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This book places prostitution at the very centre of European history in the twentieth century. It encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences.
List of contents
Introduction: Prostitution in twentieth century Europe 1. Prostitution as non-labour leading to forced labour: Vagrancy and Gender in Sweden and Stockholm, 1919–1939 2. Police and prostitution in Yugoslavia: a nuanced relationship 3. Why we need a history of prostitution in the Holocaust 4. Tensions of abolitionism during the negotiation of the 1949 ‘Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others’ 5. Prostitution in socialist Yugoslavia: from Stalinism to the Yugoslav way 6. The new face of Italian prostitution in the aftermath of the Merlin Law: forms, debate and repression 7. Selling sex under socialism: prostitution in the post-war USSR 8. ‘Cleaning up the cityscape’: managing commercial sex and city space in Cologne, 1956–1972 9. Greek trans women selling sex, spaces and mobilities, 1960s–80s
About the author
Sonja Dolinsek has worked on a doctoral project on the transnational history of anti-trafficking and the politics of prostitution after 1945 with a focus on Germany, France, the United Kingdom and USA. She works at the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University.
Siobhán Hearne is a historian of gender and sexuality in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. She is the author of Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (2021), as well as various articles about prostitution, venereal diseases and pornography in imperial Russian and Soviet history.
Summary
This book places prostitution at the very centre of European history in the twentieth century. It encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences.
