Managed zones for sex workers in Liverpool: contemporary proposals, Victorian parallels

Abstract

Recent proposals to establish a ‘managed zone’ for female street sex workers in Liverpool are placed in this paper in historical and geographical context. Liverpool is shown to be an exemplar of a late Victorian municipal management of prostitution that was just as firmly committed to the containment and ‘localisation’ of sex work. This model is contrasted with alternative municipal strategies, and set within a national legislative agenda increasingly hostile to tolerance and regulation. The contours of this governmental regulation of commercial sexuality are explored in some detail here, but this historical geography is also offered as a way of informing contemporary concerns, cautioning as it does against averring either the novelty or the progressiveness of contemporary policies on the zoning of sex work.

‘Protecting the national body’: regulating the practice and the place of prostitution in early republican Turkey

“…Though there exist many historical studies on prostitution and associated society/state relations (Aisenberg 2001;Bernstein 1995;Corbin 1990;Finnegan 1979;Fout 1992;Gibson 1986;Harsin 1985;Ringdal 2004;Stauter-Halsted 2007Vries 2001;Walkowitz 1980;Wingfield 2006Wingfield , 2011, recent historical geographies concerning regulationist regimes are most in line with our inquiry (Howell 2000a(Howell , 2000b(Howell , 2004(Howell , 2009Howell et al 2008;Legg 2010;Philips 2002). While these historical geographies are relevant in terms of both regulation and associated medical rationales for its promotionrecalling Britain's 'Contagious Diseases' legislation, they are also specific to Britain and the empire's overseas territories during the latter half of the nineteenth century.…”

“…Since that time, additional trajectories of inquiry that include analysis of prostitution have become prominent: gendered geographies of development/underdevelopment and tourism, of urban and/or state regulation, of human rights and trafficking, and of health and HIV/AIDS (e.g., Askew 1998;Hubbard 1998aHubbard , 1998bHubbard , 1999Hubbard , 2000Hubbard , 2001Hubbard , 2004Hubbard et al 2008;Howell et al 2008;Wright 2004;Manzo 2005;Van Liempt 2011;Craddock 2000;Katsulis 2008). Framing our work in terms of critical studies while researching prostitution in early republican Turkey and the state's measures to define it as a medical problem and a legal matter, we were informed by recent historical geographies exploring regulationist approaches (Howell 2000a(Howell , 2000b(Howell , 2004(Howell , 2009Howell et al 2008;Legg 2010;Philips 2002) and our own research on the governmental and biopolitical dimensions of public health in the early republic (Evered and Evered 2011a, 2011b, 2012. Framing our work in terms of critical studies while researching prostitution in early republican Turkey and the state's measures to define it as a medical problem and a legal matter, we were informed by recent historical geographies exploring regulationist approaches (Howell 2000a(Howell , 2000b(Howell , 2004(Howell , 2009Howell et al 2008;Legg 2010;Philips 2002) and our own research on the governmental and biopolitical dimensions of public health in the early republic (Evered and Evered 2011a, 2011b, 2012.…”

Narrations and practices of mobility and immobility in the maintenance of gender dualisms

“…In turn, the figure of the (roaming) outback miner was contrasted with that of sex and workers and skin workers who were conceptualised as spatially fixed within the highly-visible, regulated, taxpaying brothels on Hay Street, or (in the case of skin-workers) in a set number of known bars. v This echoes both traditional constructions of gendered mobility which contrasted male mobility and female fixity called forth in the WAM, as well as more widespread patterns of containment of sex work and skin work in Australia and elsewhere (Howell et al 2008;Hubbard 2001;Sullivan 2008).…”

Cinema’s milieux: governing the picture show in the United States during the Progressive era

“…18 In his appraisal of British prostitution regulation in the nineteenth century, Philip Howell argues this particular governmental project 'was worked out as a politics of placednot as the imposition of some abstract disciplinary or regulatory power, but as a localized intervention in the economy of sex, a strategy above all of containment, one that both attended to and was disturbed by the particularities of the places into and onto which it was projected'. 19 Here, the 'economy of sex' is a larger discursive formation or dispositive that was materialized locally through lived experiences, often in places shaped by the imperatives of the imperial war machine, especially ports and cantonments housing and directing the flows of soldiers who had to be protected from venereal disease.…”