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(Indiana University
Press, 1994)
Prostitution
as a discursive domain has had a marginal place in
the cultural exchanges of the West for thousands
of years. In two historical/philosophical periods –
the pagan and the postmodern – prostitutes have
themselves produced discourses. In ancient Greece hetairae
numbered among the sophistic philosophers.
This work is
a genealogy of the prostitute body: it is a discontinuous
history written as theory and politics; what Michel
Foucault has called ‘a history of
the present,’ beginning with a retrospective
reconstruction of the hetaira, the pagan prostitute, from
the vantage point of the postmodern prostitute.
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The overarching strategy of Reading, Writing, and Rewriting
the Prostitute Body is to show how it is that the referent,
the flesh-and-blood female body engaged in some form of sexual
interaction in exchange for some kind of payment, has no inherent
meaning and is signified differently in different discourses.
I trace the construction of the prostitute body in five discursive
domains: ancient Greece, modern Europe, contemporary feminism
(North American and French), postmodern prostitute feminisms
(North American and international), and postmodern prostitute
performance art (North American). (pp.1-2)
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