The author contends that modernity has produced "the prostitute" as the other within the categorial other: woman.

Attwood examines Victorian attitudes to prostitution across a number of sources: medical, literary, pornographic.

He strives to release both writing practices and female identity from a repressive ideology of the self and focuses on their transformative nature. He presents ways for both writer and female character to define oneself by and for oneself and not in terms of an "other." And in both cases, he stresses the importance of absence to distance himself from past tradition and to emphasize greater freedom and responsibilities for writer and reader and for women in seventeenth-century Spain."--Jacket.

How to read Walter Benjamin today? This book argues that the proper way is through an approach which recognizes and respects his own peculiar theorization of the act of reading and the politics of interpretation that this entails. The approach must be figural, that is, focused on images, and driven by the notion of actualization. Figural reading, in the very sui generis Benjaminian way, understands figures as constellations, whereby an image of the past juxtaposes them with an image of the present and is thus actualized. To apply this method to Benjamin's own work means first to identify some figures. The book singles out the Flâneur, the Detective, the Prostitute and the Ragpicker, and then sets them alongside a contemporary account of the same figure: the Flâneur in Juan Goytisolo's Landscapes after the Battle (1982), the Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (1987), the Prostitute in Dacia Maraini's Dialogue between a Prostitute and her Client (1973), and the Ragpicker in Mudrooroo's The Mudrooroo/Müller Project (1993). The book thereby, on the one hand, analyses the politics of reading Benjamin today and, on the other, sets his work against a variety of contemporary aesthetics and politics of interpretation.

There are (at least) two competing views on prostitution: prostitution as a legitimate and acceptable form of employment, freely chosen by women and men's use of prostitution as a form of degrading the women and causing grave psychological damage. In 'The Idea of Prostitution' Sheila Jeffreys explores these sharply contrasting views.

Sexuality is often understood to be uniquely private and intimate--something that can and should be protected from capitalism's influence. This book argues, in contrast, that the histories of capitalism and sexuality are closely intertwined. Integral to this story has been the illusion that economic and sexual practices are tied to fundamentally different realms. Focusing on the history of sex work in Britain, the book shows that capitalism has long needed theconstruction of artificial boundaries around sex and work in order to extract profit from sexual labor, both paid and unpaid.

Missionary Positions challenges common Christian assumptions about sex workers. Using feminist, postcolonial perspectives, interviews with pastoral practitioners and personal narrative, Lauren McGrow carves out a space for the dynamic theological agency and life complexity of sex workers to be acknowledged.