What purpose has policing sexuality served? Use at least three examples from across time and place to make your argument. Student: Rhianedd Collins, History
This essay specifically considers the historical policing of sex work. Mary Gibson suggests
that sex work, with its adage as the ‘world’s oldest profession’, is often thought of as
constant or unchanging. It is, however, socially constructed and historically contingent,
influenced by factors such as geography, economics, race, religion, war, and culture.
Subsequently, its policing is similarly contingent. 1 The history of sex work and its policing has
received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades, which Julia Laite attributes to its
value for interpreting historical attitudes to sexuality and gender. 2 Its historiography is
geographically broad and includes studies spanning from ancient to modern periods. 3 I focus
in this essay on changing approaches to the policing of sex work that occurred from around
the eighteenth-century onwards. Following a methodological consideration of chosen
terminology, I explore how modernity, with its changing attitudes to sexuality and its
growing medicalisation, globalisation, and urbanisation, encouraged greater state
involvement in the governing of sexual bodies (usually women’s, though not confined to).
1 Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860-1915: Second Edition (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 6-7 2 Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 2; Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘History and the Politics of Prostitution’, in Prostitution Research in Context: Methodology, Representation and Power , Ed. May-Len Skilbrei, Marlene Spanger (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 19-32 (p. 19) 3 Examples include Stephanie Lynn Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Nancy F. Cott, History of Women in the United States: Historical Articles on Women’s Lives and Activities: 9. Prostitution (M ü nchen: K.G. Saur, 1993); Raelene Frances, Selling Sex a Hidden History of Prostitution (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007); Magaly Rodriguez Garcia, Lex Heerma van Voss, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s (Leiden: BRILL, 2017); Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); K. A. Kapparis, Prostitution in the Ancient Greek World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018); Penny A. Petersen, Minneapolis Madams: The Lost History of Prostitution on the Riverfront (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
63
Made with FlippingBook HTML5