Prostitution

This chapter shows how slavery informed the social realities of and rhetoric about prostitution and prostitutes, which informed the negative representation of female prostitutes in early Christian sources. Following Paul’s rhetoric, many Christians used sexual virtue to legitimatize themselves and bolster their triumphalist claims over others in the Roman Empire. To this end, they employed the degraded and debased female prostitute as a powerful symbolic figure as that which stood outside communal boundaries or as a threat that could undermine boundaries from within. In so doing, they marginalized prostitutes and enslaved persons, who could not, by virtue of their enslavement, sustain the sexual ethics that early Christians were promoting. The chapter concludes with debates about contemporary sex workers, arguing that it is critical for feminist historians to resist the rhetoric of the early Christian texts, which obscure the presence of prostitutes (and vulnerable slaves) in ancient Christ-believing communities.

Poets and Prostitutes: Sexual Morality in Malawian Poetry

The social phenomenon of prostitution is to be found throughout the world. Malawi is no exception. Rather than reading it from a sociological perspective, however, this article examines the representation of the prostitute in Malawian poetry. This position is informed by the contention that literature has an illocutionary force that offers a novel view of social phenomena, in some instances permitting a closer, more intimate engagement with the human subjects at the centre of the text, with the aim of enabling fresh conceptions of that subject. In the past few decades, the figure of the female prostitute has arisen occasionally in the verse of several male Malawian poets. It is the opinion of this article that, in their representation of this individual, the poets seek to expose the prostitute’s humanity, in opposition to the overriding denigration of her as a harbinger of disease and immorality. The exercise proceeds by examining eight poems written by well-known Malawian poets: Jack Mapanje, Steve Chimombo, David Rubadiri, Felix Mnthali, John Lwanda and Stanley Onjezani Kenani. In several of the poems, the writers address the women by specific names—Fiona, Tamara, Antonina—as an attempt to humanise them, to cleanse them of the appellation of monstrosity that has often been directed at the prostitute. It is an attempt to re-centre a figure that has existed on the margins of Malawian society, by according them agency and sympathy.

Hidden Dangers

By the late 1840s, a new genre of literature revealed deep concerns with corruption in the growing urban centers. City mysteries exposed a dark underworld of the metropolis, leading readers through smoky saloons, gambling dens, and brothels. More than any other “sin of the city,” urban gothic literature focused on prostitution. The female prostitute embodied the greatest antithesis to the ideal or “true” woman. Anticonvent literature often compared nuns to prostitutes, convents to brothels, priests to seducers, and Mother Superiors to madams. City mysteries mirrored convent narratives in their description of women being seduced into lives of misery and sexual deviance. Both convent narratives and city mysteries promised to unveil a hidden world of sin and debauchery for an eager readership. This chapter compares convent tales and city mysteries, focusing on the nun-prostitute figure and the ways in which this female archetype threatened nineteenth-century female gender norms.

“A woman should not be so cheap” The Prostitute as a Constructed Other in Estonian Post-Soviet Life Stories

This article discusses the construction of the female prostitute figure in Estonian life stories on love and sexuality that were collected in 1996. As prostitution was mentioned in the questions posed in the call for writings, more than half of the 61 respondents discussed their attitudes as well as experiences concerning prostitution. The writers portray prostitution as a stable phenomenon that is needed in society; one that cannot be eradicated but should be controlled. Additionally, prostitution is connected to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and particularly to AIDS. The image of prostitution constructed in the writings carries ethicised meanings as it is exoticised as well as portrayed as something inherently Estonian. The main point in this article is that the figure of the female prostitute was constructed as an ‘other’ in the life stories, a sexual outsider who is needed in the society but who is nonetheless perceived as essentially different from the writers themselves. The contributors used this othering in their writing to construct their selves as well as the concept of acceptable heterosexuality.This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on August 17th 2016, and published on August 28th 2017.

Cleopatra: New Insights for the Interpretation of Revelation 17

The Whore of Babylon as a graphic scriptural image stirs the imaginations of contemporary readers and preachers of the New Testament Apocalypse. But how does one explain the dissonance between the book’s depiction of a powerful female prostitute living in luxury and the utter vulnerability of prostitutes at the time the book was written? The disconnect raises questions concerning the purpose and implications of such imagery. What aspects of culture, recent history or personal experience might the writer have drawn upon? This paper suggests important new connections to the figure of Cleopatra as an interpretive key. The Ptolemaic queen of Egypt, remembered as both leader and legend, provided important cultural memory behind the imagery used by the author of the book of Revelation. The power, threat and ultimate demise of Cleopatra made the imagery of the whore of Babylon particularly gripping at the end of the first century.