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Venal Bodies: Prostitutes and Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Culture

Venal Bodies: Prostitutes and Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Culture

Publié le par Alexandre Gefen (Source : Ann Lewis)

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Venal Bodies: Prostitutes andProstitution in Eighteenth-Century Culture

International conference to beheld on 4 April 2009 at the IGRS, Senate House,University of London

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

Confirmed keynotespeakers:

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

Prostitutes,and prostitution, were notoriously visible in eighteenth-century culture, avisibility that was amply reflected in political and cultural discourses. Theperiod witnessed important transformations in the representation ofprostitution, offering contrasting accounts of the prostitute as a criminalagent of corruption or as a subject of social violence. Commonly understood asan index of the moral temperature of society, the perceived increase inprostitution in the major cities of Europe invited diverse interpretations andresponses. Prostitutes in eighteenth-century texts and images mediated a rangeof central Enlightenment arguments and anxieties relating to sex, love,marriage and the family, concerns about disease and depopulation, luxury andsocial displacement, and the phenomenon of urbanisation. As a visible sign ofthe sexualised female body, the prostitute was also a point of convergence fordebates on the feminisation of culture.

We invitepapers exploring eighteenth-century prostitution as an object ofrepresentation, cultural discourse and social reality in different nationalcontexts.  We welcome a range ofapproaches, and aim to bring together the work of social, cultural and medicalhistorians, literary critics, specialists in visual and material culture, andart historians. 

Proposalsfor papers of 20 minutes duration (in English) on the following topics areparticularly welcome:

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

·   Prostitutenarratives (‘whores biographies', political and social satire, sentimental andlibertine fiction, pornography, pamphlets, tracts, sermons, sentimentalism andsensibility);

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

·   Prostitutionand 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;

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

·   Projectsfor 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);

·   Thepractice of prostitution in eighteenth-century cities;

·   Theoryand methodology: approaches and problems (Foucault, feminist approaches toprostitution history, etc).

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

Theorganisers hope to publish a selection of the papers.