2013-2014 Academic Catalog

May 05, 2024

2013-2014 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

HIST 232 - Finding the Subject: Comparative Histories of Prostitution

This seminar will examine prostitution in a variety of places and times. These include medieval, early modern and modern Europe; the United States, Argentina, Russia and China in the 19th century; ancient Rome; and 20th-century Kenya. The goal is twofold. The first is to study how historians find prostitutes in the historical record and what sorts of questions they consequently ask of their evidence. The point is to better understand the ways in which historians can access and make claims about subjects who usually have no voice of their own. The second goal is to pursue a selective, comparative, global history of prostitution. We will endeavor to see the ways in which prostitution was organized, what it meant to those who participated in it, and how it was perceived by those who did not. We will attempt to understand why prostitution, which never engaged more than a fraction of any population at any given time, managed to take on such a fundamental importance in the shaping of ideas about the state, family, women, sexuality, modernity, youth and power.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered periodically