Paris, seen through the rose-tinted glasses of Hollywood, is the city of love. How did this come to be? And what does this image hide? Across the modern period, shopping and women’s work were sexualized, prostitution was normalized, regulated, and made “safe” for bourgeois clients, nude women performed on music hall stages, gay cultures emerged in new commercial venues, and working women went on strike for their rights. This class will examine how sexual commerce shaped the identity of the city, how the commercial spaces of the city shaped sexual identities, and how discourses about sexuality contributed to the legitimation of capitalism. We will engage with topics ranging from the construction of gender difference and the emergence of mass media to the relationship between the expansion of global capitalism and the rise of moral panics.
Course Goals
Over the course of the quarter, we will explore what it means to think like a historian, practicing the art of analyzing primary sources (together in class and then alone in a midterm essay) and working them into historical narratives (again first in class, and then, in podcast form, in final projects). In doing so, we will learn not only how to question received narratives, but to see just how much point of view changes the history we tell and just how hard it is to capture history’s complexities in a single story. While learning to think about history differently, I also hope that you will come away from this class with some idea about what happened in Paris since 1750, the role gender, sex, and commerce played in this history, as well as how it relates to contemporary life.