They offer insights into the history of sexuality and gender, the state, the police, crime, labour and medical history, but also the history of media and representations.
Thus, regulation, categorisation, suspicion, and repression were directed at all women who were considered sexually deviant or unruly. Dolinsek and Saryusz-Wolska propose to analyse the discursive constructions of what constitutes il legitimate work on the one hand, and the social reality of sexual labour in the context of makeshift economies on the other.
This involves examining the politics of prostitution and public debates, but also the practices of sex workers and of others involved in prostitution. The volume consists of twelve chapters covering different countries, cities and regions of Central, East-Central and South-Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Not only current public debates but also research is often shaped by problematic categories and dichotomies, in particular questions of voluntariness and coercion, rather than a more nuanced view of agency and exploitation. In addition, researchers have only recently begun to study prostitution under socialism. Several articles deal with knowledge production and the controversial political discourses around prostitution. Bruns shows how maids, waitresses and female factory workers were associated with the risk of prostitution, and how surveillance and regulation were increasingly deployed in response to first moral and then public health debates.
In her chapter, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska examines anti-VD campaigns in the Soviet and American zones of Germany after , which she understands as biopolitical measures. She scrutinises the efforts to keep the Allied armies healthy and to avoid fraternisation, while at the same time re-establishing conservative family norms. Anna Dobrowolska traces debates about prostitution and sex work in state-socialist Poland. She understands prostitution as a metaphor for social and political transformations within society.
