Trick Identities: The Nexus of Work and Sex

For more than two decades, historians of prostitution in the United States have focused their analyses on the "sex wars" of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, emphasizing reform efforts, the geography of prostitution, and, occasionally, the "sporting life" and deviant subculture of commercial sex. ¹ Such studies have helped us understand tensions among moral reformers and their subjects and how social control has been exercised over sexually "deviant" groups in the past. With few exceptions, however, they have ignored the reality of prostitutes' daily lives. ² Most important, they give us little sense of how women in "the life" understood themselves, their work, and their clients. This weakness is often attributed to a gap in the source base, but I think it stems from a general failure among historians to consider the actual sex tasks involved in prostitution, despite histories that examine various other aspects of the profession as women's work. ³ Although women's historians have addressed other occupations with an eye to how the actual work task has served to construct work identity—domestic labor, clerical work, waitressing, dressmaking and millinery, nursing, teaching, agricultural labor, and meatpacking, to name just a few ⁴ —to date, no historian has applied this model to prostitution. Beginning in the 1980s and gaining steam more recently, however, scholars of sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism have penned theoretical studies of prostitution in Britain and the United States and have provided increasingly nuanced analyses of prostitutes' sexual labor. ⁵ In addition, some prostitutes' autobiographies from the recent past (and, I have found, from even earlier) have portrayed the sex part of sex work as work, even an "industry." ⁶ Here, I build on these writings and demonstrate the insight we gain into the history of prostitution when we look at sex acts as part of prostitutes' workaday lives in the same ways we might examine the experiences of waitresses dishing out food, teachers grading papers, and meatpackers classifying tripe.

Examining commercial sex as work complicates traditional typologies of sexual identity. ⁷ One of the main things we notice when we begin to pay attention to the work of prostitution—that is, to actual sex acts performed for money—is the great variety of acts available in the commercial sex environment. Although prostitution has always been a predominantly heterosexual exchange in which men purchased sex from women, female prostitutes often participated in sex acts with people of both sexes (and often of races other than their own) for both pleasure and profit.

To the men and women who bought or sold sex acts, a particular sex act or desire did not necessarily reflect the sexual identity of the performer. Thus, a self-identified lesbian prostitute could perform heterosexual sex acts or same-sex sex acts within an evening, and might express disgust with or desire for either her male or female customer. Similarly, a heterosexual prostitute could have had sex with a paying female customer or with another woman for the pleasure of a man, again while feeling much or little desire for her customer or sex partner. Was the former any less lesbian, or the latter any less straight, because their sexual activities involved both sexes? Was a prostitute who both desired and had sex with a paying male customer necessarily heterosexual? Was the woman who paid for sex with another woman a lesbian? In the setting of the brothel, desires, acts, and identities did not map onto one another in any predictable and tidy pattern. ⁸ Commercial sex thus uncouples the connection between sexual desires, sexual acts, and conventional object-based categories for sexual identity.

The history of brothel-based prostitution also pushes us to think about the extent to which work identity is separable from "personal" identity. Even if we use a more modern and I believe accurate conception of sexuality as socially constructed and historically specific, prostitutes' malleable sexuality proves the rule: context...