Storyville was the infamous red-light district of New Orleans. It was a world where normative social values didn’t apply and was shrouded in mystery and myth until the photographs of E.J. Bellocq were rediscovered. Bellocq’s depictions of Storyville’s sex workers have typically been treated as tragic, ominous and emblematic of New Orleans’ singularity. Yet, such interpretations have projected gendered stereotypes of frailty and victimhood onto the women they portrayed. In Images of Sex Work, Mollie LeVeque interrogates these glib readings and argues that sex work was a routine aspect of life in a modern city. She supports this theory by examining a range of cultural forms such as crime fiction, illustrations and paintings from contemporary urban centres like Paris, London and New York. In doing so, she advances the new argument that Bellocq humanised his subjects, de-sensationalised sex work and gave these women the dignity they were all too often denied.
By:
Mollie LeVeque
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 216mm,
Width: 140mm,
Weight: 440g
ISBN: 9781350430624
ISBN 10: 1350430625
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 19 October 2023
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction Chapter 1: (Self-)Representing Storyville Women Chapter 2: The 'White Slave' and the Question of Ambiguity Chapter 3: A Fog of Violence, Voyeurism, and Crime Chapter 4: The 'Paris-ification' of New Orleanian Vice Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
Mollie Le Veque received her PhD from the University of East Anglia, UK. Her research interests are the interplay of images, archives and texts, fandom histories, erased urban spaces and the Storyville Portraits.
