On both sides of the Atlantic, the rise of tabloid journalism and other forms of popular media such as magazines or movies around and after 1900 coincided with increased reporting on previously taboo topics. More explicit than ever before, widely read outlets scandalized behavior that challenged the established gender order and published on issues like prostitution, human trafficking and sexual assault. Popular media devoted particular attention to aspects of (alleged) sexual coercion or violence that crossed racial (color) lines and on women and men whose lifestyles challenged heteronormative ideals. While these reports led to public outcries, they also catered to a persistent fascination with these transgressions. In this panel, we want to explore the effects of moral panics on gender roles and racial hierarchies through the lens of (alleged) violence. While various moral panics have been researched, the three papers in this panel focus on cases that have not yet been studied; they use these cases to reevaluate the interplay of media portrayals and lived realities. Taken together, these papers offer a new perspective on the relationship of social inequality and popular media. Each presentation centers on one case from Europe or the United States in the later decades of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.

Raphael Roessel looks at U.S. debates about violent hazing among female college students around 1900. While reports of hazing cases involving women were filled with titillating remarks that promised a peak into female-only spaces, the engagement of women in these practices impacted debates on women in higher education and particularly on the perceived risks of coeducation. Hazing debates at the time often also had an implicit racial component as these practices were persistently externalized as “un-American” and deemed “uncivilized.” Sarah Frenking explores the public fascination with the “traffic women,” the alleged kidnapping of white women, in German and French film and press between the 1920s and the end of World War II. Depictions of trafficking reveal notions of Europeanness, colonialism, race and sexuality, as well as transnational crime against the backdrop of international efforts to combat the phenomenon at that time. Julia Roos addresses alleged sexual crimes attributed to Moroccan French NATO troops stationed in 1950s southwestern Germany. Public debates about, and media depictions of, these crimes created a sense of moral panic that was highly racialized. West German discourse about sexual “threats” allegedly emanating from Moroccan soldiers was often highly reminiscent of the quasi-pornographic imagery of the 1920s “Black Horror” campaign against colonial French troops in the Rhineland. This suggests that there are problematic continuities in anti-Black racism and the racializing of Muslims in the early Federal Republic.