Prostitution and the ends of empire : scale, governmentalities, and interwar India
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Prostitution and the ends of empire : scale, governmentalities, and interwar India
Duke University Press, 2014
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 259-275) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Officially confined to red-light districts, brothels in British India were tolerated until the 1920s. Yet, by this time, prostitution reform campaigns led by Indian, imperial, and international bodies were combining the social scientific insights of sexology and hygiene with the moral condemnations of sexual slavery and human trafficking. These reformers identified the brothel as exacerbating rather than containing "corrupting prostitutes" and the threat of venereal diseases, and therefore encouraged the suppression of brothels rather than their urban segregation. In this book, Stephen Legg tracks the complex spatial politics surrounding brothels in the interwar period at multiple scales, including the local, regional, national, imperial, and global. Campaigns and state policies against brothels did not just operate at different scales but made scales themselves, forging new urban, provincial, colonial, and international formations. In so doing, they also remade the boundary between the state and the social, through which the prostitute was, Legg concludes, "civilly abandoned."
Table of Contents
Preface vii Introduction. Spatial Genealogies from Segregation to Suppression 1 1. Civil Abandonment: The Inclusive Exclusion of Delhi's Prostitutes 41 2. Assembling India: The Birth of SITA 95 3. Imperial Moral and Social Hygiene 169 Conclusion. Within and beyond the City 239 Notes 247 References 259 Index 277
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