The Uneasy Condition of Artistes: Performers and Prostitutes in the Mandate Mediterranean

Sexual practice and the administration of desire have been central to colonial projects. French authorities initially regulated prostitution in the name of public hygiene and later organized prostitution for colonial troops, thus marking prostitution as central concern. Regulated but resented by both French authorities and former Ottoman officials incorporated into mandate administration, who could all agree on casting women’s presence in public as moral threat, working women were suspected of shifting forms of treasonous traffic- of selling sexual favors in times of prosperity, or of selling national secrets in times of war. Whether as providers of Western crafts and commodities in the urban modern materializing in Eastern Mediterranean or as prostitutes engaged in state engineered servicing of troops stationed in military outposts, women circulated despite hardening mandate authority restrictions on movement, the League of Nations’ concerns over white slave traffic, and local hostility on the part of conservative and religious sectors, who equated the French presence with moral depravity. Associated with spaces and temptations perceived as quintessentially modern- the movies, the café chantant, music halls, foreign women but also local women who emulated the styles and demeanors of the metropole, engaged in dangerous pleasures.

This paper will attempt to situate Mediterranean debates on workingwomen, performers and prostitution in the mandate period as crossed histories that acknowledge colonial spaces and their history of regulating sexuality as well as scandalous public debates on women’s work, women’s bodies and women’s relation to the law which colonial authorities dragged with them into colonial administration. This paper is based on original archive research at the Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres archives in Nantes and Paris, the City Archive of Haifa, and numerous interviews.