Public Health, Public Order and Public Morality

4 March 2015
Subtitled: Historical and Methodological Perspectives on the Spatial Politics of Prostitution in London, Delhi and Lima, this panel brings together scholars working on the history of prostitution in three different cities in order to explore the convergent and divergent experiences produced by the regulation of space and the regulation of sexuality in the twentieth century.

Julia Laite (Birkbeck), Stephen Legg (Nottingham), Paulo Drinot (UCL-Institute of the Americas) - This panel brings together scholars working on the history of prostitution in three different cities in order to explore the convergent and divergent experiences produced by the regulation of space and the regulation of sexuality in the twentieth century.

Julia Laite (Birkbeck) will trace the geography of prostitution in London, from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1950s, and will argue that the city was significantly more geographically diverse than has sometimes been allowed.
Stephen Legg (Nottingham) will engage the writings of Gayatri Spivak on the figure of the subaltern, focusing on a recurrent tension in her writings and in readings of them, in the context of an exploration of reports on 'rescue homes' in interwar colonial Delhi which served an ancillary spaces, in various senses, to the tolerated red light district in the city.

Paulo Drinot (UCL-Institute of the Americas) will suggest that the regulation of prostitution in early twentieth-century Lima needs to be understood as expressive of the broader spatial politics of the city, a spatial politics shaped by attempts by state authorities to regulate 'the social' and 'the sexual'. However, this was not a simple top-down, elite-driven, process. Several actors, including Lima's prostitutes themselves, Drinot will argue, intervened in the spatial reordering of prostitution.

More information on paper abstracts and speakers' biographies here.
Attendance is free of charge but registration is required.