Prostitution, performance, and Mae West: speaking from the whore position. This book tries to reconcile those two competing discourses.
On one hand, the prostitute is a victim: denied sexual agency she is also denied a voice, a place in history, an identity as an autonomous woman. On the other hand, though vilified, the prostitute can speak for and from the margins.
Though these two positions are not easily reconciled, some women have drawn on this dual tradition of victim and radical to carve a space for female sexual agency. Historically as well as in the contemporary moment, the whore 1 has been silenced or ignored.
This project attempts to recover whore stories, to bring these narratives into sharper focus. I argue here that particular women incorporate the tradition of transgression and marginalization in order to name their own experiences. Ultimately, the whore position may allow women a space for agency; performance is the strategy by which they expand that position to offer alternative narratives of female sexuality and experience.
The stories I tell are whore stories, but they are also the stories of female performers. Betty Boutell, Charlotte Charke, Lydia Thompson, and Mae West worked as actresses; as I demonstrate below, they used their performances to engage questions of gender identity and appropriate female sexuality. The prostitutes included, whether the eighteenth-century madam Margaret Leeson or the s escorts working in Madison, Wisconsin, are also performers, albeit in less standard ways. Their narratives indicate that they perform for their clients and their reading audiences, acting out a version of femininity that simultaneously masks and projects subjectivity.
