Jill Suzanne Smith Book Abstract

SELF-CONSCIOUS COMMODITIES: LITERARY, CULTURAL, AND SOCIAL DISCOURSES ON PROSTITUTION IN BERLIN, 1880-1933


My research tracks the emergence of the prostitute as agent in various literary, cultural, and social texts created between 1880 and 1933 in or about the city of Berlin. Drawing from texts by canonical writers, political agitators, radical feminists, and sex reformers, among others, I develop the concept of the prostitute as self-conscious commodity: a complex, scalar notion of agency that incorporates and simultaneously questions the traditional dichotomies of subject and object, victim and agent, masculine and feminine. The self-conscious commodity is a woman who recognizes her commodity status and uses it to her own advantage-perhaps to gain financial autonomy, social mobility, or simply to attract attention. Through this figure, I examine how the prostitute, a figure that so often represents victimized or exploited womanhood, can also represent a form of women's financial and sexual emancipation.

Organized chronologically, my project analyzes turn-of-the-century writings primarily as a discourse on prostitution. In the works of this earlier period prostitution is used by progressive political figures, feminists, and social commentators as a polemic device to interrogate bourgeois capitalism, respectability, and patriarchy. The writers' initial interest in prostitutes does not signify a concern for individual women's choices or motivations, but rather relies on their categorization as "exploited" persons, social victims of a corrupt socio-economic order. Any social sympathy for these women, however, is blurred by the writers' utter contempt for prostitution as an institution. In its inability to effectively distinguish between the individual and the institution, the turn-of-the-century social critique of prostitution is, more often than not, collapsed with a moral condemnation of the prostitutes themselves. The discourse of the 1920s, in contrast, can be described as a discourse of prostitutes. Examining visual and pop cultural representations of prostitutes, I argue that discourses on prostitution were increasingly conflated with those of emancipated womanhood (i.e. the "New Woman" or the Angestellte). By drawing attention to this conflation, my research questions whether the experimental period of the Weimar Republic made female desire and financial independence more socially acceptable, or whether the lack of a social code for distinguishing sexually aggressive, working women from paid prostitutes caused all sexually active women simply to be marked as prostitutes. Closely reading popular novels by Vicki Baum and Irmgard Keun that contain sympathetic portrayals of women who prostitute themselves, I investigate how women's quotidian experience of work and the increasing fluidity of gender boundaries changed the perception of prostitution as a chosen occupation or, at the very least, as a mode of survival in turbulent modern times.

The discourses on prostitution and prostitutes examined in this study act as "sites of transformative practices"-transforming marriage from an unshakable institution to one in need of reform; transforming definitions of women's work to include domestic labor and sexual labor; and transforming notions of female sexuality by challenging the binary definition of that sexuality as either destructive or naturally passive1. In other words, the prostitute is a figure through which societal transformations in the embattled areas of bourgeois marriage, women's work, sexual morality, and female desire can be imagined and explored.



1 I take this term from Kemala Kempadoo & Jo Doezema, eds., Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (London/NY: Routledge, 1998) 8.