Public City / Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Andrew Israel Ross (review)

The sex trade of nineteenth-century Paris has generated a wealth of excellent scholarship in cultural and social history and in literary studies. The city's homosexual subcultures have similarly received much—if nowhere near as much—scholarly attention. In discussing one or the other phenomenon, historians have frequently noted the compelling analogies and occasional symbiosis between the sex trade and homosexual subcultures. These accounts were often prompted by explorations of the many nineteenth-century moralists and hygienists who theorized about this association (or simply saw it as obvious). Andrew Israel Ross's conceptually ambitious and thoughtprovoking book pursues these connections even further. Scrupulously acknowledging those who have gone before and drawing on an expanded if often familiar corpus of published and archival sources, Ross offers an intriguing reinterpretation of the motivations, implementation, and (most crucially) effects of Parisian authorities' attempts to regulate public sexuality in the city.

Placing his analysis under the sign of Michel Foucault's debunking of the repressive hypothesis in favor of attending to how discursive and spatial technologies reorganize and redirect sexual knowledge and experience (11–12), Ross reimagines nineteenth-century regulationism as playing not simply a repressive but also a facilitative role in the development of urban sexual culture(s). The regulatory "tolérance"-based view of public sexuality—which came to characterize the authorities' attitudes to male same-sex sexual activity as much as it did their approach to female prostitution—functioned not by hiding sex but rather, Ross perceptively argues, by making it visible, albeit in specific places. These places, such as tolerated brothels and urinals, emerged from a managerialist-capitalist urge to extract value from the city by making it ever more available for consumption, usually if not exclusively by men. These places were thus built into the fabric of the developing nineteenth-century capital and equipped with their own readily apprehensible semiotics and even aesthetics. Whatever the rhetoric of concealment and unspeakability used by hygienists, urban planners, and police in discussing such features of the urban landscape, Ross argues, legibility by the most general of publics was their defining feature: "Parisians were … being trained to recognize evidence of sex by the very processes of sexual management put into place by the authorities" (140).

The book impresses with the boldness of its analytical and interpretative moves. To be sure, Ross's claim that his focus on "women who sold sex and men who sought sex with other men" (to borrow his cumbersome but no doubt necessary formulation) is innovative in that it "positions marginalized figures back at the center of the story of Parisian life" (152) seems a bit like breaking down an open door: surely few humanities scholars will need persuading that so-called marginal figures have always been central to the discursive production of norms and the development of innovative social forms, such as the "novel sexual possibilities" (141) analyzed here. Yet when toward the end of the book Ross suggests that the female prostitute of nineteenth-century Paris should be regarded as "absolutely essential to the emergence of both modern sexual life and modern urban existence more broadly" (211), the grand claim really does feel justified. Certainly, one can quibble with some details of Ross's demonstration along the way. In chapter 5, for instance, he considers a cache of letters of complaint sent by Parisians to the Prefecture of Police and bemoaning the visibility of prostitutes or pederasts in certain neighborhoods. Ross notes, reasonably enough, that the ability to recognize such individuals (especially pederasts) was to some degree sexually compromising by nineteenth-century lights, but he stretches the point too far in arguing that the letters therefore reveal the complainants' "own participation—even if unwilling—in the culture of public sex" (166). Sure enough, when a couple of pages later Ross evokes "the imposition … of...