(Indiana University Press, 1994)

Prostitution as a discursive domain has had a marginal place in the cultural exchanges of the West for thousands of years. In two historical/philosophical periods – the pagan and the postmodern – prostitutes have themselves produced discourses. In ancient Greece hetairae numbered among the sophistic philosophers.

This work is a genealogy of the prostitute body: it is a discontinuous history written as theory and politics; what Michel Foucault has called ‘a history of the present,’ beginning with a retrospective reconstruction of the hetaira, the pagan prostitute, from the vantage point of the postmodern prostitute.

The overarching strategy of Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body is to show how it is that the referent, the flesh-and-blood female body engaged in some form of sexual interaction in exchange for some kind of payment, has no inherent meaning and is signified differently in different discourses. I trace the construction of the prostitute body in five discursive domains: ancient Greece, modern Europe, contemporary feminism (North American and French), postmodern prostitute feminisms (North American and international), and postmodern prostitute performance art (North American). (pp.1-2)