Images of Sex Work in Early Twentieth-Century America: Gender, Sexuality and Race in the Storyville Portraits

Description

Storyville was the infamous red-light district of New Orleans. It was a world where normative social values didn’t apply and was shrouded in mystery and myth until the photographs of E.J. Bellocq were rediscovered. Bellocq’s depictions of Storyville’s sex workers have typically been treated as tragic, ominous and emblematic of New Orleans’ singularity. Yet, such interpretations have projected gendered stereotypes of frailty and victimhood onto the women they portrayed. In Images of Sex Work, Mollie LeVeque interrogates these glib readings and argues that sex work was a routine aspect of life in a modern city. She supports this theory by examining a range of cultural forms such as crime fiction, illustrations and paintings from contemporary urban centres like Paris, London and New York. In doing so, she advances the new argument that Bellocq humanised his subjects, de-sensationalised sex work and gave these women the dignity they were all too often denied. Cover Author Biography Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction 1 (Self-)Representing Storyville Women ‘The Terrible Fate of Kate Townsend’: Melodrama and Morality in the Media Blue Books and Manufactured Personas The ‘Indelible Marks’ of ‘Lewd and Abandoned’ Women – Pornography and Print Culture Depictions of Collateral Damage? 2 The ‘White Slave’ and the Question of Ambiguity ‘Degrees to Which a Woman could be Considered Fallen’: White Slavery Scares and Sloan’s Three A.M. Intersecting Taboos ‘Think I Want to get Pinched under the White Slave Law?’: Ambiguity in Representations of Sex and Sex Work ‘Infinite Stories Whose Endings We Will Never Know’ in Bellocq’s Portraits 3 A Fog of Violence, Voyeurism, and Crime ‘Violently and Downwards’ – the Ripper Postmortems and the Curious Case of Thomas Neill Cream ‘But I Am What [He] Made Me’: The Storyville Portraits as ‘Lust Diary’ ‘I Am Just Aching To Take My Axe and Go Down Canal Street’: Violence As a Convention of Reform ‘Bellocq Never Said Anything and They Always Let Him Go’ – Imposed Criminalities 4 The ‘Paris-ification’ of New Orleanian Vice Mysteries of Paris; Mysteries of New Orleans – Promiscuity, Sex Work, and Sex Slavery ‘To See The Tenderloin Proper is to Visit Trilby’s’: Echoes of Nana and Trilby in Storyville Était Dans Le Vice Comme Un Poisson Dans L’eau: Creole and Parisian Influences on Narratives of Storyville ‘An Opulent City of Sin, [. . .] a Dangerous City of Death’ – New Orleans’s Parisian ‘Otherness’ Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index