Dear All, 

Ww would like to advertise the following call for papers. We would really 
appreciate it if you can pass this on to any interested people/networks!

CALL FOR PAPERS

Representations of prostitution, sex work and sex trafficking between the 19th 
and 21st centuries

The Women’s Library, London, 9th-10th September, 2010

Provisional Keynote Speakers:
Jane Arthurs, University of the West of England
Marianne Hester, University of Bristol
Russell Campbell, University of Wellington
Kirsten Pullen, Texas A&M University

The figure of the prostitute is a malleable cultural symbol, used to address 
social fears and desires (Matlock, 1994; O’Neill, 2001). Representations of 
prostitutes enable us to understand attitudes towards female mobility, 
sexuality, ethnicity, and emancipation that cross national divides and affect all 
gender identities. The global centrality of such representations is growing, as 
debates about sex work, tourism and trafficking recur in a variety of border-
crossing forms.

When considered from a global and historical perspective, portrayals of 
prostitution are many and varied, intersecting with different cultural and 
historical moments, in different forms and for different audiences, and 
functioning in dramatically different ways. Studies of the narratives of the 
prostitute, sex worker and sex trafficking within specific representational and 
key national contexts point to a need for further collaboration to understand 
the extent of their transnational nature, and the way in which representational 
forms may differ. This conference aims therefore to bring together studies of 
the representation of prostitution from a range of cultures, including Europe, 
North Africa, the US, Latin America, China, Japan, Korea, and India. In this 
transnational context we will examine how various representational forms 
inflect the figure differently since little attention has been paid to the 
evolution of the prostitute’s representation over the past two centuries from 
the novel and stage towards the globalized modes of film, television and the 
internet.

We would welcome proposals on any aspect of the conference theme, 
particularly in the light of the following questions:

1) Which features of the representation of prostitution cross a selection of 
different media and national contexts, and which do not? 

2) How have new representational forms affected portrayals of prostitution? 
To what extent is there continuity between nineteenth, twentieth, and 
twenty-first century approaches?

3) What are the contentious issues around the representation of prostitution, 
and what strategies might one devise to negotiate them? How do different 
understandings of feminism inflect the way we interpret images of prostitution? 

4) How do representations of prostitution overlap with other discourses about 
gender? 

5) How can we develop a transdisciplinary methodological approach to the 
study of gender representation, in particular to the representation of 
prostitutes, by bringing medical history, philosophy, sociology, politics, and 
geography together with more traditional studies of representation?

Please send abstracts of 500 words to the organizers Danielle Hipkins and Kate 
Taylor at [log in to unmask] by February 28th, 2010