37. Unlikely bedmates: A critical look at the history of public health and prostitution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The trope of the prostitute as a vector of sexually transmitted disease is longstanding, though not as old as the profession itself. The regulation and control of sex work also boasts of an incredibly long history; the practices that have developed into the field of public health in particular have been an important source of the ideology suffusing sex work, as well as the social identities associated with sex workers. A general form of a ‘medical police’ (to borrow from Foucault) emerged rather abruptly in the 18th Century, gaining greater support with the advent of positivism in the early 19th Century. The developing methods of epidemiology were intertwined with the uncovering of correlations between poverty, class, and disease, providing both a methodological and ethical foundation for public health interventions and social control, including the legal regulation and sequestering of women thought to be prostituting, forced medical examinations, as well as moral rehabilitation campaigns directed toward sex workers. The breadth of interventions justified by the interests of public health demonstrates that the relationship between public health and prostitution is far deeper than the use of population statistics and outbreak investigations to curb the spread of disease. In this paper, I consider some of the various ways in which prostitution has been constructed through norms regarding class, gender, and sexuality, and how aspects of the historical relationship between public health practices and prostitution have influenced, and been influenced by, these understandings. Appreciating the historical context of sex work and public health is of significance, given that current ideas about appropriate interventions and regulations continue to be informed by this type of politics of health. Bell S. Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Indiana University Press, 1994. Brock D. Making Work, Making Trouble: Prostitution as a Social Problem. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Lupton D. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. Sage Publications, 1995.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".