The Sexual Politics of Moral Citizenship and Containing "Dangerous" Foreign Men in Cold War Canada, 1950s-1960s

Abstract

Canadian historians have not fully explored how post-1945 mass immigration heightened contemporary panics about crippled personalities, failing families, and declining moral standards and how these panics also served to bolser state surveillance of those considered a source of contamination. Among the groups considered potentially dangerous, in the discourse of the time, were European refugee and immigrant men. Popular writers, journalists covering ethnic murders, professional researchers, government officials, ethnic Canadians, and caseworkers dealt with the sexual, moral, and mental health of New Canadian men in ways that were often contradictory. An examination of some of these sources sheds light on an under-studied dimension to the exaggerations and alarmist predictions that fuelled the moral panic of the early Cold War years.