Venal Bodies: Prostitutes and Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Culture

Venal Bodies: Prostitutes and Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Culture

International conference to be held on 4 April 2009

at the IGRS, Senate House, University of London

Co-organised by Prof. Markman Ellis (School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London) and Dr. Ann Lewis (French Department, School of Languages, Linguistics & Culture, Birkbeck, University of London) with the support of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies and School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London; and the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture, Birkbeck, University of London.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Prof. Emma Clery (University of Southampton) and Prof. Kathryn Norberg (UCLA)

Prostitutes, and prostitution, were notoriously visible in eighteenth-century culture, a visibility that was amply reflected in political and cultural discourses. The period witnessed important transformations in the representation of prostitution, offering contrasting accounts of the prostitute as a criminal agent of corruption or as a subject of social violence. Commonly understood as an index of the moral temperature of society, the perceived increase in prostitution in the major cities of Europe invited diverse interpretations and responses. Prostitutes in eighteenth-century texts and images mediated a range of central Enlightenment arguments and anxieties relating to sex, love, marriage and the family, concerns about disease and depopulation, luxury and social displacement, and the phenomenon of urbanisation. As a visible sign of the sexualised female body, the prostitute was also a point of convergence for debates on the feminisation of culture.

We invite papers exploring eighteenth-century prostitution as an object of representation, cultural discourse and social reality in different national contexts. We welcome a range of approaches, and aim to bring together the work of social, cultural and medical historians, literary critics, specialists in visual and material culture, and art historians.

Proposals for papers of 20 minutes duration (in English) on the following topics are particularly welcome:

· Typologies of prostitution: the lusty whore, the harlot, the courtesan, the streetwalker, the fallen woman;

· Prostitute narratives (‘whores biographies', political and social satire, sentimental and libertine fiction, pornography, pamphlets, tracts, sermons, sentimentalism and sensibility);

· Visual representations of ‘the prostitute': print culture and book history (book illustrations, prints, almanachs, libelles); painting;

· Prostitution and the body, disease, hysteria, medicine;

· Gender, race and prostitution: men, women and sexual roles, deviance and ambiguity; male and female prostitution; exoticism, virtue and manners;

· Commerce and luxury: social ascent and descent, town and country;

· Projects for social and moral reform: practices of containment, regulation, surveillance (Magdalen houses, hospitals, strategies for repression, utopian projects for ‘official brothels', proposals for a ‘police', public order and prostitution);

· The practice of prostitution in eighteenth-century cities;

· Theory and methodology: approaches and problems (Foucault, feminist approaches to prostitution history, etc).

Please send a title and abstract of no more than 300 words to venalbodiesconference@googlemail.com by 1 November 2008.

The organisers hope to publish a selection of the papers.