Governing a Pleasurescape. Policy, gender and urban space in the public regulation of prostitution in Copenhagen 1874-1904

Based on an empirical study of police and city governors’ archives as well as contemporary publications, the project investigates the emergence of new policies and forms of urban governance directed towards promiscuity and prostitution in Copenhagen 1874-1906. By studying governmentality – and its inspiration, rationale, systems of governance – as well as conceptions of gender, morality and urban space in the policy processes, the paper presents an analytical interpretation of how the development of new regulation of prostitution and sexual morality contributed to the spatial ordering of the city. Especially the processes leading to the location of legal prostitution and publicly controlled brothels to certain streets and areas in the inner city. This policy of zoning amplified the construction of what might be termed as publicly sanctioned pleasurescapes: Districts in the city in which practices and activities related to pleasure took place. The process of governing how the intersections of gender, sexuality and class were lived in these pleasurescapes emphasised an interesting ambiguity in the political system between the wish for controlling and repressing the immorality of the ‘dangerous masses’ on one hand, and the pragmatic acceptance of prostitution as a fact and the derived wish to curb it though controlled legalisation on the other.

På 1870-talet ledde uppkomsten av nya former av stadsstyrning till introduktionen av ett omfattande offentligt regleringssystem av prostitution i Köpenhamn. Syftad var att kontrollera sexualmoralen och spridningen av sjukdomar, men även föreställningar om genus och stadsrum spelade en viktig roll i den nya governmentality. Genom att studera dessa policy processer historiskt, kan vi få ny viktig kunskap om hur regleringen och legaliseringen av också bidrar till den rumsliga ordningen i staden.