Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema: New Takes on Fallen Women

Description

This volume brings together international scholars to engage in the question of how film has represented a figure that for many is simply labelled ‘prostitute’. The prostitute is one of the most enduring female figures. She has global historical resonance and stories, images and narratives surrounding her, and her experiences, circulate transnationally. As this book will explore, the broad term prostitute can cover a variety of experiences and representations that are both repressive and also have the potential to empower women and disrupt cultural expectations. The contributors aim to consider how frequently 19th-century narratives of female prostitution—hence the label ‘fallen women’—are still recycled in contemporary visual contexts, and to understand how widespread, and in what contexts, the destigmatization of female sex work is underway on screen. Front Matter ....Pages i-xvi Introduction (Danielle Hipkins, Kate Taylor-Jones)....Pages 1-15 Front Matter ....Pages 17-17 Distant Suffering, Proper Distance: Cosmopolitan Ethics in the Film Portrayal of Trafficked Women (Jane Arthurs)....Pages 19-43 ‘Through Hardships To the Stars’: The Moldovan Prostitute in Nicolae Margineanu’s Schimb Valutar (Alice Bardan)....Pages 45-64 Front Matter ....Pages 65-65 Duality and Ambiguity: Prostitution, Performance and the Vagaries of Modernity in Japanese Cinema (Adam Bingham)....Pages 67-84 The Idealization of Prostitutes: Aesthetics and Discourse of South Korean Hostess Films (1974–1982) (Molly Hyo Kim)....Pages 85-105 Inside the ‘House of Ill Fame’: Brothel Prostitution, Feminization of Poverty, and Lagos Life in Nollywood’s The Prostitute (Saheed Aderinto)....Pages 107-128 Front Matter ....Pages 129-129 Where Cabaret Meets Revolution: The Prostitute at War in Mexican Film (Niamh Thornton)....Pages 131-146 Distorted Antigones: Dialectics and Prostitution in Lola and Shirins Hochzeit (Teresa Ludden)....Pages 147-171 Front Matter ....Pages 173-173 Becoming and Contradiction in the Muslim Courtesan—The Case of Pakeezah (Aparna Sharma)....Pages 175-194 Le Traviate: Suffering Heroines and the Italian State Between the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries (Danielle Hipkins, Katharine Mitchell)....Pages 195-217 Consumptive Chic: The Postfeminist Recycling of Camille in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (Katie N. Johnson)....Pages 219-240 Front Matter ....Pages 241-241 Postcards and/of Prostitutes: Circulating the City in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe (Fiona Handyside)....Pages 243-263 Handbags, Sex, and Death: Prostitution in Contemporary East Asian Cinematic Urban Space (Kate Taylor-Jones)....Pages 265-286 Back Matter ....Pages 287-295