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oapen-20.500.12657-621212024-03-27T14:14:45Z Berlin Coquette Smith, Jill Suzanne European history thema EDItEUR::N History and Archaeology::NH History::NHD European history During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman." Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women’s financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency. 2023-03-29T15:50:49Z 2023-03-29T15:50:49Z 2014 book ONIX_20230329_9780801469701_106 9780801469701 9780801469695 9780801478345 9780801452673 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/62121 eng Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought application/pdf application/epub+zip Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 9780801469701.pdf 9780801469695.epub http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/html/WYSIWYGfiles/images/9780801452673.jpg Cornell University Press Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library 10.7298/0qya-jq21 10.7298/0qya-jq21 06a447d4-1d09-460f-8b1d-3b4b09d64407 5cb49704-e598-467a-b720-126dd1d29bf5 9780801469701 9780801469695 9780801478345 9780801452673 Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library 236 Ithaca [...] open access
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During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman." Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women’s financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.
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