Managing Commercial Sex

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-117
Author(s):  
Siobhán Hearne

This chapter focuses on individuals who facilitated the commercial sex transaction in late imperial Russia, namely brothel madams, pimps, and those who rented their properties to registered prostitutes. It examines the complex relationship between brothel madams and the police, as well as addressing the various roles given to madams in official legislation: guardians of public health, watchdogs, and money-makers for the local government. Brothel madams provided lucrative income for the authorities, both formally through taxation and informally through bribes and cash gifts. The rules of regulation enforced a paternalistic relationship between madams and registered prostitutes, as well as providing ample opportunity for exploitation. Finally, the chapter examines hidden managers, in the form of pimps and procurers, and their cultural significance in the late imperial period.

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-180
Author(s):  
Siobhán Hearne

This chapter focuses on the experience of living in towns and cities in the late imperial period, when prostitution was a visible component of urban life. It examines the different unsuccessful policies employed by the imperial state to enforce the spatial segregation of registered prostitutes and attempts to render brothels invisible on the urban landscape. Official efforts to push lower-class sexuality to the spatial margins are also addressed, particularly policies of zoning and brothel ranking. Some landlords frequently complained to the police about the negative impact of nearby brothels on their rental prices, whereas others helped women who sold sex to resist some of the residency restrictions placed upon them by the police. Ultimately, officialdom’s attempts to limit the visibility of prostitution were spectacularly unsuccessful, as commercial sex was visible everywhere across the Empire’s towns and cities at the turn of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Ellie R. Schainker

The epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion, though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews who grappled with questions of Jewish identity and the role of religion in the increasingly powerful Jewish secular nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The epilogue explores evolving Jewish attitudes towards baptism, interfaith sociability, and cultural mobility in the late-imperial period, and it puts conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia in conversation with conversions from Judaism in the modern period more broadly. Finally, the epilogue looks ahead to the inter-revolutionary period (1906-1917) and the Soviet period when conversions from Judaism accelerated, accompanied by a growing ethnic conception of Jewish identity whereby national Jewishness found explicit harmony with Christian religious adherence.


Author(s):  
Siobhán Hearne

Policing Prostitution examines the complex world of commercial sex in the final two decades of the Russian Empire before its collapse in 1917. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical-police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensuring that they followed the strict rules prescribed by the imperial state governing their visibility and behaviour. The vast majority of women who sold sex hailed from the lower classes, as did their managers and clients. Official interest in prostitution generated a mass of documentation, which allows us to glimpse the lives and challenges of various groups of the Empire’s urban lower classes, including women who sold sex, their clients, brothel madams, police, and wider urban communities. In the late imperial period, prostitution was not just an urban ‘problem’ to be controlled and contained, but also a lucrative commodity due to the formal and informal financial relationships forged between brothel madams, registered prostitutes, and the police. This study is a social history of prostitution, drawing on archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. It focuses on how regulation was implemented, experienced, and resisted in various urban centres in the northwest of the Russian Empire, and how everyday experiences of regulation varied widely from place to place. In principle, the tsarist state regulated prostitution in the name of public order and public health; in practice, that regulation was both modulated by provincial police forces who had different local priorities, resources, and strategies, and contested by registered prostitutes, brothel madams, and others who interacted with the world of commercial sex.


2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
KONSTANTIN KASHIN ◽  
ETHAN POLLOCK

2016 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-397
Author(s):  
Zinan Yan

AbstractThis paper suggests a different approach in the study of Qing dynasty yongwu poetry, which is to analyse the cultural significance of the object in this literary subgenre instead of its lyrical essence. Taking eyeglasses as an example, this paper surveys the general development of imported and domestic eyeglasses in China from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and presents various literary interpretations assigned to this object through time. It further discusses Western and Chinese materiality, the economy and scholars' lives, political and social justification, as well as literary complexity and object identity, which are vital to the development of poetry on eyeglasses in the late imperial period.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Mohammed Mustapha Namadi

Corruption is pervasive in Nigeria at all levels. Thus, despite recent gains in healthcare provision, the health sector faces numerous corruption related challenges. This study aims at examining areas of corruption in the health sector with specific focus on its types and nature. A sample size of 480 respondents aged 18 years and above was drawn from the eight Metropolitan Local Government Areas of Kano State, using the multistage sampling technique. The results revealed evidence of corrupt practices including those related to unnecessary-absenteeism, diversion of patients from the public health facilities to the private sector, diverting money meant for the purchase of equipment, fuel and diesel, bribery, stealing of medications, fraud, misappropriation of medications and unjustifiable reimbursement claims. In order to resolve the problem of corrupt practices in the healthcare sector, the study recommended the need for enforcement of appropriate code of ethics guiding the conduct of the health professionals, adoption of anti-corruption strategies, and strengthening the government monitoring system to check corruption in public health sector in order to ensure equitable access to healthcare services among the under-privileged people in the society.


Author(s):  
Rodrigo Borba

Sex work has long been of interest to a variety of fields, among them anthropology, sociology, public health, and feminist theory, to name but a few. However, with very few exceptions, sociolinguistics seems to have ignored the fact that commercial sex, as an intersubjective business transaction, is primarily negotiated in embodied linguistic interaction. By reviewing publications in distinct social scientific areas that directly or indirectly discuss the role of language in the sex industry, this chapter critically assesses the analytical affordances and methodological challenges for a sociolinguistics of sex work. It does so by discussing the “tricks” played by sex work, as a power-infused context of language use in which issues of agency (or lack thereof) are paramount, on sociolinguistic theory and methods. The chapter concludes that the study of language in commercial sex venues is sociolinguistically promising and epistemologically timely.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document