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Memoirs of the Sex Trade: A Cultural History of Prostitution is a study of how workers in the sex trade, both prostitutes and madams, in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century United States publicly represent themselves, including their response to vice regulation, and the relationship that this representation bears to the identity of straight women in their society. Too much of what we know about prostitution comes exclusively from the point of view of those who view prostitution only as a social problem. I want to focus on what happens when we examine prostitution from the point of view of the prostitutes and madams who engage in it. I want to look at how their experience has influenced the wider culture, both when it is filtered through the accounts of others like anti-vice crusaders and journalists and when it appears unmediated as in the memoirs of prostitutes and madams and the activities of prostitutes’ rights organizations. In particular, I want to focus on how the culture of the sex trade has influenced mainstream American culture. The student will help with fact checking, library and online research, and locating illustrations and securing permissions for Memoirs of the Sex Trade.
Memoir and Memory: Jewish-American Women: Contested Lives is a book project that arises out of a course cross-listed with American Studies, Jewish Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies that I have given since 2000. The course and the book project explore the Jewish-American female identity in autobiography and memoir, social history, literature, and film as well as the interplay of religious belief, secularism, social mobility, and acculturating influences within the American experience. The student will perform research related to both course and book project.
On Thursday, November 14, 2013 from 9:00 A.M.-2:30 P.M. I will present a workshop on Memoir and Memory: Myth and Reality to high school teachers at the High School Teachers Institute sponsored by the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. This workshop examines classic American memoirs like Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Piri Thomas' Down These Mean Streets, Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Mary Crow Dog's Lakota Woman, and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory in order to understand how these memoirs sought to interpret their subject's lives both as they had been lived and as the subjects would like to have them understood retrospectively. We will compare and contrast excerpts from Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s Letters from a Woman Homesteader with the 1979 film Heartland and excerpts from Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter with Lise Yasui’s 1988 documentary film A Family Gathering that tries to capture her family’s past as Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II. The student will help me locate images, select appropriate texts, and prepare PowerPoint presentations.
The student will learn library and online research skills, how to compile bibliographies, and how to secure illustrations and permissions for manuscripts. The student could, if interested, design his or her own independent study project based on these materials.
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