Labouring in the Peripheries: Racialized Sex Workers and Unrecognized Work in 18th-Century London

Abstract

This dissertation studies labour policy and memoir documents through the lenses of time and affect theory in order to recover evidence of women of colour who laboured in the eighteenth-century sex trade. Each of my thesis chapters focuses on theories of time and affect to respectively examine one affective state that has been widely and problematically assigned to women of colour: laziness, shamelessness, industriousness, and decadence. The goal of my project is not to reaffirm these racial stereotypes but to use them as research tools to stake a two-pronged claim: that women of colour existed in this precarious workforce, and also that a white-neutral bias in the literary-historical record has influenced popular consciousness and allowed these affective sociocultural markers to stick to marginalized women over time and space. Learning about this type of women’s work and its lesser-known racialized dimension has long-term benefits for how we understand gendered labour that is often framed as unproductive.