Pleasure or All Customers?: Disrupting Heteronormative Perceptions of Nineteenth-century Prostitution

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Studies of nineteenth-century prostitution have always been tied in some manner to discussions of gender. In sites of organized prostitution, the narrative has been that women commoditized their sexuality and men purchased it from them. This subversion of nineteenth-century sexual norms has led to fascinating work in archaeological understanding of these spaces. Nineteenth-century prostitution, however, also encompassed sites of gender fluidity and played upon, and benefitted from, racist structures. Prevailing discussions of prostitution also rarely address the presence of male prostitution within and outside the female brothel spaces we are familiar with. These topics fall within what Martin Hall (2012) calls the “transgressive and the intangible” but should still be considered when interpreting sites of prostitution. In this paper I will explore encounters that I had with intangible transgressions (outside of more normative nineteenth-century sex work) during the course of my dissertation research on a mid-nineteenth-century brothel in Boston, MA.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 790