Session 7: From Prostitution to
S and M
Chair: Péter Szil
Documenting the Sex Industry: Bodily Confessions
and Investigations
Karen Boyle
Dept. Theatre, Film & Television Studies, University of Glasgow,
Scotland
Existing studies of prostitution and pornography on
television have largely focused on the ways in which prostitution is
used to explore general themes of sex, morality and crime in programmes
not specifically about prostitution. However, the most visible – and
certainly the most explicit – representation of prostitution
on contemporary British television is to be found in post-watershed
reality-programmes which deal with local aspects of the global sex “industry” and
tend to use the “erotic” rather than the “criminal” as
their conceptual frame.
Unlike their predecessors, these programmes
typically focus on off-street prostitution and other forms of commercial
sexual exploitation (particularly “exotic” dancing
and the making of video and internet pornography), often blurring the
boundaries between exploitation and “erotica” by focusing
on women producers and consumers. Using the conventions of documentary,
reality television and pornography, these programmes provide the viewer
with free access to “private” brothels, bedrooms, sets,
shops and domains whilst rendering the local purchasers of these women
invisible. The viewer’s own position vis-à-vis these images
is rendered respectable by the use of a discourse of erotica, on the
one hand, and the conventions of reality television on the other.
This
paper seeks to explore how the domestic television viewer is positioned
in – and in relation to – these spaces of prostitution
and pornography, and the women who inhabit them, and how the “erotic” functions
as a legitimating discourse within these spaces.
“Worse than the monster bred on th’banks
of Nyle”: The Discourse
of the Prostitute and the Formation of Women’s Sexuality in Early Modern
England
Victoria Price
Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of
Glasgow, Scotland
In the discourses of prostitution circulating in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, there is a tendency for
the prostitute to be located within sexual narratives as a creature
that must be contained and marginalized; the disruptive energy of her
excessive and monstrous female sexuality must be diffused or she will
prove, to borrow Samuel Pick’s words, “gangrene
to the state.” Yet, whilst geographically and ideologically
located on the fringes of the community, this paper will reveal that
the early modern prostitute is simultaneously discovered as integral
to society’s
functioning. For, in concentrating on a variety of the period’s
social documents - from John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1604-05)
to Samuel Pick’s “Satyre of Gracelesse Grace” (1613)
- I will show that the gender inflections of diatribes that focus
on the prostitute’s dangerously seductive sexuality discursively
mark all women as potential prostitutes. In this way, the
discourse of the prostitute comes to operate as a controlling device
for the regulation and harnessing of female sexuality, and thereby
as a means of (re)positioning women within the gender hierarchy.
My argument in this paper, then, resides at the contradiction between
a cultural imperative to ostracize and condemn the prostitute, and
the simultaneous societal need for the figure of the prostitute to
function as a vehicle through which it is possible to establish sexual
boundaries for women. In this sense, I will be addressing some of the
period’s interstitial anxieties as regards the maintenance of
sexual mores and male dominance in the face of a monstrous female sexuality
which once unleashed knows to the contemporary mind no bounds. In mobilizing
a discourse of deviant sexuality that becomes applicable to all women,
the attempts of men to define the gender order at this historical juncture
become exposed.