Selling French Sex
Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations

This illuminating global history challenges the notion that coercion alone dictated women's migrations for work in the sex industry.

Elisa Camiscioli (Author)

9781009418379, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 January 2024

306 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.614 kg

'… the focus is on French emigration, thereby opening French history more fully onto the world, embedding it within a global history and changing how we understand modern global migration on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a major achievement, one that those of us still entrenched in national histories especially need to grapple with … Selling French Sex will be of clear interest to scholars of women, global migration, sex work, and trafficking, but all scholars would benefit from engaging with her sensitive treatment of the fraught category of agency.' Hannah Frydma, American Historical Review

Selling French Sex is an illuminating account of the cultural, social, and economic history of the sale of 'French sex'. It explores the discourses and experiences surrounding the early twentieth century debate on sex trafficking, which mobilized various international reform movements to combat the coerced prostitution of young women abroad. According to popular legend and empirical studies, French women were present in brothels all over the world, where they were the most desired and best paid in the business. But were they trafficking victims or willing migrants? In this timely book, Elisa Camiscioli reconstructs the networks and mechanisms of cross-border migrations for sexual labor; elucidates women's motives for leaving and staying; and explains why French migrant sexual labor occupied such a prominent place in the underworld of prostitution, as well as in the imaginaries of anti-trafficking campaigners, immigration officials, and ordinary consumers of vice.

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Terminology
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The French Paradigm: Reconciling Individual Liberty and Sexual Slavery
2. Desiring Undesirable Women: Fantasies of French Vice in the United States and Cuba
3. Coercion and Choice: The Road to Buenos Aires
4. The Gender of Identity Documents: Passports, Forgeries, and Fraud
5. Rejecting Honest Work: Pimps, Apaches, and Other Undesirable Men
6. Reputation and Repatriation: The Road Back to France
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: General & world history [HBG]