Working Group: Sex work history: Adrina Schulz (Zurich), Alisha Edwards (Bochum), Annalisa Martin (Greifswald), Nora Lehner (Vienna/FU Berlin), Priska Komaromi (HU Berlin), and Sonja Dolinsek (Magdeburg)
Time: 10.-11.10.2024
Venue: FU Berlin
Proposals by: 05.07.2024
In the past decades, the history of commercial sex has become a burgeoning field of research. While early scholarship confined “prostitution” to the fields of social history and women’s history, the past decade has witnessed a broadening of perspectives and methodological approaches – from cultural history to global history and histories of labor, gender, the body, and sexualities. Despite the development of the field and the evident centrality of sex to sex work, it is precisely these sex practices that have received the least analytical attention in historical research. This stems in part from the methodological difficulties involved in accessing past sexual practices and experiences in historical sources. It might also be due to the “respectability” politics that historians engage in when trying to research sex work while avoiding the “prostitution stigma” attached to the topic and to the subjects who performed it. By focusing on governmental perspectives, social and economic factors, and media and social constructions of “prostitution”, historians could attempt to avoid the sex of sex work. Nevertheless, as trends in the fields of the history of sexuality and queer histories have shown, concrete sexual practices are situated in specific times and social environments.
Histories of sexuality have increasingly moved away from a focus on discourse and policing and towards a study of sexual practices and experiences. We propose using the sources and methodologies used by historians of sex work/prostitution to give us an insight into the sexual practices and the subjectivities of historical actors more generally. In doing so, we can also fight back against the stigma surrounding this topic, and against “respectability” politics, by openly and analytically discussing the still-taboo topic of sex practices in the history of sex work and prostitution. The goal of this workshop is to bring the sex of sex work into the centre of historical analysis and to thus truly integrate histories of sex work into histories of sexuality. The organisers also hope to bring the history of sex work closer to queer history, where commercial sex so far had a problematic status since the sex of sex work was and is not Continue reading