“Our country held hands with the U.S. in an alliance and we knew that its soldiers were here to help us, but that didn’t mean that they could do whatever they wanted to us, did it?”
Since the Philippine-American war in the 1890s, the sexual exploitation of Asian women has gone hand in hand with American militarism in the Pacific. It's foolish to pretend that this history has nothing to do with attacks on Asian American women today.
Although this humanities research project might read to many as a niche project in a small ethnic studies department, its cultural, political and technological implications loom large.
Many of the ways present-day sex traffickers do business would look familiar to slave traders supplying “fancy maids” -- females sold for sexual exploitation -- to buyers in the South.
