Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Urban Studies and Planning Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

PDF

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

2020

Articles 1 - 1 of 1

Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning

Darkness In The Parlor: Prostitution And Narratives Of Urban Exploration In London’S West End, Aiden Evans Jun 2020

Darkness In The Parlor: Prostitution And Narratives Of Urban Exploration In London’S West End, Aiden Evans

The Forum: Journal of History

Prostitution in London’s West End came to constitute a multidimensional transgression for middle-class observers during the late-Victorian period, contesting traditional distinctions between West and East, middle-class and working-class, and public and private life. First, through the use of Late Victorian urban exploration narratives, I will show that urban explorers applied a rigid conceptual framework to identify the working-class prostitutes occupying London’s affluent West-End. Rooted in class-based hierarchies, these systems of identification presumed that working-class prostitutes were categorically distinct, visible, and undisguisable in London’s West End. Moreover, I argue that this conceptual framework reveals the authors’ binary understandings of prostitutes’ public …