Editors:

Loraine Chappuis (Damoclès, université de Genève) et Hélène Duffuler-Vialle (Centre d’Histoire Judiciaire, université de Lille)

Presentation

Criminocorpus invites submission for a special issue on intersections of prostitution, justice and the law from the late Middle Ages to the present days.

Historical research into prostitution in French academia started at the end of the 1970s, after the long struggle of the history of sexuality to acquire scientific legitimacy. Three major works – Les filles de noces (1978) of Alain Corbin, La prostitution et la police des mœurs au XVIIIe siècle (1987) of Erica-Marie Benabou and La prostitution médiévale (1988) of Jacques Rossiaud – marked this new research field in France, at the same as, in English-speaking research, the works of Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution: A Study of Victorian Prostitutes in York (1979) or Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (1980) established the field.

In their wake numerous scholars addressed the issue adding new interdisciplinary and methodological approaches to the question. Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk’s collective book, Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s, published in 2017, is a striking example.

This issue seeks to further contribute to these recent renewals of historiographical questions by intersecting history of the law, social history and socio-history and by integrating gender, intersectionality, post- and decolonial studies as well as history of sexualities.

Perspectives and New Historical Approaches

This issue proposes to question modes of regulation, control or condoning of prostitution throughout times, seeking to extend the analysis beyond public authorities, which have traditionally been the focus of study. The aim will be to give special attention to practices and individuals involved, to their interactions with the law, and to the strategies they adopted to circumvent institutional and social constraints imposed on them. Furthermore, it will examine their social integration as well as their relationship with their neighbourhood.

Gender studies allow to highlight the agency of the involved individuals as well as their potential strategies in a coercive context (Plumauzille, 2016). Moreover, they invite us to question gender relations and to assess the influence of stereotypes and gender norms in the process of enforcing control over prostitution. At stake is the coerced place imposed on men and women in the law of sexual supply and demand by the judiciary system (texts and judiciary, and police practices). Adding to that, intersectionality addresses the intertwinement of gender, race, class or age power dynamics (Duffuler-Vialle, 2015). The heteronormativity inherent to the institutional approach to prostitution shall be put into perspective, to make more visible homosexual prostitution, which has been marginally studied by scholars so far (Tamagne, 1998, Révenin, 2005). The aim is to integrate heterosexual prostitution in a borader approach to economico-sexual exchanges, as conceptualised by anthropologist Paola Tabet, among others (Tabet, 2004).

Moreover, this issue calls for a dialog between European and colonial contexts, to question the circulation of norms, protagonists, and control apparatus (Taraux, 2003: Tracol-Huyn, 2013). Contributions can draw on comparative approaches to analyse different legal and social regimes to prostitution in a global context. Lastly, spatial approaches to prostitution are welcome (Gonzalez-Quijano, 2015; Roby, 2021). Namely, this issue invites historians to draw on the works of sociologists, rarely used in historical studies, even though they offer particularly stimulating and useful perspectives analysing space, urban practices and the visibility dynamics of prostitution (Pryen, 1999, Mathieu, 2000).

Questions about hygiene and health, although discussed since the Middle Ages, began to take on renewed importance in the 20^th century because of natalist, hygienist, and eugenic policies. Even though they have already been analysed in classical works, it would be worth studying more in depth the feminist figures engaged in such matters. Beyond the role played by doctors and learned societies, positions of activists, such as Madeleine Pelletier and Marcelle Legrand-Falco in France, put into perspective with those of Anna Pappritz and Henriette Arendt in Germany, call for a special attention (Machiels, 2016).

Another important stake of the issue is the political and feminist controversy and, in particular, the debates about repression as opposed condonement of prostitution among public authorities. Since the 19^th centuries, these debates have thus fostered the wakening of different ideological tendances such as regulationism, abolitionism, and prohibitionism.

Nowadays tensions within feminist movements about prostitution are still raging. Indeed, the “sex war” opposing queer feminists and pro-sex work feminists on one side to abolitionists on the other appear to be one of the most polarzing in contemporary feminism. While the former view sex work as empowering (Robin, Butler, 2001), the latter denounce it as a form of gendered violence comparable to rape, which must be fought to dismantle patriarchy (McKinnon, 1988). In this issue, we do not, as a matter of principle, exclude any approach, provided that on adheres to the methodology of standpoint epistemologies, which encourages the researchers to clarify their positionality with respect to their object of study. From an historical perspective, the origins of this feminist dispute could be the subject of article proposals.

Finally, contributions should reflect on methodological challenges and on the sources that can be drawn upon, particularly those allowing access to the experiences and agency of people who engaged in sex work. Special attention may also be given to timelines in order to highlight changes according to specific and situated context.

Themes

Contributions may investigate the following (non-exhaustive) list of thematics

1. Regulation and agency

2. Prostitution, spaces and neighbourhood

3. Violences et procuring

4. Prostitution, sex work and sexualities

Submission deadline: 30^th October 2025. Proposals (max 3000 signs) along with a short bio-biography are to be submitted by email.

Contacts : Loraine.Chappuis@unil.ch et helene.duffuler@univ-artois.fr

Deadline for article submission: 31^th of June 2026

Publication of the issue: March 2027