The Business of Pleasure. A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe

On December 4 (from 5pm to 7pm), the Atelier(s) Genre(s) et Sexualité(s), is pleased to welcome you to a lecture by Magaly Rodriguez Garcia (KU Leuven), as part of the AGS Fall 2024 Seminar program, entitled “The Business of Pleasure. A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe”. The event will be held at Henri Janne Room, Building S - 15th floor (Avenue Jeanne 44, 1050 Brussels). Participation is free, but registration is required to guarantee your place via this email address: ags@ulb.be

ABSTRACT

In 2022, the Belgian Parliament made a landmark decision by approving the decriminalisation of sex work. This move positioned the small nation as the first country in Europe – and the second globally – to abandon the hypocrisy of tolerance. Yet this was not the first time paid sex in Belgium gained international notoriety. The bathhouses of the fifteenth-century ‘frows of Flanders’ were well-known throughout Europe. In the nineteenth century, Belgium faced international outrage as the alleged epicentre of white slavery. Although Belgians were then accused of forcing white women into prostitution, they were also free to include any suspect women in the prostitution registers of colonial Congo. Throughout the First and Second World Wars, both allied and German soldiers sought relief in Belgian brothels. The Business of Pleasure, the first English-language book on the history of commercial sex in Belgium, presents the compelling life stories of sex workers and their interactions with authorities, clients and pimps. Pushing beyond stereotypes, this history of commercial sex offers a nuanced understanding of the difficulties and opportunities associated with paid sex for women, men and trans persons past and present.

BIOGRAPHY

Magaly Rodríguez García is an associate professor attached to the research unit History of Modernity and Society at the KU Leuven. She obtained her PhD in 2008 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her doctoral dissertation – Trade Unionists and the World: European and Latin American Labour and the Creation and Maintenance of International Trade-Union Organisations, 1949-1969 (published in 2010 in Peter Lang) – won her the Labor History Dissertation Prize 2008. Between 2009 and 2015 she worked as a postdoctoral fellow for the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). She studied the League of Nations’ campaigns against human trafficking, prostitution and child labour. In 2013 she became postdoctoral fellow of the Francqui Foundation to conduct research at the Université libre de Bruxelles. She is visiting fellow at the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) since 2010, and a member of national and international networks such as the EU-COST Action ‘Comparing European Prostitution Policies: Understanding Scales and Cultures of Governance (2014-17)’, the Young Academy (2016-21), HIVA – Research Institute for Work and Society (2018 - ), and the Advisory Platform on Prostitution Policy - Flanders (2016 - ). Her current research focuses on the history of international organisations, global labour, and subaltern history.