David+william+foster-+prostitution.pdf

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woman, prostitution, and modernity in fin-de-siècle mexico ◆◆◆

At the center, both the false and the true one, of houses of assignation and zones of tolerance are the prostitutes, as much indispensable as they are belittled, human beings at the disposal of pleasure and scandal in the abstract, which is also persecution as a real fact. —Carlos Monsiváis, Introduction to Ava Vargas, La casa de citas (my translation)

T

he phenomenon of the whore and female prostitutes during the early years of the twentieth century in Mexico intersects with two features central to the project of modernity: the systematic organization of business and the generalized exploitation of women. Prostitution and the generalized exploitation of women stretch back to times immemorial, but there can be little doubt that the social outburst of modernity could hardly exclude, as in everything, these two universal phenomena. If prostitution depended on the overdetermined eroticization of the female body, the culture of modernity—modernism, in a word— provided the cultural practices to stimulate this excess valorization. If it is undeniable that modernity included a mythification of woman, in the interests of producing a specific patriarchal social model, that involved enshrining icons of sacred matrimony and sacrosanct maternity, the simple truth is that what is more fascinating are the women who, in Dijkstra’s apt phrase, were “idols of perversity.”1 As a consequence, no matter how much one might, today, construct a defense of prostitution as body-based employment like any other and

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assert that female—and male—prostitutes are engaged in “sex work,” it would be difficult to find in the imaginary of the early twentieth century any other interpretation of prostitution than as the perversion of the divine role of woman and a dire assault on the integrity of the family. It matters little that the masterminds of the hegemonic imaginary, which included high functionaries of the state, leaders of the Church, and magnates of industry and commerce, were the principal clients of the whorehouses, which, after all, were organized to satisfy the needs of these very men. Although there existed alongside the organized system of prostitution forms of prostitution that serviced the needs of lowlife clients, whether in the zones of tolerance or in outlying streets, prostitution that served the interests of the ruling class had all of the characteristics of the most refined elegance of the mansions of sin, which were not very different from the petits palaces of the great families. Although, as the saying of the famous paradigmatic grand New York madam Polly Adler went, “A house is not a home.” The images collected by Ava Vargas in 1991 in the dossier La casa de citas en el barrio galante (House of assignation in the red-light district) date, in her estimation, from sometime between 1900 and 1920 (Vargas xv).2 These are photos that were taken in stereoscopic format and thus to be viewed in the corresponding apparatus that was customarily to be found in the homes of the well-to-do as part of the material trove of culture, along with the piano, the violin, and the phonograph. That is to say, we are to understand that the photos whose discovery Vargas describes (she came upon them thanks to the filmmaker and antiquarian Raúl Kamffer, who found them in 1975 in one of his “prowls” among markets and fairs in search of forgotten material) were part of some artistic project in which women were posed and photographed, so to speak, for posterity. It is reasonable that such types of images would have circulated in a clandestine market that allowed “refined” gentlemen (including undoubtedly other women with a taste for feminine nudes) to treasure in their hearts recollections of their transit through the world of brothels or, absent such experiences, the dream of having done so. These images are parallel to the so-called French postcards that fulfilled the same function of erotic entertainment, and such stereoscopic photos constituted a cultural production industry that came out of the new technologies of the period that included, in this case, photography. If it is true that photography, from the earliest time of its origins, served to immortalize the mighty and to record majestically in time sober bourgeois families, while at the same time being the basis for the postcard 39

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that was exchanged as part of the ritual of formal visits and contained the image of the person visiting, it is important to remember that photography also lent itself from the time of its invention to giving a new imagebased dimension to anecdotal accounts of sexual practices: pornography now had another extremely potent vehicle for its divulgation. In the realm of feminine prostitution as much as in that of homoerotic pursuits, two exemplars of high modernity, photography served to provide a priceless aide-mémoire (see Waugh; Mavor; Köhler). When one opens Vargas’s dossier, it is hardly possible to be surprised at the array of naked or seminaked women. We can, today, hardly expect to discover corporal novelties, largely because the widespread publication of images of women’s bodies from time immemorial has achieved such ubiquity that one hardly pays attention anymore, since there is so little new to see. Aside from contortionist erotic poses of the body or unheard of manipulative practices, women’s bodies, although always a source of delight, no longer surprise. Only the grotesque stance of a Joel-Peter Witkin could be capable of providing surprising images of the female body. It goes without saying that the plastic optics of photography allows us a constantly renewed gaze at all material phenomena, and, hence, the possibilities for framing are innumerable. By the same token, although no one any longer is astonished at the photographic exploitation of the feminine body in the contemporary world, there is a certain frisson that derives from the realization that our most respectable great-grandfathers had the same interests and that, more than likely, one of the women portrayed here might just possibly be one’s own great-grandmother . . . But such mitigating circumstances aside, the greatest enchantment and astonishment that arise from the photographs in the Vargas dossier do not have to do with the bodies of the women as such, but with their setting in the interior and exterior spaces of the turn-of-the-century Mexico of a hundred years ago.3 There is a really remarkable disconnect in these images we have the privilege of seeing all together (by contrast with the original spectators, who certainly must have seen them in small installments owing to the nature of their commercial or semicommercial distribution). Such a disconnect has to do with one of the most formidable characteristics of Latin American modernism: the attempt to meld cultural motifs of a profoundly classical origin (with certain derivations to be found in Western Europe) with the harsh landscape realities of Latin America that had little to do with the origins of such motifs. If it is true that literature could transcend such contradictions by placing its texts outside of Latin America or simply ignoring its geophysical parameters, the 40

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Figure 3.1. A prostitute as part of formal room décor.

Figure 3.2. A prostitute as a table centerpiece.

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photographs often could not go beyond their immediate physical world. Of course, there is a modernist current that achieved something like a precarious and even satisfactory amalgamation if the landscape was not too hostile. This is what we find in the most ultra-urban versions, where the built environment can effectively mask the New World realities of the background. One thinks of the achievements of the Belle Époque in Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro or the private chambers of the Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, as described in remarkable detail by fellow-Colombian Fernando Vallejo in his biographic novel Chapolas negras (Black butterflies; 1995). But this is not the case with the photographs presented by Vargas. On the one hand, we have faithful re-creations of the luxury of the Mexican oligarchy/upper bourgeoisie. These are the palaces—or petits palaces— that are imitations of models seen in Paris and London, where the imperious display of luxury items creates something like a fantasy cabinet in which the body is inserted in poses that oblige it to adjust to the static dimensions of the setting. For example, in figure 3.1, the binarism of the objects and the boundaries of décor are reduplicated in the feminine body, whose two arms, two hands, two legs, two breasts, and two eyes are reinforced, in turn, by the stereoscopic contemplation the client receives from the photograph. The sexual odalisque is perfectly framed by the tapestry that extends outward toward the viewer as though inviting him (I used the masculine form, since the masculinist gaze is supposedly to be privileged here) to enter into the realm of the photograph and to enjoy through/ with his own body what the tableau has to offer. This image is timid in its provocation, but it matches many others in which the women spread themselves open before the spectator, and always with their bodies and corresponding anatomical details being framed by the setting of luxury. In another image, the naked body of the woman lies spread out on a serving table. One supposes that this is a bedroom because of the presence of the chamber pot below and to the back of the table. Whatever the room’s function is, it is replete with objects of décor that could fill an extensive, detailed list. Suffice it to point out the modern detail of the lamp to the right, between the two picture windows, which, although neoclassic in design, comes with an electric cord and tulips holding lightbulbs. What is, however, particularly notable about this photographic montage is how the woman, who is objectified, serves as one more detail of the décor. Her languid pose turns her into a table centerpiece, although the way in which she extends from one end of the table to the other makes one think that she is perhaps more of a table runner, especially in the way her hands 42

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and feet hang beyond the edge of the table as the ends of a runner might do. One cannot help but take in the phallic features that are part of the excess of the worked detail of the table that puts the naked woman on decorative exhibition. While almost half of the images in La casa de citas place woman in this sort of fantasy box that is the interior décor of the architecture of modernity, the other half concern a surprising dislocation of décor, whereby the female nude is thrust into the hostile landscape of the central Mexican mesa. Bernardo de Balbuena could take pride, in his La grandeza mexicana (Mexican greatness; 1604), that this Valle de Anáhuac was another Tempe: Al fin, aqueste humano paraíso tan celebrado en la elocuencia griega, [. . .] es el valle de Tempe, en cuya vega se cree que sin morir nació el verano y que otro ni le iguala ni le llega. (cap. VI, est. 16)4

Balbuena could be certain that none of his readers in the Spanish court possessed reliable photographs that might contradict him. Nevertheless, the shock is nothing short of jarring when the anonymous photographer or photographers come up with the brilliant idea of taking the women from the sporting dens outside to place them in the Mexican countryside (the place where many of the women in the photographs, one can well surmise, had come from, as in the case of Santa, the namesake country maiden forced by rape to become an urban prostitute in Federico Gamboa’s 1903 novel). Although in many cases the women are simply arranged in poses with the landscape in the background, in other cases one takes note of the attempt to create an artistic composition that echoes the ones already described in terms of the metaphor of the fantasy box. For example, there is a series of four photographs in which the two women (always the same ones) are posed amidst the rushing waters of a rapids. They are aquatic nymphs, Mexican Nereids whose beauty interacts with the elements of nature. Although the fifty daughters of Nereus and Doris are often represented as inhabitants of the deep and turbulent oceanic waters (as in the case of the acclaimed masterpiece of sculpture by the Argentine Lola Mora), there are also many images of them as delicate fairies who splash around in serene pools of waters and streamlets. In the case of the Mexican nymphs, we see them sitting on top of enormous rocks, some larger than they are, and in one case they are semisub43

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Figure 3.3. Prostitutes posing as water nymphs.

Figure 3.4. Prostitutes posing as water nymphs.

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Figure 3.5. Prostitutes posing as forest sprites.

Figure 3.6. A moment of homosociality among prostitutes.

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merged in the powerful currents of the rapids. In one of the four images, the attempt to achieve a classic tableau is apparent. Despite all the efforts to direct the gaze of the viewer of this photography toward the paradigmatic models the women represent in contexts of the elegance to which high modernity aspired or against a Mexican landscape that is to be a remaking of Balbuena’s new Tempe (yet the images of the women posed against the backdrop of majestic agave plants are in particular almost truculent), there is a fundamental characteristic that prevails above all else. It is the way in which the body placed on view is, once and for all, the body of a Mexican woman. Even if in the most highly priced brothels of Latin America the little French girls were the most highly prized object of attention for their delicacy, refinement, and erotic savoir, not all of the clients could aspire to such heights, and local flesh is what prevails, even in the most refined of sporting dens, with all the dimensions imposed by the ethnic origin, diet, lifestyle, circumstances of personal and collective health, and the personal story of each woman in terms of the trajectory that ended for her in barrio galante.5 Each viewer will measure and appreciate in his own way the bodies of the women who gaze back at us across a century in Vargas’s dossier, but in one photograph after another, these are bodies of women who are Mexican, regardless of the international privilege that the interior and exterior settings pretend to model. In this sense, one of the most eloquent photographs has to do with two women snuggling together on a bed, comfortable in their relationship of friendship and intimacy, with or without the lesbian dimension to be found in the back rooms of the women’s world of the whorehouses. The Mexicanness of the two, and especially of the one on the left, is what most gives the touch of authenticity to these long-lost images.

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