Thesis (B.S.)--University of Wisconsin -- La Crosse, 2008. / Also available online. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-49).

This dissertation argues that the Japanese debate over prostitution regulation between the 1870s and the 1910s saw a fundamental shift in the construction of male sexuality as a political tool. Before the turn of the century the Protestant Christian “abolitionists” and the brothelkeeping “regulationists” who debated Japan’s system of licensed prostitution did not describe erotic desire as an inherent property of male bodies; rather, both camps asserted that men did not experience erotic desire unless they visited brothels. On that shared understanding, the two sides debated whether desire itself was desirable: while abolitionists argued that desire harmed society by training men to use women as tools for pleasure, their opponents argued that the experience of desire stabilized male psyches. After the turn of the century both camps reformulated their arguments based on the assumption that all male bodies harbored an instinctual desire for sex. Regulationists adopted the notion with gusto. And abolitionists proved no less willing, as they came to describe male sexual desire as the impetus for the romantic love that created stable families, and argued that commercial sex disrupted the natural courtship process. In the 1910s, secular feminists deployed the male sex drive to advocate for legislation to empower women within marriages. The political use of the sexual instinct put male sexuality at the heart of several forms of social policy and critique. Therefore the debate over prostitution regulation is emblematic of the larger discourse on male sexuality as a subject of government intervention and social-policy activism. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Mit ihrem Beitrag, „‚Gerne will ich wieder ins Bordell gehen…‘. Wehrmachtsbordelle und Freiwilligkeit“, widmet sich Anne S. Respondek (M. A.) einem weitgehend unerforschten, wenn nicht tabuisierten, Gegenstand der neueren Geschichtswissenschaft zum Zweiten Weltkrieg – liegen zur Zwangsprostitution in Frankreich doch nur wenige, zur sexualisierten Gewalt und Prostitution in den Ostgebieten indessen keine nennenswerten Untersuchungen vor. Dem ‚male gaze‘ und den ‚blinden Stellen‘ des bisherigen Erkenntnisstandes begegnet die Verfasserin auf eine ebenso analytisch-kritische wie einfühlsame Weise, indem ihre genderorientierte Argumentation mit Hilfe neuen Quellenmaterials dem Einzelschicksal einer Frau aus Polen nachgeht. Dabei zeigt sie exemplarisch die perfiden, durch den NS-Staat sanktionierten Mechanismen männlicher Gewalt gegen betroffene Frauen auf, der auch die diffamierte, verfolgte, zur ‚Prostituierten‘ erklärte und ins Wehrmachtsbordell gezwungene Maria Kowalska bis zu ihrem Tod im KZ Ausschwitz ausgesetzt war.

The brothel has an important role in Latin American literature and film. The fictional brothel is expected to produce gender in both men and women, but these gendered identities are placed at the extremes within the bordello. This gender extremism creates opposition, or gender transgression, in the characters of twentieth-century Latin American narrative and film. Here I map the brothelized iteration of both genders through prohibitions, taboo, abjection, and violence within various texts and films. Much of the discipline of this cultural production of gender rests on the body. The body must bear the mark of its gender or the character risks violent consequences. Fatness plays an important role in this sexual economy, because fatness destroys gender, pushing the subject toward an androgyny that other characters reject or hate. Though the brothel has been studied before, it has not been analyzed from this gendered perspective. / text

This dissertation studies the development of a regulation of prostitution in Stockholm during the period 1812-1880. The development of the regulation system is seen in the light of an analytical framework, developed from Carole Pateman's ideas on the sexual contract, and a feministic critique and elaboration of Jürgen Habermas's ideas on the public sphere. The regulation of prostitution was a common characteristic for many metropolises in Europe during the nineteenth century, where supposedly loose and lecherous women were medically and spatially controlled to impede the spread of venereal diseases. Stockholm, and Sweden as a whole, went from a non-gendered to a gendered control of venereal disease, which eventually developed into a spatial control of public women. This study argues that the practices of a regulation system was at first part of an attempt to import what was seen as part of modernisation. Rather than to prohibit extra-marital sexual relations, these were to be controlled and supervised. Eventually the system was adapted to local circumstances in Stockholm, and a control of women's sexuality in public became part of a metropolitan modernity. In the process of the professionalisation of groups such as the police and the physicians, public women were over time perceived as a group of professional prostitutes. The possibility to live off prostitution as a transitory stage in women's lives disappeared, and prostitution became a medically and spatially controlled trade.

This thesis is a study of the problem of subjectivity and prostitution in the Middle Ages. Three legal case studies of unpublished archival material and one chapter focussing on fictional texts from late mediaeval Germany and Switzerland are used to investigate the conditions of prostitutes' subjectification in law and literature. The thesis takes impetus from Ruth Karras's recent articulation of the problem of prostitution and sexuality, seeking to engage critically with her notion of “prostitute” as a medieval sexual identity that might be applied to any woman who had extra-marital sex. In dealing with trial records, it also aims to make a methodological contribution to the study of crime and the problem of locating the individual. Chapters I-III examine the records of criminal cases featuring the testimony of prostitutes, or women who risked such categorisation, to consider the available subject positions both within and outwith the context of municipal regulation. Whilst acknowledging the force of normative ideas about prostitutes as lustful women, these chapters argue that prostitutes' subject positions in legal cases were adopted according to local conditions, and depended upon the immediate circumstances of the women involved. They also consider trial records as a form of masculine discourse, arguing that an anxious masculine subject can be seen to emerge in response to the phenomenon of prostitution. Chapter IV expands this discussion by drawing on literary texts showing how prostitutes prompted concern on the part of male poets and audiences, for whom their sexual agency was a threat which belied their theoretical status as sexual objects. Note: Transcriptions of the legal cases making up chapters I-III are provided in Appendices A, B, and C.

My objective with this thesis is to understand how racist stereotypes and myths compounded the sale of fair-skinned black women during and after the slave trade in New Orleans, Louisiana. This commodification of black women's bodies continued well into the twentieth century, notably in New Orleans' vice district of Storyville. Called "quadroons" (a person with ¼ African ancestry) and "octoroons" (1/8 African ancestry), these women were known for their "sexual prowess" and drew in a large number of patrons. The existence of "white passing" black women complicated ideas about race and racial purity in the South. Race as a myth and social construct, or as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explains in her essay, African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race, a "metalanguage" exposes race not as a genetic fact, but rather a physical appearance through which power relations and status were to be conferred. My methodology uses race and gender theory to analyze primary and secondary sources to understand and contextualize how population demographics, myths, and liberal 18th century colonial laws contributed to the sale of black women's bodies. The works of Emily Clark, Walter Johnson, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and other historians who utilize Atlantic history have been paramount in my research. Emily Clark has transformed the "white-black" women from a tragic, sexualized trope into a fully actualized human being, while Hall has tackled the racist underpinnings inherent in the neglect of black women's history. The writings of bell hooks, particularly her essay Eating the Other, establishes the modern day commodification of black women vis-à -vis their representation in media, as well as through the fetishism of their bodies by a white patriarchal system. During slavery plantation owners could do virtually anything they wanted with their property, including engaging in sexual intercourse. By depicting black women as hypersexual jezebels, they could justify their rape, while establishing their dominance and place in the white male hegemony of that time period. For the right price a white male of a lesser class could achieve the same thing at a brothel down in Storyville at the turn of the twentieth century, for as Emily Clark argues in her book, The Strange History of the American Quadroon, these brothels were a great equalizer, allowing all white men to experience "…sexual mastery enjoyed only by elite planters before the Civil War." By democratizing white supremacy, the quadroon and others like her forged solidarity that bridge across all classes, while upholding whiteness and oppressing people of color at the same time.