Prostitution and the ends of empire : scale, governmentalities, and interwar India / Stephen Legg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Legg, Stephen.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prostitution--Government policy--India--History--20th century.

Prostitution.

Prostitution--India--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (294 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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."

Contents:

Introduction: spatial genealogies from segregation to suppression

Civil abandonment : the inclusive exclusion of Delhi's prostitutes

Assembling India: the birth of Sita

Imperial moral and social hygiene

Conclusion: within and beyond the city.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781322067391

1322067392

9780822376170

0822376172

OCLC:

888746568