Carnal vigilance, vending vice: race, gender and sexual commerce in Cape Town, 1868-1957

Abstract

This Ph.D. thesis is an examination into the history of prostitution in Cape Town from 1868 to 1957, a period that began with societal and legal toleration of the sex trade through government regulation and ended with abolition and criminalization. This historical research does not simply focus on the changing dynamics regarding prostitution in a vacuum that are only specific to Cape Town, but rather assesses local, regional, national, international, and imperial forces affecting the Western Cape and southern Africa. The overarching themes involve socially constructed ideas on morality, gender, race, and class. Such ideas produce and sustain the practice of the following discourses: state power, government control, resistance, surveillance, and policing. Sexual anxieties were also anxieties about threats to the racial order. It is these corresponding attitudes that resulted in greater limitations to the sex trade. Ultimately, this study addresses increasing racially motivated exclusionary and segregationist measures, moral policing, immigration, industrialization, health policies, disease, women’s activism, sexual commerce, national formation, and identity.