disempowering Knowledge: How to Teach Not to Help.’