"Wicked" Istanbul: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Early Turkish Republic by Mark David Wyers (review)

Following World War I and the Turkish War of Independence, those leaders of the new republic established in 1923 were compelled to confront both local and international complaints regarding the seeming pervasive and unconcealed conduct of prostitution in Istanbul. Examining republican-era discourse on gender, nationalism, and modernization, Mark David Wyers's "Wicked" Istanbul analyzes how the early state came to regulate prostitution—and thus women and their bodies—and how women complied with and resisted associated legislative agendas. To achieve this objective, Wyers also provides a crucial survey of prostitution during the previous Ottoman era. As such, the book is an excellent source that analyzes both late Ottoman and early republican Turkey in terms of these societies' and states' approaches to regulating sex work. Maintaining his focus on the spatial dimensions of this issue as well, Wyers adroitly scrutinizes the various "sexual geographies of the urban" in the Ottoman and republican periods (29).

Bridging these eras is one of several significant contributions of Wyers's study. Though many histories cover these periods, the transition from empire to republic is often presented as an impassable divide—or simply as the undisputed end or beginning of many other histories. By focusing on how prostitution was regulated variously under both regimes, however, Wyers demonstrates how one tradition of governance actually spanned these eras, thus balancing the ruptures with the continuities. In this regard, his work transcends that singular nationalist historical narrative that so many—even otherwise critical—histories reiterate and thus perpetuate, that narrative being the illusion of a total sociopolitical break from one era to the next. Indeed, because so many of the early republic's reforms had their roots in the late imperial era, Wyers's examination of this issue relies necessarily upon understanding both Ottoman views of sexuality, ethnonational identity, and space and how such perspectives were refashioned and propagated well into the republican era.

In his second chapter, "Illicit Geographies: Pre-regulatory Istanbul," Wyers thus focuses on prostitution in Istanbul prior to the implementation of statist controls. Identifying the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries as a crucial period of preregulation, he notes various themes in sociopolitical discourse concerning prostitution and how these views coalesced and transformed in the late nineteenth century to render a dominant depiction of the prostitute as a hygienic and moral threat to the state. This perspective—one familiar to most historians of prostitution in Western and non-Western contexts throughout the world during these years—provided state officials with adequate justification for enacting those legal and other measures they viewed as essential to managing what they constructed to be a "dangerous" risk to society's moral and medical integrity. Upon this basis, we are able to appreciate how subsequent regulationist policies (or règlementation) emerged.

Still addressing the prerepublican era in much of the third chapter, Wyers begins to examine the evolution of how legal regimes concerning prostitution evolved in the late Ottoman context (ca. 1880s) and how they were readopted in the subsequent republican era (through the 1930s). In focusing on this process of legislative expansion, Wyers reveals how the "medicalized vernaculars" of governmental and other reformers were crucial in understanding how broader trends in the centralization of state laws also came to encompass citizens' bodies and sexualities (60 - 63). In doing so, he also engages with how some discourse of the 1920s and 1930s that promoted a healthy nation also framed syphilis and the syphilitic as a threat to the national body— "merging" the narratives on syphilis with the anxieties of eugenics. From this perspective on framing prostitution, the fourth chapter progresses to address how it was legislated and policed from late Ottoman through early republican times. Wyers also returns to the international dimensions of prostitution as conveyed through the League of Nations' reports, among other sources. Noting the experience of the Capitulations, we are able to understand how the Great Powers simultaneously frustrated Ottoman agendas...