ABSTRACT
In the political dramas Restoration political pornography so shrewdly staged, bawds almost always shared the boards with whores, their democratic daughters. Inasmuch as pornographic satires portrayed bawds as masterminding the 'plot' to leach property away from its traditional heteronormative distribution, thereby establishing an 'amorous Republick,' prostitutes addressed the other dimension of entrepreneurial individualism: labor. Therein lay their democratic threat. For the seventeenth-century version of entrepreneurial individualism had staked its claim to political justice on the ground that everyone owned property and the property one owned in oneself was labor. In this chapter, I argue that the emergence of a sexual identity specific to prostitutes was itself part of a strategy to contain the democratic implications of that assumption. Prostitutes, too, were subjected to an obsessive scrutiny of their behaviors that was part of a larger effort to define those behaviors in 'natural' rather than political terms. Ultimately, pornographic representations of the prostitute attempted to figure out exactly what kind of work she did, so that dominant culture could invalidate it and neutralize its threat.
