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Mark David Wyers, "Wicked" Istanbul: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Early Turkish Republic, Istanbul: Libra Kitapcilik ve Yayincilik, 2012, 312 pp. 70 TRL, (pb), ISBN 978-605-4326-50-1.
The book is a historical study of the continuous developments and moments of dis- ruption between the Ottoman (pre)regulatory discourses and the Turkish Republican social policy on prostitution in the town of Istanbul until the 1930s. It contains nine chapters, including a conceptual introduction, epigraphs to each chapter, and a con- cise conclusion. The acknowledgments, footnotes, index, and the bibliography of pri- mary and secondary sources in Ottoman, Turkish, French, and English display the appreciation of past studies on the social phenomenon of prostitution. The structure is thus chosen to support the conceptual presumption of a kaleidoscopic approach to legislative measures, their impact on prostitutes, and their subsequent reverberations in the public discourses of national media, international surveys, and travel accounts. With regard to the question of the regulation of prostitution, the traditional Turkish historiographical divisions do not fit well because there are significant points of conti- nuity between the measures taken in the late Ottoman period and the early Republican era. The instances of power under different political regimes are guided by same pre- sumption of restraining the subversive and dangerous nature of sexuality.
The study claims that despite the different approaches of state control over sold sex practices, the Réglementation (regulation) of prostitution represents an urban uto- pia. The utopian character of the efforts to regulate prostitution is visible in the belief that the incarceration of prostitutes in specially designated urban areas was for the protection of the citizen, his family, and the "social health" of the nation as a whole. Similarly to the movement for Réglementation in other Western European cities, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Istanbul there was a campaign for set- ting up "public houses" and "red-light districts," for establishing police records, and for providing medical examinations for prostitutes. These practices were presented as gestures of care for the physical and moral chastity of...