US Military Medical Experimentation and Women’s Sexual Labor on the Isthmus of Panama

This paper examines the struggles between US military officials, US civilian officials, Panamanian officials, and women who sold sex in the Panama Canal Zone over how to control women’s sexual labor during and after WWI. At stake was the maintenance of racial, gender, and national hierarchies. During the crisis of wartime and its immediate aftermath, US military and civilian officials in the Panama Canal Zone claimed the right to police prostitution in border cities located in the Republic of Panama to protect white American soldiers from the disease and sexual immorality they believed Afro-Caribbean migrant women who sold sex would spread. These clashes gave US officials greater access to women’s bodies as sites of medical experimentation, which they used to construct racial differences in the idioms of science and sexuality. Thus, even though Panama was not a theater of war, it was a location of immense wartime violence, where US Americans, Panamanians, and migrant workers from across the Caribbean, including women who sold sex, were struggling to articulate their own vision of a post-WWI world order. For all parties, sexual labor was crucial to this vision. In addition to tracking official debates, I read documents and photographs against the grain to reconstruct women’s perspectives. Though mediated through the perspectives of US officials, the complaints of individual women and labor unions, along with police records, reveal the complexity of migrant women’s lives on the isthmus, which officials reduced to a singular issue, prostitution.