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.
By:
Mollie LeVeque
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 216mm,
Width: 140mm,
Weight: 440g
ISBN: 9781788311786
ISBN 10: 1788311787
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 21 March 2019
Audience:
College/higher education
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction Chapter 1: (Self-)Representing Storyville Women Chapter 2: The 'White Slave' and the Question of Ambiguity Chapter 3: A Fog of Violence, Voyeurism, and Crime Chapter 4: The 'Paris-ification' of New Orleanian Vice Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
Mollie Le Veque received her PhD from the University of East Anglia, UK. Her research interests are the interplay of images, archives and texts, fandom histories, erased urban spaces and the Storyville Portraits.
Reviews for Images of Sex Work in Early Twentieth-Century America: Gender, Sexuality and Race in the Storyville Portraits
`This author has crafted an intriguing look at an important topic'. - Court Carney, Associate Professor of History, Stephen F. Austin State University and author of Cuttin' Up: How Early Jazz Got America's Ear