Sporting Girls, Streetwalkers, and Inmates of Houses of Ill Repute: Media Narratives and the Historical Mutability of Prostitution Stigmas

This article examines the mutability of symbolic sanctions—or stigmas—applied to sex industry work by examining newspaper narratives in one medium-sized Canadian city over two time periods: 1870–1910 and 1980–2004. The article's purpose is first to get a sense of what the authors call the ecology of stigmas—their relation to the temporal and spatial contexts in which they are produced—and second to give needed historical context to them and the representational tropes that currently dominate media, policy, and academic discussions about prostitution. This article finds significant continuities and discontinuities between media representations during the two study periods. In particular, prostitution stigmas are constituted out of cross‐articulations of narratives around containment, culpability, and contagion across the twentieth century, but the ideational contents and empirical referents of these narratives reflect the intersection of sex industry contexts with historically specific concerns around gender, sexuality, race, and social status. Stigmas of the sex industry, rather than being constant, reveal themselves to be both deeply ecological and accommodating to a range of concerns about female sexuality and normative behavior that are sensitive to historical time.