Log in Register. Searchable Program. Full Program. Search Sessions. Search Abstracts. Search Participants. Gender, sex and prostitution in Turkey, ss. Panel Description. The field of modern Turkish history has transformed considerably in recent years moving from a state-centric approach to the state's interaction with its citizens, to social history and to new sub-fields such as medical history and history of women and gender.
It is within this context of the broadening of the field that previously neglected topics and marginalized groups finally became subjects of historical scholarship on late and post-Ottoman Turkey.
This panel contributes to this emerging scholarship by examining aspects of changing gender relations, sexual relations and prostitution in Turkey from the s through the s, drawing on sources such as archival documents, court records, newspapers, memoirs and autobiographies. The first paper charts the gradual development in the s and s of regulatory state policies on prostitution.
It argues that the regulatory policies that emerged by the mids were a result of debates and competing proposals by medical professionals, administrators and policy makers around issues of public health, criminality and morality. The second paper turns to the most important piece of legislation on sex work in Turkey: the Regulation on prostitution.
It explains how the regulation of sex work in practice led to the creation of a strict regime of control and the surveillance of bodies and spaces--not only of prostitutes and brothels, but of the larger communities and indeed of the nation. The next paper seeks to reconsider the definition of prostitution on the basis of the types of gendered relations and sexual encounters that emerge from an examination of memoirs and autobiographical works focusing on Ankara in the s and s.
