Sonja Dolinsek – författare

This book places prostitution at the very centre of European history in the twentieth century. With its wide geographical focus from Italy to the USSR via Sweden, Germany, occupied Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the international stage of the United Nations, this book encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences.

This book moves beyond exploring state-regulated prostitution, which was the dominant approach to managing commercial sex across Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State regulation combined police surveillance, the registration of women selling sex (or suspected of doing so), and compulsory medical examinations for registered women, as well as various restrictions on personal movement and freedom. The nine chapters shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution well into the second half of the twentieth century to examine the ruptures and continuities in state, administrative and policing practices following the end of widespread legal toleration. The varied chronology extends the parameters of existing historiography and explores how states grappled to understand, or impose control over, the commercial sex industry following the far-reaching social, economic and political upheaval of the Second World War.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.

This book places prostitution at the very centre of European history in the twentieth century. With its wide geographical focus from Italy to the USSR via Sweden, Germany, occupied Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the international stage of the United Nations, this book encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences.

This book moves beyond exploring state-regulated prostitution, which was the dominant approach to managing commercial sex across Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State regulation combined police surveillance, the registration of women selling sex (or suspected of doing so), and compulsory medical examinations for registered women, as well as various restrictions on personal movement and freedom. The nine chapters shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution well into the second half of the twentieth century to examine the ruptures and continuities in state, administrative and policing practices following the end of widespread legal toleration. The varied chronology extends the parameters of existing historiography and explores how states grappled to understand, or impose control over, the commercial sex industry following the far-reaching social, economic and political upheaval of the Second World War.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.

The book offers unique insights into the politics and practice of commercial sex in the early 2000s through the eyes of male sex worker, Stefan Hülsmann, aka Marc-of-Frankfurt. It is based on sources and documents from his archive in the years 2000 to 2013. Hülsmann was a sex worker and sex workers’ rights activist in Germany and Europe between 2000 and 2013, before dying in 2017 by suicide. He left his belongings and archives to the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft. This book explores this historically unique archive of a male sex worker and activist and makes it accessible to scholars, students and activists through introductory texts and a selection of original sources. The book centers the professional and political work of Hülsmann and the creation of his sex worker persona Marc-of-Frankfurt. Sources include meticulously drafted business plans, diary entries of paid sex encounters, drawings and mind maps about Marc’s views about himself as a sex worker. Chapters tackle subjects including sex workers’ engagement with the law, especially, the legal reform of prostitution laws with the Prostitutionsgesetz (ProstG) in 2001, as well as Marc’s ideas and ideals of professionalization post legal change. Further chapters consider Marc’s efforts at "communicating sex work" and his activism within German and European sex workers’ networks, his efforts at creating a network of male sex workers and his intense activity on the sex worker online forum sexworker.at.