Abstract

In contemporary discourse, prostitution is frequently considered to be a timeless social reality. Person and commodity, active subject and slave, entrepreneur and marginalized worker, universal urban land-mark and social secret - the prostitute is all of these, a body upon which are contested multiple identities and relationships. And yet after more than a hundred and fifty years of debate, surprisingly little mention has been made of the way class is inscribed on the prostitute body. This paper examines the emergence of modern prostitution discourse as a response of capital’s administrative and discursive apparatus to an unruly working class, and highlights the various ways the prostitute has been written as a gendered embodiment of more general working class resistance and subversion. Through a reading of nineteenth century academic work on prostitution, regulatory responses to sex work, and early feminist interventions, as well as contemporary analyses, it becomes apparent that prostitution has been constructed and regulated not simply as sex work, but as a threat to the gendered and racialized codes upon which capital’s political, economic and cultural order was established.

Introduction

Long after the fiercely-fought ’sex wars’ of the 1980s and into the emergent field of what is called ’prostitute’s rights discourse’, debates over bodies, sexualities, and the interplay of domination and agency continue to play a central role in feminist research, analysis, and politics. And it is arguable that no body has been more hotly contested on this ground, and remains more pivotal to the construction of feminist discourses, than the body of the prostitute.
Person and commodity, object of desire and derision, sexually-charged subject and empty hole, marginalized worker and entrepreneur, free agent and slave, urban landmark and tightly-kept secret : the prostitute is all of these and more. Her body is deemed public space in a way no other is, and reveals explicitly the multiple identities and relationships which are contested more subtly on the body in general (1). And yet, after more than one hundred and fifty years of debate about prostitution’s origins, social relationships, and effects, little mention has been made of the way class is inscribed on the prostitute body.
This paper will trace the emergence of modern prostitution discourse as a response of capital’s administrative and discursive apparatus to an unruly and transgressive working class. Through an examination of academic research, public policy and early feminist voices between 1830 and 1900, I will argue that ’the prostitute’ was identified not only within broader discourses of class, but was in many ways written as a gendered embodiment of the more general working class threat (moral, economic, political, physical).
But is not prostitution ’the oldest profession’ ? Is not the prostitute a timeless subject/ object, whether as a universal symbol of patriarchy or a source (at least in her previous incarnations) of women’s sexual power ? In a word, no ; though notions of timelessness are common in both masculinist and feminist constructions, the prostitute as currently understood cannot be abstracted from her temporal, geographic and social location within capitalist modernity. Through the Middle Ages and up to the rise of Protestant morality and capitalist social organization, the term prostitute was unknown ; its antecedents, common woman, meretrix, putain, and whore all referred to sexually-available women in general, and those of the working and peasant classes in particular (Karras : 3-13). But while the labeling of women deemed sexually-deviant has roots far beyond the ascendancy of capital, these terms did not necessarily connote pay for sex or give rise to anything resembling the contemporary regulatory infrastructure (Ibid : 141). That more modern body which is named prostitute was constructed within the discourses of morality, sexuality and class which accompanied the rise of capitalism in Europe.
Michel Foucault has shown how our ’common-sense’ understandings of identities, bodies, characteristics and relationships are the results of long-term social processes of definition and categorization, processes by which dominant institutions define the boundaries of acceptability, label anything outside those boundaries deviant, and organize and impose discipline upon individuals and groups who fail to comply with the ’normal’ (i.e. patterns which are functional to the dominant institutions). Contemporary understandings of sexualities are neither timeless nor natural ; on the contrary, they were shaped, intentionally or not, through conversation, interrogation and debate involving practitioners and experts in various institutions : medical, psychological, political, economic etc. (Foucault : 23-25). So while sexual practices may be timeless, what is not timeless is their codification into a specific knowledge-system, their labeling as normal or deviant, their social meaning, their identification as immutable characteristics of certain subjects.

Prostitutes and Proletarians - the construction of a discourse

The prostitute was initially constructed as an identifiable body through the writings of Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet and William Acton, two researchers who framed prostitution as a response of working class women to both the imposition of labour discipline and the subsistence needs brought about by industrial capitalism. Parent-Duchatelet, the first to construct the prostitute as a product of Europe’s industrialization, was trained as a sanitation researcher, his previous work on the Parisian sewer system providing a metaphor for his view of prostitution as an underground network of industrial capitalism’s human waste. His experience inside the sewer, he writes, and there handling "putrid matter…in the midst of the most abject and disgusting products of large groups of people" (cited in Bell : 47), is precisely what has prepared him to research prostitution.
Parent-Duchatelet’s sanitation discourse linked her immersion in physical and social ’filth and mire’ to recurrent medical problems which threatened to spread throughout the social body if not subjected to political and medical regulation ; and that metaphor was to have enormous implications for the construction of the prostitute body. Some thirty years later, William Acton placed the diseased body/ contagion at the very centre of his work. Acton writes the prostitute’s "inner rottenness" as a blight, and compares the social implications of prostitution to the medical threat posed by vermin ; in both cases, public administration has a responsibility to manage and contain the pest who, "corrupt and dependent on corruption", carries " contamination and foulness to every quarter" (Acton : 166).
The sanitation discourses of Parent-Duchatelet and Acton framed the prostitute as moral and medical threat, with the potential to undermine the social body. That threat, however, did not originate in the prostitute herself, but emerged from working class communities generally, with the prostitute as a carrier, or signifier, of the class. She emerged from a proletariat whose living conditions, housing, hygiene and social gatherings were outside the boundaries of bourgeois moral values, and whose containment and regulation were made more difficult by the publicity and ungovernability of her body. In other words, if the prostitute could be sanitized, the spread of working class unhygiene could be managed ; if the prostitute could be geographically contained, so too could the morally-questionable and politically-dangerous social gatherings of the class.
But the prostitute/ working class connection in Parent-Duchatelet and Acton is not simply symbolic ; in both cases, the researchers emphasize prostitution as a product of capitalism, a common feature of emerging working class communities for which the social order is not adequately prepared. Industrialization had spawned the rapid growth of an urban proletariat who was neither adequately trained in the work ethic nor provided with the material requisites of a staid bourgeois respectability. Low wages and instability of employment, particularly for women, forced the adoption of alternative means of income on a regular basis, and the chaotic sprawl of working class neighbourhoods gave rise to make-shift gatherings of which bawdiness and drink formed the core. Under such conditions, the spread of prostitution was easily explained ; conversely, the means of its containment were apparent as well : higher wages, social security, public investment in and policing of working class communities.
Having written the prostitute as a natural product of the working class, Parent-Duchatelet and Acton equated her with the proletarian woman in general. The prostitute was not a unique body but a temporary identity adopted by working class women in times of particular financial hardship. Both men emphasized two related points about women in prostitution. They frequently worked in the formal economy as well, particularly the factory system ; therefore, prostitutes were proletarians. Likewise, temporary prostitution was a common survival strategy of working class women and could not be associated with an inherently ’corrupt’ or ’immoral’ character ; therefore, proletarian women were prostitutes. In Acton’s words,

prostitution is a transitory state through which untold number of British women are ever on their passage…multitudes are mothers before they become prostitutes, and others become mothers during their evil career (Acton : 49).

The fluidity that Parent-Duchatelet and Acton found between the identities prostitute and worker ran both ways, and so too did its implications. On the one hand, if prostitution was a common form of labour in working class communities, then the prostitute herself was to a large extent not Othered in the initial discourse. But, at the same time, that fluidity set apart the working class as a whole, ’the great unwashed’, from the bourgeoisie, whose moral values, living conditions, leisure activities and forms of congregation were constructed as the norm. In other words, the class as a whole was Othered.
This construction of the working class as Other to the bourgeoisie involved a number of discourses ; sanitation, public health, respectability and morality all played their part in bourgeois writings of class relations and of the prostitute as embodiment of all that was lowly. At the same time, however, working class resistance and agency are explicitly written into Parent-Duchatelet’s and Acton’s constructions, which identify prostitution as a choice of working class women (within constraints, of course) and a challenge to bourgeois ethics and moral codes.
Capitalism’s critics have emphasized that the imposition of the wage as a means of social control was fiercely resisted by newly-made proletarians, and was possible only as a result of enclosure, eviction, criminalization of leisure, and extensive violence - ’bloody legislation’ and even bloodier enforcement. And such struggles - of workers against the wage, of the bourgeoisie to justify work by appeal to morality - is embedded throughout Parent-Duchatelet’s writing of the prostitute, who he defines as exemplary of the problem of putting the working class to work : she cannot be "held still, pinned down", she shows little interest in frugality, and seeks "to procure happiness without work", a characteristic which threatens "very serious consequences" if allowed to invade public space unchecked (cited in Bell : 49-50). Prostitution, then, though a form of labour which emerges in response to capital’s expansion, is one which originates among workers precisely because it evades the controlling gaze of the factory, is compatible with a culture of non-work, and represents a partially self-defined labour which avoids internalization of capital’s moral commands. It facilitates the expansion of working class congregation in public places for sex, drink, and raucous conversation, phenomena which run counter to the demands of bourgeois morality and the requirements of the labour regime. As such, the regulation and containment of prostitution is necessary for the enforcement of labour discipline (in the factory and in the household) upon workers ; their submission to capital is by no means automatic, but must be secured by the isolation of those occupations whose geographic and temporal work-spaces evade the direct surveillance of capital.
Parent-Duchatelet and Acton were both keenly aware of the social conditions which facilitated the emergence of the modern prostitute. And both called for the extension of social welfare to workers in general as a means of containing prostitution and similarly ’reprehensible’ outgrowths of poverty. But both, too, were equally concerned with the political instability of the prostitute and the working class, and framed the improvement of social conditions as part of a political project to govern working class communities, regulate social interaction, and enforce the ethic of work.

Answering the Call - administrative and disciplinary responses to the prostitute

The writings of Parent-Duchatelet and Acton constructed the prostitute as a subject emerging from the class struggles of capitalism, and framed the problem of her regulation ; it was incumbent upon officialdom to implement policy and enforce containment. This political side of prostitution’s construction took place largely under the aegis of a British Royal Commission which was charged with the production, implementation and on-going evaluation of public policy to manage prostitution in the state’s interest.
British state administration and regulation of prostitution were codified in the Contagious Diseases Acts, a series of legal statutes imposed over a period of several years between 1860 and the early 1870s. That prostitution was by this point considered a moral and physical threat to national security is beyond question ; the Acts were explicitly designed to regulate commercial sex in the vicinity of military bases, sea-ports, and other areas deemed critical to national security. The Acts organized an interdisciplinary team of administrators and enforcers, including military officers, police, doctors, social workers and religious authorities. Each was assigned a particular role in the enforcement of policy, which by 1869 ordered compulsory periodic medical examinations of known or suspected prostitutes, forced treatment and medical detention for ’diseased’ women, lessons in personal hygiene and domestic labour, and moral instruction.
The Acts explicitly targeted prostitutes rather than the men who visited them, noting that "there is no comparison to be made between prostitutes and the men who consort with them" (cited in Bell : 58). The line between prostitutes and other working class women, however, was no clearer under the Acts than it had been for Parent-Duchatelet and Acton. As noted above, the Acts provided for forced examination and detention of women suspected of prostitution, and named grounds for suspicion so broad that they included gossip among soldiers and sailors or a woman’s presence in any area in which prostitutes also could be found. These policies, then, targeted working class communities as much as prostitution per se, implementing heightened surveillance of poor neighbourhoods in general, and locations of public gathering and leisure activity in particular. The effect was to enforce capital’s split between public and private spheres, and to criminalize, medicalize and psychoanalyze working class women who challenged these boundaries. This blurring of the line between working class and prostitute was of fundamental importance. Both discourse and enforcement were effective precisely because they were "not fixed or internally coherent ; [they were] accommodating and flexible and could define any woman who transgressed the bourgeois code of morality" (Nead).
The Contagious Diseases Acts are a prime example of the way public policy both responded to the emergence of the prostitute and helped to shape her public body ; but they are only one example of the administrative and disciplinary response of the state. Regulation of appropriate use of public space, for example, also served as a means of managing transgressive sex, by prostitutes and gay men in particular (Maynard : 168-9). Likewise, the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which followed repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, criminalized the geography and publicity of prostitution (i.e. brothels and solicitation) rather than the behaviour itself, an indication that what was being managed was not the exchange of sex for money but the social and political impact of public transgression (Waterman : 11 ; Weeks : 200) (2).
That the development of a discourse and administration of prostitution was linked to more general concerns with the containment of autonomous means of economic valorization, working class congregation, and alternative moralities is a constant theme in both the primary literature and more recent historical analyses of prostitution, but it is rarely drawn out explicitly. The U.S. experience is particularly telling in this regard, as its own anti-prostitution regulations directly followed the example of Britain (Best : viii ; Waterman : 11), but openly distinguished between commercial sex as a private (if morally-questionable) matter and prostitution as an unmanageable social phenomenon. Prostitution was commonly covered not only by vagrancy law, as in England, but also by regulations against ’disorderly conduct’, by which means a distinction could be made between high-end brothel exchange and street prostitution or brothels serving working class communities ; while the former could be seen as "inevitable and perhaps even desirable" (Waterman : 13), the latter served to gather "disorderly persons", "destroyed the habits of industriousness" (Whiteaker : 6, 8), and so posed "a dangerous urban social problem" (Hobson : 11).
But if U.S. discourse was perhaps more explicit in its distinction between prostitution as an economic/ sexual behaviour and its danger as social problem, it nonetheless emerged as a direct descendant of the Contagious Diseases Acts. And its policy variations only reinforced the original model and the original political purpose (Best : viii ; Waterman : 13) : to contain transgressive practices and prevent the formation of spaces for politically-dangerous and morally-subversive public gathering.
In practice, then, by targeting prostitution as social-disruption rather than behaviour, the police presence in working class public houses and markets enforced bourgeois moral codes not only among women, but among the class in general. The construction of an administrative/ disciplinary infrastructure to manage prostitution and related ’contagion’ provided a means by which moral-ideological codes could be physically imposed upon working class communities ; and what those codes demanded was worldly asceticism against ’pleasures of the flesh’, vocation and obligation against leisure and resistance to work, thrift and accumulation against indulgence and consumption (Hawkes : 107).

Prostitution as Carnival - bloody legislation and the bourgeois moral code :

The political regulation of prostitution was but one part of a more far-reaching political effort which attacked working class communities and social gatherings in order to enforce the moral code of the bourgeoisie and impose isolation in all but the most surveilled locations (i.e. factory and church). Marx’ famous discussion of ’bloody legislation’ against idleness and vagrancy exposes modern law as the enforcement of labour discipline and its attendant ethical system. Prostitution, though not addressed directly by Marx, was at the time considered a form of vagrancy and so implicated in the various laws and disciplines he reviews ; "vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes", are targeted precisely because they represent the potential degeneration of proletarians into a "dangerous class" (Marx : 643) - a class whose ’coarse’ language and humour, bawdy festivity and raucous public gatherings are symbolic of its hostility to being made a labouring class (Nead : n7) and its tendency toward the carnivalesque.
For Shannon Bell, the culture of carnival - a ritualized space for inversion of hierarchy, reunion of the human and the animal, and purposeful breaking of social and sexual taboos - is central to the construction of the prostitute body, and her analysis of the bawdiness, excess, harshness and utter physicality of prostitution reveals the extent to which even working class commercial sex was grounded in a class-specific culture which celebrated non-work. Rooted in pre-industrial peasant communities throughout Europe, carnival had been a profound illustration of the fact that working people had not internalized the moral values and assumptions of the dominant class, and provided for expression of a not only different but openly antagonistic cultural framework. Capital’s labour regime, however, was incompatible with a carnivalesque discourse precisely because its reliance on the work relationship itself as the primary means of social control and its emphasis on labour and accumulation as values in and of themselves, regardless of human purpose, directly contradicted carnival’s celebration of non-work, consumption, and immediate gratification. And the prostitute - whose work was neither supervised nor directly productive for capital, who symbolized not thrift but consumption, who fulfilled an immediate and intensely physical desire - carried on her very body the contradictions, conflicts, and competing desires of bourgeois and proletarian, of Protestantism and carnival.
Bell is unique in her use of the metaphor of carnival, but the underlying point she makes is shared by others who have sought to read class and class struggle on the prostitute body : that the prostitute represents a working class woman’s own economic valorization in explicit opposition to capital’s desire to ’break’ her for the factory. Barbara Meil Hobson states it differently ; as the nineteenth century opened, prostitution was discovered as a "dangerous urban social problem" precisely because bourgeois social- and moral-reformers were
creating higher expectations about order and decorum, and an emerging business elite sought to impose new standards of discipline in the work-place, the marketplace, and the street (Hobson : 12).

And as the objects of such reform, it was neither uncommon nor surprising that prostitution often appeared to working class women as a viable alternative to other employment options, which revolved around subsistence wages, factory surveillance, and workplace discipline (Hobson : 5).
Like Bell, Hobson stresses that prostitute agency (albeit only within the context of what were deemed worse options) responded to capital’s regime of labour in the factory and the home, as Parent-Duchatelet and Acton had implicitly acknowledged. But she notes, too, that by 1900 prostitutes had been stripped of any such power in mainstream discourse, subversive understandings of their work obscured by the class biases of the very reform movement which sought to speak for them - the early feminist movement, whose bourgeois social location blinded it to "the motivations, moral codes, and survival strategies" of working class women (Ibid.).

The Woman as Bourgeois - morality and victimhood in early feminist discourse

Early feminist discourse on prostitution took shape in response to the debate around policy-formation, and the Contagious Diseases Acts in particular. The Ladies National Association worked actively to repeal the Acts on the basis that state regulation and surveillance of prostitutes was not only misguided but discriminatory. The objections of the LNA were threefold : a) the Acts were discriminatory in punishing women for prostitution while excusing men’s participation as the expression of a normal impulse ; b) the Acts targeted public, or ’common’, prostitutes only, and had the effect of policing working class women specifically ; c) the Acts initiated state regulation of women’s bodies.
In opposition to the Acts, the LNA presented its own view of prostitution and the women who engaged in it. In her submissions to the Royal Commission, Josephine Butler framed prostitution as a fundamental sin, an "impure and unlawful intercourse" imposed upon working class women by men. Inverting the Acts’ portrayal of prostitution as a disease and ’infected’ men as helpless victims filling a natural urge, Butler presented respectable women as fundamentally asexual and prostitutes as fallen. The ’fall’, however, was explained as having little if anything to do with the women themselves ; rather, male sexuality was naturally predatory, and, allowed to run unchecked, had the effect of turning women with few options towards prostitution (Jennes : 33). In other words, there was one sexuality, male and all-powerful ; there was an essence of woman, respectable, asexual, inherently bourgeois in her morality (3). Prostitution had emerged as a response to the social conditions of industrial capitalism and was a one-sided relationship of domination : the all-powerful, socially-sanctioned sexuality of man - carnival incarnate - over the afraid and frail but naturally chaste woman - the epitome of the bourgeoisie.
The LNA made particular mention of the fact that policing of prostitution frequently involved the detention of working class women who were not engaged in sex work, and that the women’s movement’s own approach, rescuing prostitutes, provided a superior model for handling the problem. Like Parent-Duchatelet and Acton, LNA spokeswoman Mrs. Lewis stressed the fluidity of the prostitute/ worker/ wife/ mother, and argued that a combination of education for working class women and policing of men’s use of prostitutes would address both sides of the issue - provide options for working class women and reconstruct them as ’reformed and industrious’, and restrict male sexuality to its proper place within marriage. In other words, the values of the "Christian sisterhood" - white, bourgeois, asexual - were innate to European women, and could, if properly nurtured among proletarian women, transcend class difference (Hobson : 66).
Finally, the LNA objected that the Acts did little more than enforce state inspection and regulation of women’s bodies in order to provide ’clean’ and ’safe’ prostitutes for the use of the army and navy. Such policy had the effect of managing, not overcoming, prostitution, criminalizing women for their natural powerlessness, and professionalizing what had previously been a transitory and temporary form of labour by naming certain women prostitutes, publicizing the sexual work of women, and enforcing a long-term relationship between women engaged in sex work and the state, regulator of that work.
The Ladies National Association fought the Contagious Diseases Acts on grounds of sexism, classism, and state surveillance of women’s bodies. It also, however, introduced women’s voice into the debates as asexual, essentially chaste, and industrious. Its lasting contribution to the construction of the modern prostitute, then, was the image of the victim, of woman as naturally bourgeois, naturally wife and mother, and articulated a demand not to end state projects of encoding and enforcing sexual morality, but to do it differently. In this way, early feminism reinforced the hegemonizing and interlocking discourses of sex and gender whose "will to purity" (Kroker and Kroker : 13) constituted a moral and psychological violence against those whose sex spilled over the boundaries of staid and tight-lipped bourgeois morality - to large degree, working class women (Jennes : 33).

Racialization of the Prostitute/ Working Class

The modern prostitute emerged with the expansion of capital and the extension of the market as a primary means of labor discipline and general social control. But her class location is at the same time a racialized identity ; indeed, as Hobson notes, race and class are so densely interwoven in bourgeois social thought that "it is almost impossible to distinguish the effects of race from those of class" (Hobson : 36). Fundamental to the class struggles of prostitution, then, has been their racialization, both through the identification of the whore/ working class with physical darkness, and later through the notion of white slavery/ pimping and white women’s victimization by the oversexed male object of colonization.
The association of prostitution with race has followed an interesting path ; as the prostitute was constructed as an embodiment of working class threat, she was initially written, like the class as a whole, as a racial Other to the middle class. That the Irish were deemed ’non-white’ until relatively late in the colonial process, that the working class was deemed ’unwashed’ in contrast to the purity of the bourgeoisie, that parallels were drawn between an unruly European working class and the ’savages’ encountered in colonial expedition, all indicate that Whiteness was constructed on the basis of cultural and class characteristics rather than biological difference. But as the growth of the working class demanded an ideological and moral offensive to curtail transgressive cultural practices, and as imperialist expansion demanded the stabilization of racial boundaries, racial divisions were re-drawn to distinguish between the industrious working class, a white, Protestant social body, and the subversive rabble, at various times Irish, Catholic, Black, Jewish, colonial (Allen : 21-23 ; Stoler : 345).
Early feminist intervention in prostitution discourse built on these assumptions, as we have seen, framing the feminine as naturally bourgeois, i.e. white. Such a construction was immediately racialized as feminism’s universal woman was little more than an embodiment of core white middle-class values. As much as the prostitute symbolized white women’s manipulation and exploitation by men, then, this construction implicitly set apart women of colour (however that might be defined) as whores. Such exclusion had important political implications ; as white-defined women were marked for salvation and recuperation, those racialized differently were targeted for arrest and criminal detention (Hobson : 35).
As much as feminist discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was predicated upon an association between the feminine and the bourgeois, inclusion in the feminine was restricted to those who were not racialized as Other, whose membership in the collective was precluded by their exclusion from the white Christian body more generally (Stoler : 355-357). By challenging the association of white prostitutes with terms also imposed upon the colonial subject (i.e. contagion), and presenting the white woman as naturally chaste and industrious, feminist discourse limited its defense by victimhood to the white prostitute ; women of colour, whether engaged in sex work or not, were implicitly excluded, and remained subject to the labels ’threat’ or ’disorder’, markers otherwise associated with the poorest of working class men (Pheterson : 216-220).
But feminism’s early construction of the prostitute as victim opened the door as well to another racialized project - the battle against white slavery. If woman was naturally pure (that is, white, staid, industrious, Protestant), then her fall could only be explained by reference to a naturally aggressive and uncontrollable male body. And as the colonial project was constructed as a civilizing mission involving the transfer of white civilization to the savage, white labourers were incorporated into the colonial project, and many of the characteristics initially assigned to proletarians transferred to the racial Other. Thus the stage was set for an image of prostitution as the sexual victimization of the white woman by the exotic Other, whether black or Asian.
By 1895 prostitution was equated with white slavery in both public perception and international political administration, an association which was to remain central to official discourse until 1949 (Bindman). Though often defined as any forced prostitution, white slavery connotes that prostitutor and prostituted are differently-racialized and that white dominance is inverted (Love). Though substantial research has shown it to be a myth which evolved as a means of explaining white women’s engagement in prostitution, the discourse of white slavery has played a central role in shaping public perception of sex work and state regulatory practices. Associated with Jewish communities in Europe, Black men in the United States, and colonized men in general (Bristow : 21-22 ; Stoler : 352-353), the related notions of Exotic predatory sexuality and white slavery reinforced justifications for racism and colonialism, bolstered bourgeois gender regulations by writing women as asexual, and guided public regulation on prostitution towards working class and racialized communities rather than individual behaviours.
But the prostitute’s shifting racialization is neither additional to nor subsumed by her position as embodiment of the working class ; rather, class, race, gender, and sexuality are interlocking relationships, and so the various processes of race-ing the prostitute involve a dynamic, mutli-directional relationship with class and gender composition. While the prostitute’s initial racial marking followed from the classification of Europe’s emergent proletariat as Other to the respectability and purity of the bourgeoisie, then, as capitalist modernity deepened, the characteristics associated with European ’rabble’ were transferred to the colonial working class, a process which served to incorporate workers labeled white into the process of imperialist expansion. And the new racial boundaries drawn by these dynamics further intersected with the emerging feminist movement to divide whores from prostitutes, the former retaining fluidity with working women of colour, the latter being associated with core bourgeois values. Such a division not only sought to incorporate all white women into the imperial project, but also inscribed the sex work of white working class women with a fundamental victimhood which prevented it from being socially- or sexually-meaningful as resistance or agency.

Subversive Readings of the Prostitute Canon

By 1900 prostitution discourse formed its own canon, to which Christianity, political-economy, medicine, psycho-analysis, feminism, racialization and sanitation discourse had all contributed. And while that body of work frequently characterized sex work as transitory, and stressed fluidity between the prostitute and the working class generally, its reliance on metaphors of disease and contagion and its intersection with bourgeois ethics of work, consumption, gender and sex also stigmatized prostitution and constructed the prostitute as a permanent and fixed identity (Pheterson, 1999).
This paper has emphasized the way that the prostitute was invented as an embodiment of working class threat to capital’s social order and moral code ; it has not examined pre-existing gender relations, with which class and race intersected on the prostitute body. It is not by mere chance that the prostitute has been constructed as a female identity, despite the equally widespread male sex trade (Weeks : 199-200). It is not by mere chance that women labeled prostitutes have been targets of extensive male violence (individual and state). And it is not by mere chance that the prostitute has been written as a body without agency, without resistance, an identity never achieved, but only assigned (Barry : 22). Prostitution as a somewhat autonomous means of economic valorization, the prostitute body as a public display of sexuality, the prostitute as a woman not ’owned’ by any one man : all of these have been threats to bourgeois social order precisely because they throw into doubt the gender codes on which that order is built. If class has been the primary emphasis of this paper, then, it is not because class relations are of singular or primary importance in deconstructing the prostitute body, but because class forms one critical component of prostitution, and one which has been largely overlooked. That is, the prostitute body was constructed as a new social problem of capitalist modernity, a body upon which transgressive sexuality and subversion of gender roles both reconfigured and were reconfigured by the threat posed by capitalism’s urban working class.
Today, as postmodernist discourses and the process of capital’s globalization re-shape the social world once again, prostitution discourse is also being reconstituted, largely in response to a body of theory and activism loosely-termed ’prostitute’s rights discourse’ (Bell ; Bindman ; Chapkis ; Jennes ; Pheterson, 1999 ; St. James). Emerging from the voices and experiences of sex-workers themselves, prostitutes rights discourse presents a potential to subvert many of the cultural codes which have for the past hundred years written the prostitute as degenerate, contagion, and victim. And yet the transgressive power of the prostitute voice must remain limited so long as it is presented in class-neutral terms. The prostitute body has been written, from the beginning, a working-class body and a subversive potential, representative of the instability of white bourgeois moral codes and the fragility of capital’s attempt to achieve cultural hegemony. As a result, where the discourse of prostitute rights frames the prostitute as entrepreneur and/ or sexual healer, persecuted by a Christian morality, it fails to destabilize key building blocks of that body’s construction. But where it does engage capital and class, articulating itself as a body on which the struggles and contradictions of capitalist modernity are played out daily, it potentially exposes postmodernity for what it is — an ensemble of relationships of domination and resistance in which class, race, gender and sexuality are so densely interwoven that the dichotomies subject/ object, worker/ idler, agency/ slavery, madonna/ whore, public/ private, exploitation/ resistance are open for either recuperation or subversion. And in this, as the social construction of the modern prostitute again comes alive as a dynamic process of struggle over material conditions, her deconstruction can engage not just discursively, but politically.

Notes :

1. In this paper, the feminine pronoun will be used to refer to the generic prostitute, not to suggest a uniformly female subject but because the prostitute has been constructed as a female body within the wider discourses of gender, sexuality, and morality. Male prostitution, though early recognized as equally widespread, was primarily regulated by older laws against sodomy until as late as the 1950s and 1960s (Weeks : 199-200).

2. It must be noted that the compromise which legally allowed prostitution while criminalizing its publicity was limited to heterosexual exchanges. Gay male prostitution continued to be governed by laws against sodomy and buggery.

3. As Nead notes, the term fallen woman was placed in direct opposition to prostitute, and connoted an entirely different class origin. While ’the prostitute’ was naturally hostile to and subversive of bourgeois moral codes and Christian values, ’the fallen woman’ was naturally pure, courteous, clean and respectable, her ’fall’ always and everywhere the result of victimization.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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