ancient cities

hence helped to maintain the sanctity of family life.
In some instances, this encouraged the formation
of officially sanctioned brothels, bawds, and stews,
so that, for example, most medieval French towns
had a maison de ville or bathhouse where prostitution
was subject to legal control.
This pattern of officially tolerated prostitution
began to change in the modern period as the
increased distanciation of home and workplace
drove a wedge between the feminized suburbs and
the masculine realms of the city center. Associated
with a range of pleasures and dangers, the city center
was regarded as no place for an unaccompanied
woman: There was thus no female equivalent of the
streetwise flâneur, only the prostitute. In this sense,
the street prostitute’s presence in the public realm
was a reminder to the city fathers that their mastery
of the metropolis was not as complete as they might
have wished it to be. Furthermore, urban governors
expressed concern that the sight of prostitutes on
the street would corrupt innocent women and children
while undermining the moral values normalizing
the heterosexual family unit. For such reasons,
the female prostitute came to constitute a central
figure in the modern social imagination, becoming
subject to increasingly elaborate forms of surveillance
and containment designed to restrict the
visibility of sex workers and express the state’s disapproval
of prostitution. New prohibitionist legislation
was thus passed throughout the urban West
with the intention of allowing the forces of law and
order to eradicate prostitution; however, the impossibility
of this task frequently led to the state instituting
forms of regulationism predicated on systems
of enclosure and surveillance. For example, French
regulationism brought about the establishment of
maisons de tolérance in designated quartiers
réservés. In some instances, anxieties about disease
also justified the institutionalization of demeaning
medical inspections for suspected prostitutes, with
the English Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s
providing the basis of a spatialized form of control
that was replicated throughout the empire.
Collectively, historical geographies of prostitution
thus highlight the forms of spatial governmentality
inherent in different forms of regulation,
with tactics of spatial confinement, surveillance,
and exclusion essential to practices of policing
prostitution in modern cities. Mapping out these
changing geographies thus reveals the distinctive
Sex Industry
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spatial formations—for example, the maisons de
tolérance of nineteenth-century Paris, the tippelzones
of postwar Dutch cities, or the roadhouse
brothels of Nevada—associated with particular
modes of control and policing. Alongside these
heavily regulated sites, however, street prostitution
has continued to flourish in the “twilight areas” of
cities, with the discretionary policing of street sex
work serving to push street prostitution away from
wealthier and Whiter areas of cities toward areas
where residents have been insufficiently motivated
or insufficiently powerful to oppose the presence
of prostitutes on their streets. The fact that such
areas of street sex work may also be associated
with drug dealing, deprivation, and criminality has
become highly significant in the media representation
of prostitution, cementing the associations
between sexual immorality, violence, disease, and
poverty. This marginalization of prostitutes, not
only in moral discourse but also geographically in
“streets of shame,” thus creates a distinctive moral
geography, implying that some sexual behaviors
are acceptable only in certain places.
Hence, the literature on the legal and social
regulation of prostitution in the urban West is now
well established, having documented how the
nation-state seeks to influence both on- and offstreet
prostitution through evolving laws, statutes,
and policies. Far from asserting that these laws
determine the shape and form of prostitution, such
literature suggests the law is a productive force that
shapes a whole range of social institutions that go
well beyond the state, impinging on the actions of
social actors in a variety of ways. Such literature
demonstrates that regulation of prostitution is spatially
variegated, to the extent that some forms of
prostitution may be regarded as legitimate work in
some cities yet are thoroughly criminalized in others.
Furthermore, major distinctions are often made
between legal and illegal forms of sex work within
given jurisdictions, and commentators and advocates
alike are thus beginning to tease out the implications
of sex work legislation for the health and
well-being of prostitutes in different cities.
Beyond Prostitution:
Regulating Commercial Sex
Laura Agustin has argued that, studies focusing on
prostitution often ignore the wider social, cultural