Prostitution and Racialised Sexuality

The Regulation of Prostitution in Britain and the British Empire before the Contagious Diseases Acts

Bibliographic Data

ID4476274
AuthorsPhilip Howell (0000-0002-4673-6422, University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume18
Issue3
Pages321-339
Publication date2000-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/d259
OpenAlexW1972111852
LanguageEN
Citations received29
References cited31

In this paper I examine the interplay of race and sexuality in 19th-century British colonial legislation concerning prostitution. I demonstrate that British systems of regulation of prostitution predated the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1864, and that rather than spreading from Britain to its colonies regulationist measures developed from the interplay of metropolitan-colonial relations. The example of Hong Kong serves to illustrate both the priority of colonial systems for the regulation of prostitution and the explicitly racialised nature of this legislation. I argue that colonial practice served as more than a merely legislative precedent for domestic measures, however, as racial discourse and practice can be seen to mark all attempts at the regulation of prostitution, at home and abroad; and the conception of 'racialised sexuality' is useful for understanding both colonial and domestic measures for the regulation of prostitution. Understanding the historical geography of regulation therefore undermines conventional analyses of relations between imperial metropole and colonial periphery, and directs our attention to the articulated categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender in the complex colonial spaces of the British imperium

British Empire · Colonialism · Criminology · Empire · Human sexuality · Legislation · Legislature · Metropolitan area · Political science · Race (biology · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law · Sex work and related issues

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