sex work (Other Keyword)
1-9 (9 Records)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Sex work in the American west held a precarious position during expansion and as urban centers sought to establish themselves as legitimate cultural and economic centers in the nation at large. The relationship of the sex district in Central City, Colorado and its residents to their neighbors was no exception. Preliminary research...
Breaking the Silence. Sex Workers in 19th and 20th-Century Detroit: Findings from the Femme Beings Project. (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Femme Beings Project, established by the authors in 2024, is a collective of scholars from Wayne State University in Detroit-area heritage institutions. The project investigates women’s experiences as sex workers and the conditions they lived under in the Detroit area between 1830 and 1930 by...
The City In the Valley, The Houses On the Hill: Brothels In the Landscape of an Affluent Mountain Mining Town (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Where today is a grove of trees and a mountainous mine tailing, was once the brothels of Central City. Once a prominent and affluent mountain mining town, now a sleepy casino town, the brothels served the needs of the surrounding mining towns. Despite being pushed ‘out of town’ soon after establishment, these businesses were...
Comparative Analysis of Food Production, Waste, and Socioeconomic Dynamics in Red Light Districts and Brothel Sites across Three Port Cities during the American Industrial Revolution (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I present a comparative analysis of brothel sites and red-light districts in three major port cities during or around the period of the American Industrial Revolution. With a focus on Storyville in New Orleans, Louisiana, I will use Five Points in Manhattan, New York, and Hell's Half Acre...
An "Enemy Against Society?": Sex Work and Victorian Ideals in Sandpoint, Idaho (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2006, the state of Idaho began its largest archaeological project to date: the Sandpoint Archaeology Project. Emerging from 500 units, over 550,000 artifacts tell the story of the town’s “Restricted District,” home to two houses of sex work, two saloons, and a dance hall. The adjacent proximity of a brothel and a bordello allows...
Landscapes of Desire: Mapping the Brothels of 1880s Washington, DC (2016)
From 1860-1915, brothels were prominantly loaced within Washington, DC’s urban landscape. This paper focuses on brothels in 1880s Washington, examining the spatial dynamics of the main brothel neighborhood, the Hooker’s Division. I argue that experiences of Hooker’s Division brothels were shaped by the space within the city that the neighborhood occupied, and simultaneously, Washington’s sex workers contested social norms thereby changing the symbolic implications and tangible reality of the...
Othering Spaces: The Creation of "Deviant" Community Spaces in 19th- and Early-20th Century Brothels in Central City, CO (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Deviations: Archaeologies of Sexuality Beyond the Heteronormative", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Sex work occupied a liminal space in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century heteronormative American culture. Sex workers were often perceived as outsiders within the “polite” society of their own communities. In the mining town of Central City, Colorado, there is historical evidence that further restrictions...
The Queering of the Brothel Space through Personal Adornment (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Deviations: Archaeologies of Sexuality Beyond the Heteronormative", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Sex workers exist outside of the heteronormative expectations of society by not conforming to the traditional structure of relationships such as monogamy and non-deviant sexual practices. This deviation from societal norms can manifest in the way they present themselves and behave, such as types of clothing...
Who is Part of the Community?: When Terms Like "Stakeholder" and "Descendant" Don’t Quite Cut it (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. For decades the archaeological community has worked towards a more publically-minded and inclusive discipline that strives for collaboration with the communities that it serves. Many of these discussions rightly center the descendants of the groups under study, or the people who live where archaeology is being conducted. Some...