I’m very pleased to announce that I have an article in the most recent issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality titled “Serving Sex: Playing with Prostitution in the Brasseries à femmes of Late Nineteenth-Century Paris.” The article traces the emergence of “brasseries à femmes” — cafés that featured serving girls — as a target of moral disapproval in late nineteenth-century Paris. In particular, the servers were often accused of being prostitutes, an assumption that has also pervaded a good deal of historical work on them. I argue, however, that we shouldn’t take this association at face value. Rather, I follow art historians and literary critics who have shown that representations of serving girls emphasized their essential ambiguity: were they or weren’t they available for sex? [1] Using records drawn from the Archives de la Préfecture de Police alongside published moral commentary, I show that this ambiguity was not just an effect of male discourse, but was also a key strategy of the servers themselves. The servers were able to use the assumption that they were prostitutes to their advantage as they manipulated their customers into believing that they were available for sex, whether they actually were or not. Even as the association of serving with prostitution constrained these women, therefore, it also offered them a limited ability to shape their day-to-day lives.
[1]See for example Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Theresa Ann Gronberg, “Femmes de Brasserie,” Art History 7, no. 3 (1984): 336; Jessica Tanner, “Turning Tricks, Turning the Tables: Plotting the Brasserie à Femmes in Tabarant’s Virus d’amour,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 3-4 (2013): 256.