Marketing Sexuality: Sex Industry and the Politics of Race in Twentieth-Century America

Rahil Asgari, University of Houston

There has always been a profound connection between sexual attributes and individual identity, but this was reimagined in the late twentieth-century United States in the context of sexuality-based civil rights movements. Over the course of the 20th century, racial minorities in the United States came to be categorized as they are known today: Black, Asian, Latino/a, White, and Native American. In my research, I will show how marketing principles shaped these terms in a racialized and gendered capitalist system, in which sex workers’ physical attributes became commodified in specific ways. It will demonstrate how organized crime, the sex and porn industries, border and welfare/health politics, and the legacies of slavery have created racial brands as we know them today. The complication that I endeavor to showcase is the fine or even blurred line between the commodity (a subjugated gendered racial identity) and labor (a rebellious gendered racial identity), which complicates the history of sex work in twentieth-century America. My focus will be on Chinese immigrant women working for the gangs known as the Tong in San Francisco (1900-1920), Black women working as sex workers in Harlem during the Jazz Age, and South and East European women working in the Upper Westside, New York City (1920-1940), and last, Mexican women working as sex workers in the borderland (1946-1965). I will go on to show that after the 1960s, the civil rights movement also flourished inside the sex industry and its media counterpart, the porn industry. Scholarly work on the history of organized crime, labor history, and women’s history has yet to explore all the documents available on the sex industry. I combine the story of gangsters involved in the sex industry and sex workers fighting the impossible discriminatory politics to represent how these industries shaped racial scripts during the 20th century.

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 Presented in Session 113. Sexuality, Race, and the Regulation of Difference