S. Dolinsek / M. Saryusz-Wolska (Hrsg.): Histories of Prostitution

Cover
Titel
Histories of Prostitution in Central, East-Central and South Eastern Europe.


Herausgeber
Dolinsek, Sonja; Saryusz-Wolska, Magdalena
Reihe
FOKUS
Erschienen
Paderborn 2023: Brill / Schöningh
Anzahl Seiten
XXIX, 278 S.
Preis
€ 109,00
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Sarah Frenking, German Historical Institute Washington DC

In their introduction, Sonja Dolinsek and Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska refer to Alain Corbin’s seminal 1978 book on prostitution, in which he still had to justify the topic as “a subject worthy of study” (p. XIV).1 Much research has been undertaken since then, and new and exciting methods of interpreting a variety of sources have been explored.2 This volume demonstrates that histories of prostitution are deeply embedded in social and economic transformations and linked to larger political debates in different societies. They offer insights into the history of sexuality and gender, the state, the police, crime, labour and medical history, but also the history of media and representations. The editors argue that the history of prostitution goes far beyond “just histories of paid sex”, because “any non- and extra-marital sexual activity by a woman could be seen as ‘prostitution’” (p. XVI). Thus, regulation, categorisation, suspicion, and repression were directed at all women who were considered sexually deviant or unruly. Dolinsek and Saryusz-Wolska propose to analyse the discursive constructions of what constitutes (il)legitimate work on the one hand, and the social reality of sexual labour in the context of makeshift economies on the other. This involves examining the politics of prostitution and public debates, but also the practices of sex workers and of others involved in prostitution.

The volume consists of twelve chapters covering different countries, cities and regions of Central, East-Central and South-Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The editors provide the reader with a very thoughtful introduction, paying particular attention to the meanings of terms such as prostitution, sex work, trafficking, and others that, in their view, reflect “a wide range of political viewpoints” (p. XII). Not only current public debates but also research is often shaped by problematic categories and dichotomies, in particular questions of voluntariness and coercion, rather than a more nuanced view of agency and exploitation. According to the editors, “Eastern Europe” in particular serves as a cliché, that evokes images of poverty-driven emigration, organised crime and human trafficking, and therefore deserves renewed scholarly attention. In addition, researchers have only recently begun to study prostitution under socialism.

Several articles deal with knowledge production and the controversial political discourses around prostitution. Tobias Bruns’ contribution focuses on the discursive securitisation of prostitution in the German Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, and in which way prostitution and venereal disease were framed as a threat to society. Bruns shows how maids, waitresses and female factory workers were associated with the risk of prostitution, and how surveillance and regulation were increasingly deployed in response to first moral and then public health debates. Judit Takács analyses the criminalisation of homosexuality in early twentieth-century Hungary through expert discourses on legal and public health issues. Budapest in particular was associated with a “homosexual tide” and male prostitutes appeared among its typical underworld figures. Not only were male homosexuals portrayed as “unemployed, inactive, lazy and generally with many feminine characteristics” (p. 136), but one study made a telling distinction between “honest” homosexual prostitutes on the one hand, who might return to respectable society, and “profit-seeking boys” as active agents, on the other. In her chapter, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska examines anti-VD campaigns in the Soviet and American zones of Germany after 1945, which she understands as biopolitical measures. She scrutinises the efforts to keep the Allied armies healthy and to avoid fraternisation, while at the same time re-establishing conservative family norms. She emphasises that the history of prostitution always includes the repression of “loose women” and the control of sexual behaviour, and that police and social workers played a crucial role in defining these women. Anna Dobrowolska traces debates about prostitution and sex work in state-socialist Poland. She understands prostitution as a metaphor for social and political transformations within society. Dobrowolska emphasises that “the existence of prostitution was ideologically contradictory to the principles of the new socialist society” (p. 214), as the eradication of prostitution was seen as a consequence of the communist revolution and of the United Nations Convention on trafficking of 1949. However, the figure of the “prostitute” made it possible to express anxieties about problems such as “economic crisis, scarcity, unfulfilled consumerist aspirations” (p. 226). Christiane Brenner’s article analyses research on prostitution from the Institute of Sexology and the Criminological Research Institute in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. The chapter focuses on how prostitutes were associated with the category of “parasitism” for supposedly violating their obligation to work and described as dysfunctional, disorderly and of lower intelligence and how prostitution was associated with a moral crisis after Stalinism.

A number of chapters are more specifically concerned with state measures and police practices as well as how they were challenged by those targeted as prostitutes or pimps. Kim Breitmoser explores the perspective of a customer by interpreting the private diary of a Prussian officer, which provides information on services and prices for commercial sex. Dealing with the practices of military prostitution beyond mere regulations, this text offers a rare insight into the experience of a soldier who frequented women who sold sex, his financial loss in maintaining this lifestyle, and ultimately the deadly consequences of untreated venereal disease in the early nineteenth century. Alexandra Skedzuhn-Safir’s chapter focuses on the topography of more than 1,000 legal and illegal brothels in late nineteenth century Florence. Fears of moral contamination and attempts to modernise urban space led to the spatial clustering of brothels, various forms of prohibition and strict control in the red-light district, which restricted sex workers’ freedom of movement. Stipica Grgić’s chapter on prostitution in Croatia between 1918 and 1941 looks at the shift from tolerating brothels to when the autocratic regime of the early 1930s identified prostitution as a problem and banned it. Grgić highlights the socio-economic background of the women selling sex, who, while looking for money, autonomy and flexibility, also experienced physical and financial abuse. Stefan Wünsch’s contribution is a detailed micro-history of a female impersonator in Berlin in the late 1920s who was accused of being their wife’s pimp. Wünsch carefully examines how they challenged the court in two ways: because they did not see themselves as male and thus not capable of the exclusively male crime and because they “invoked transvestitism and his [sic] wife’s right to sexual satisfaction” (p. 145). In her chapter on Nazi measures against pimps and prostitutes, Mirjam Schnorr focuses on pimps, who were persecuted as “Asoziale” (antisocials), allegedly had a “criminal disposition” and were perceived as dangerous, brutal, cunning, and as “parasites” pursuing “shady activities” (p. 174, 175). The article includes several case studies that explore the ambivalent relationships of pimps and prostitutes, between protection, exploitation and love.

Two chapters also examine prostitution from a transnational perspective. Keely Stauter-Halsted’s study of Eastern European Jewish traffickers in women between the 1880s and 1920s asks about the demonisation and racialisation of migration facilitators. Not only could prevailing regulations and employment restrictions force Jews to live outside the law, but also practices that had existed “under the radar of imperial surveillance in earlier periods” became now “illicit activities” (p. 81). Travel agents could help women escape the poverty of Eastern Europe, but also deceive or abuse them and the press linked them to rumours of Jewish blood libel atrocities. Priska Komáromi’s article focuses on prostitution and tourism in Hungarian consumer socialism from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. As prostitution was criminalised in 1961, sexual encounters of Hungarian women with foreign men in hotels triggered a moral panic linked to fears of a threatened ethnic nation, which demanded traditional female behaviour. While these women were associated with a pathological desire for luxury, state tourism hypocritically advertised with sexualised women often displayed alongside Western consumer goods.

All of the articles in this excellent edited volume emphasise agency and seek to trace the voices of women who sold sex. They carefully reconstruct how the women made sense of their lives, how they challenged and endured criminalisation, poverty, stigmatisation, difficult relationships and precarious circumstances. All contributions offer a very precise vocabulary and provide valuable insight into the many sources that exist on prostitution – parliamentary debates, criminal police, welfare or court files, League of Nations documents, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, films, and literary texts, posters, memoirs and many more – and how to draw conclusions from them. This makes the book also very valuable for teaching. It would have been helpful to include a little more political and social context in some parts, given the variety of countries under study. In addition, the specificity of the geographical focus compared to other parts of the world, especially Western European and colonial prostitution regimes, sometimes remains unclear.3 Nevertheless, the articles in this book, particularly when taken together, provide impressive proof of the diversity and extensive significance of the history of prostitution.

Notes:
1 Alain Corbin, Les filles de noce. Misère sexuelle et prostitution au XIXe siècle, Paris 1978 (English version: Alain Corbin, Women for Hire. Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, Cambridge 1990).
2 Many of the recent studies on prostitution or sex trafficking have also been conducted by the contributors to this edited volume, see for instance Sonja Dolinsek / Siobhán Hearne (eds.), Introduction. Prostitution in Twentieth Century Europe, in: European Review of History. Revue européenne d'histoire 29 (2022) 2, p. 121–144; Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain. Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland, New York 2015; Stefan Wünsch, Das erkrankte Geschlecht. Medizin und Prostitution im Berlin des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, Würzburg 2020.
3 For instance Elisa Camiscioli, Selling French Sex. Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations, Cambridge 2024.

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