An Interdisciplinary History of Prostitution

The research project on the history of sex work seeks to deconstruct the sociospatial construction of prostitution as an archetypal urban phenomenon. A long-term, comparative and interdisciplinary approach informed by subaltern theory and human geography is employed to personalize the sex industry and to identify the growth and dislocation of vice zones or liminal spaces in relation to urban and (semi-)rural heteronormativities. Belgium is taken as a case study for an exhaustive analysis of various forms of prostitution, the shifting spatial and mental boundaries of what was perceived as aberrant sexuality, the motivations, strategies and movements of the industry’s main actors and their interplay with authorities, reformers, social workers and neighbors.

The research emphasizes the multidimensional nature of displacement. We argue that sex workers and third parties followed the laws of supply and demand, responded proactively to local prostitution policies and non-state actors’ interventions, and reshaped the cultural landscapes to accommodate commercial sex alongside mainstream socioeconomic activities. Tracing the dynamics of sex work and mapping commonalities and differences between definitions, policies and practices in various socio-geographical contexts allows us to pay attention to the way the prostitution milieu responded to macro-level pressures and vice versa, to the society’s answer to the appropriation of space for commercial-sex purposes by sex workers and intermediaries of prostitution. Furthermore, the analysis of commercial sex activities in different geographical settings contributes to the re-conceptualization of the urban/rural dichotomy, which tends to treat social phenomena in urban and (semi-) rural environments as totally disconnected from each other.