Research

My research explores the relationship between urban space and sexuality. My first book, Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Temple University Press, 2019). The book places women who sold sex and men who sought sex with other men at the heart of the history of nineteenth-century Parisian life. My work demonstrates the centrality of sexuality to histories of urban change, modernization, and consumer culture and participates in an ongoing effort by historians of sexuality to demonstrate the central role of sex and sexuality to histories of politics, society, and culture. It argues that the appropriation of public space by men and women seeking sexual partners for profit and pleasure shaped the meaning of the city for everyone who used it. The opening of the city to commerce, circulation, and social interaction enabled both new modes of social control and novel forms of urban pleasure. As the police and expert commentators not only failed to prevent, but also inadvertently enabled, the appropriation of parks, boulevards, cafés, and even public urinals by prostitutes, men seeking sex with other men, and Parisians seeking out sex, everyone who used the city found themselves wrestling with the sexualization of urban space. The interactions between these diverse groups put into question both the distinction between asexual and sexual spaces, but also between normal and abnormal individuals.

I have published portions of this research in several journals. I first published an article on the appropriation of public urinals by men who sought sex with other men in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. More recently, I explored the use of serving girls in late nineteenth-century Parisian cafés in “Serving Sex: Playing with Prostitution in the Brasseries à femmes of Late Nineteenth-Century Paris,” which appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Finally, I laid out some of the theoretical and methodological impetuses of my project in French Historical Studies in an article titled “Sex in the Archives: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and the Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris.” Full citations to these articles can be found on my CV.

My next book, tentatively titled “Abolishing the Police in Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Sexuality, Race, and the Campaign Against the Morals Brigade, 1870-1920″ expands upon this research through a a history of the campaign to abolish the morals police in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Paris. The “Paris system” of morals policing, with its dedicated police force who registered, monitored, and examined female prostitutes and harassed other offenders proved a model across Europe during the nineteenth century. With the passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Great Britain and the declaration of the Third Republic in France, however, such practices became increasingly susceptible to attack by self-proclaimed “abolitionists” who claimed that morals policing was but the most acute threat represented by over-policing in democratic societies. Asserting that over-policing rendered its victims into degraded “slaves,” abolitionists drew on diverse strands of racial thinking as they variously sought to ensure greater sexual autonomy and preserve social order at home. “Abolishing the Police” argues that efforts to reform urban policing in fin-de-siècle Paris rested on deploying racial anxieties around sex and sexuality to, surprisingly perhaps, attack the power of the police. A portion of this work is forthcoming in the Journal of Women’s History.

I also recently published, with Nina Kushner of Clark University, an edited volume of essays on the history of sexuality in modern French history, from the Enlightenment to the present day. Each chapter shows how examining sexuality reshapes existing narratives within French history. My own contribution addresses the “flâneur” and the male gaze in Haussmann’s Paris.

In addition to my next monograph, I am currently working on a few other projects. First, I am the editor of the 19th-century volume of A Cultural History of Prostitution, part of Bloomsbury’s Cultural History series. I am contributing a chapter on the history of Paris brothels to the Routledge Handbook for the History of Paris, as well as a chapter on archives for the forthcoming Queer Realms of Memory (Liverpool University Press).