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 GLOBAL
CINEMA

Prostitution
and Sex Work in
Global Cinema
New Takes on Fallen Women
edited by
Danielle Hipkins and
Kate Taylor-Jones
 Global Cinema

Series Editors
Katarzyna Marciniak
Ohio University
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Anikó Imre
University of Southern California
Claremont, CA, USA

Áine O’Healy
Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA, USA
The Global Cinema series publishes innovative scholarship on the trans-
national themes, industries, economies, and aesthetic elements that
increasingly connect cinemas around the world. It promotes theoreti-
cally transformative and politically challenging projects that rethink film
studies from cross-cultural, comparative perspectives, bringing into focus
forms of cinematic production that resist nationalist or hegemonic frame-
works. Rather than aiming at comprehensive geographical coverage, it
foregrounds transnational interconnections in the production, distribu-
tion, exhibition, study, and teaching of film. Dedicated to global aspects
of cinema, this pioneering series combines original perspectives and new
methodological paths with accessibility and coverage. Both ‘global’ and
‘cinema’ remain open to a range of approaches and interpretations, new
and traditional. Books published in the series sustain a specific concern
with the medium of cinema but do not defensively protect the boundaries
of film studies, recognizing that film exists in a converging media environ-
ment. The series emphasizes a historically expanded rather than an exclu-
sively presentist notion of globalization; it is mindful of repositioning ‘the
global’ away from a US-centric/Eurocentric grid, and remains critical of
celebratory notions of ‘globalizing film studies.’

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15005
Danielle Hipkins · Kate Taylor-Jones
Editors

Prostitution and
Sex Work in Global
Cinema
New Takes on Fallen Women
Editors
Danielle Hipkins Kate Taylor-Jones
Department of Modern Languages Department of East Asian Studies
University of Exeter University of Sheffield
Exeter, Devon, UK Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK

Global Cinema
ISBN 978-3-319-64607-7 ISBN 978-3-319-64608-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64608-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948723

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: © EyeEm/Alamy Stock Photo

Cover by Sam Johnson

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

It was in 2010 that we held a joint conference at the University of Exeter

that focused on the themes of this book. It really was the foundation
stone of this project and indeed several of the contributors attended this
conference and allowed us to hear their fascinating work for the first
time. Other smaller workshops followed and we wish to thank all the
attendees at these events for their contributions to the academic back-
ground of this project. Russell Campbell needs a special mention as
someone who has supported us in this endeavour from the beginning.
He and Jane Arthurs were both keynotes at the conference and we thank
them both heartily for their contribution to the wider field and this spe-
cific project.
We would also like to thank the following people for their help and
commitment to getting this book into publication. Firstly, we would like
to thank the editors of the global cinema series, Katarzyna Marciniak,
Anikó Imre and Áine O'Healy for the long-running support of this
­project. At Palgrave Macmillan we wish to thank Erica Buchman, and
the long-suffering Shaun Vigil and Glenn Ramirez. The anonymous
reader offered some helpful advice, and we thank you for your feedback.
We particularly want to thank all the contributors for staying with this
­project as, for some people, this publication has been several years in the
making!
Danielle Hipkins wishes to thank Kate Taylor-Jones for her patience
and always enthusiastic collaboration, despite the many stops and starts
along the way. In addition she wishes to thank all the colleagues, friends,

v
vi Acknowledgements

and family who have supported her through this project. In particular
she thanks colleagues and administrative staff at the University of Exeter
for their support in the organization of the conference that gave rise to
the book.
Kate Taylor-Jones wishes to thank the various groups of students over
the last few years to whom I have taught the topic of representation of
prostitution—your responses have both inspired and frustrated me in
equal measure. I also wish to thank E J-yong and M-Line Distribution
who allowed me to see The Bacchus Lady before festival release in the
UK. My gratitude is extended to the various friends and colleagues that
over the years I have discussed this topic with—whether we have agreed
or disagreed, the conversations have been important. I want to thank my
co-editor Danielle Hipkins for her collaboration and friendship over the
last few years—finally we have actually managed to finish this!

Notes
All Japanese, Korean and Chinese name appear in the traditional fashion with
the surname first.
An earlier version of Jane Arthurs’ ‘Distant Suffering, Proper Distance:
Cosmopolitan Ethics in the Film Portrayal of Trafficked Women’ was
previously published in the International Journal of Media and Cultural
Politics, (2012) 8:2, 141–158. Reproduced with thanks.
A modified version of Molly Hyo Kim’s chapter ‘The Idealization of
Prostitutes: Aesthetics and Discourse of South Korean Hostess Films
(1974–1982)’ previously appeared in Acta Koreana (2014) 17:1, 455–
477. Reproduced with thanks.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Danielle Hipkins and Kate Taylor-Jones

Part I Re-Viewing The Politics Of Poverty And Pity

2 Distant Suffering, Proper Distance: Cosmopolitan Ethics

in the Film Portrayal of Trafficked Women 19
Jane Arthurs

3 ‘Through Hardships To the Stars’: The Moldovan

Prostitute in Nicolae Margineanu’s Schimb Valutar 45
Alice Bardan

Part II Coming To The Cinematic City In Global Modernity

4 Duality and Ambiguity: Prostitution, Performance

and the Vagaries of Modernity in Japanese Cinema 67
Adam Bingham

5 The Idealization of Prostitutes: Aesthetics and Discourse

of South Korean Hostess Films (1974–1982) 85
Molly Hyo Kim
vii
viii Contents

6 Inside the ‘House of Ill Fame’: Brothel Prostitution,

Feminization of Poverty, and Lagos Life in Nollywood’s
The Prostitute 107
Saheed Aderinto

Part III Transgressive Women?

7 Where Cabaret Meets Revolution: The Prostitute at

War in Mexican Film 131
Niamh Thornton

8 Distorted Antigones: Dialectics and Prostitution

in Lola and Shirins Hochzeit 147
Teresa Ludden

Part IV Suffering Heroines Revisited

9 Becoming and Contradiction in the Muslim

Courtesan—The Case of Pakeezah 175
Aparna Sharma

10 Le Traviate: Suffering Heroines and the Italian State

Between the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries 195
Danielle Hipkins and Katharine Mitchell

11 Consumptive Chic: The Postfeminist Recycling

of Camille in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! 219
Katie N. Johnson

Part V Re-Viewing Women In The Postmodern City

12 Postcards and/of Prostitutes: Circulating the City

in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe 243
Fiona Handyside
 Contents ix

13 Handbags, Sex, and Death: Prostitution in

Contemporary East Asian Cinematic Urban Space 265
Kate Taylor-Jones

Concluding Commentary: Further Takes on Fallen Women? 287

Index 293
 Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Danielle Hipkins is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Film at

the University of Exeter. She has published widely on gender representa-
tion in postwar Italian cinema, and has recently published Italy’s Other
Women: Gender and prostitution in postwar Italian cinema, 1940–1965
(Peter Lang, 2016). She is currently working on girlhood and contem-
porary European cinema, and was a Co-investigator on the AHRC-
funded ‘Italian Cinema Audiences’ project, a study of memories of
cinema-going in Italy of the 1950s with the Universities of Bristol and
Oxford Brookes (2013–2016).

Kate Taylor-Jones is Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the

University of Sheffield. She is the co-editor of International Cinema and
the Girl (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and has published widely in a vari-
ety of fields. Her latest monograph study, Divine Work: Japanese Colonial
Cinema and its Legacy has recently been published with Bloomsbury
Press. Kate is editor-in-chief of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture
and is currently working on a project exploring postcolonial cinematic
aesthetics in East Asia.

xi
xii Editors and Contributors

Contributors

Saheed Aderinto is an associate professor of history at Western Carolina

University. He has authored or edited six books including, When Sex
Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in
Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 (University of Illinois Press, 2015). In
addition, his works have appeared in leading Africanist and specialist
journals such as, the Canadian Journal of African Studies; Journal of the
History of Sexuality; Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History; History
in Africa: A Journal of Method; Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies;
Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute; the Journal
of Social History; and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth,
among others.
Jane Arthurs is Professor in Television at Middlesex University,
London. Her research is in the fields of feminist cultural studies and
popular culture. She has developed her approach to the representation
of sex workers in film and television through several previous publica-
tions: ‘Documenting the Sex Industry’, a chapter in her book Television
and Sexuality; ‘Deliciously Consumable: The Uses and Abuses of Irony
in ‘Sex-Trafficking’ Campaign Films’, in The Handbook of Gender, Sex
and Media; and an analysis of the implications of commercial audi-
ence research in ‘Brands, Markets and Charitable Ethics: MTVs Exit
Campaign’, in Participations Vol. 6, Issue 2.
Alice Bardan holds a Ph.D. in English and a Visual Studies Degree
Certificate from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
She has taught courses on documentary film and television, film adap-
tation, global cinema, and television history at several universities in
Los Angeles. She has edited submissions to prestigious journals such as
Mass Communication and Society, Studies in Eastern European Cinemas,
Feminist Media Studies, and Wide Screen, and her articles have been
published in several edited collections, including Work and Cinema:
Labor and the Human Condition (Palgrave, 2013), The Cinemas of
Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives (Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2013), Transnational Feminism in Film and Media
(Palgrave, 2007), Not Necessarily the News? News Parody and Political
Satire across the Globe (Routledge, 2012), Entertaining the New Europe:
Popular Television in Socialist and Post-Socialist Europe (Routledge,
2012), The Blackwell Companion to East European Cinema (Blackwell,
 Editors and Contributors xiii

2012), Branding Post- Communist Nations (Routledge, 2012) and in the

refereed journals New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (2008),
Flow (2010) and Popular Communication: The International Journal of
Media and Culture (2012). In 2012, she had the chance to work as a
mentor for students enrolled in the American Pavilion Program at the
Cannes Film Festival, and, most recently, had the privilege to serve on
the jury at the twelfth edition of the Zagreb Film Festival.
Adam Bingham is a lecturer in Film and Asian Studies at Nottingham
Trent University and the author of Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi
(Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and editor of Intellect’s Critical
Directories of East European and Indian cinema, as well as writing reg-
ularly for the American film journal CineAste. He has contributed to
recent books on Hong Kong Neo-Noir, female filmmakers in world cin-
ema and a new study of Shohei Imamura and is currently researching and
writing about gender and the family in contemporary Japanese film.
Fiona Handyside is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and French at
the University of Exeter. She is the author of Sofia Coppola: A Cinema
of Girlhood (I.B. Tauris, 2017) and Cinema at the Shore: The Beach in
French Cinema (Peter Lang, 2014).
Katie N. Johnson is Professor of English and an Affiliate of Film
Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Miami University
of Ohio. She is the author of Sisters in Sin: Brothel Drama in America
(Cambridge, 2006), Sex for Sale: Six Progressive-Era Brothel Drama Plays
(University of Iowa Press, 2015), and numerous articles and book chap-
ters on theatre, performance, film, and U.S. culture. Johnson is a board
member of the Eugene O’Neill Society and Review Editor of the Eugene
O’Neill Review. She is working on her next book project, Racing the
Great White Way: A Counter History of Early Broadway.
Molly Hyo Kim received a B.A. in Communication and Culture from
Indiana University and an M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York
University. She attained a doctoral degree in Communications with
a minor in East Asian Languages and Cultures, from the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in December 2014. Her research area
includes film history, film censorship and particularly 1970s/80s South
Korean cinema. Kim is currently working on a comparative analysis of
South Korean Hostess films and Japanese Nikkatsu Roman Porno films,
xiv Editors and Contributors

in terms of their marketing strategies, genre conventions and film censor-

ship.
Teresa Ludden is Lecturer in German at Newcastle University. She
works on post-1945 and contemporary German literature and film, and
is interested in interdisciplinary readings with theory and philosophy,
especially gender and psychoanalysis. She has published on memory cul-
ture and trauma in the German literary context and on eating disorders
in contemporary German women’s writing.
Katharine Mitchell is Lecturer in Italian at the University of
Strathclyde, Glasgow. She is author of Italian Women Writers: Gender
and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, 1870–1910 (University
of Toronto Press, 2014), and co-editor (with Clorinda Donato) of
‘The Diva in Modern Italian Culture’, special issue of Italian Studies
70:3 (2015) and (with Helena Sanson) of Women and Gender in Post-
Unification Italy: Between Private and Public Spheres (Peter Lang, 2013).
She has published articles and chapters on women’s writings, the figure
of the diva in literature, female spectators of theatre and opera, and the
femme fatale in the nineteenth century.
Aparna Sharma is a documentary filmmaker and theorist. Her films
document experiences and narratives that are overlooked in the main-
stream imagination of the Indian nation. She is presently working in
India’s northeastern region, documenting cultural practices of indig-
enous communities. As a film theorist, she is committed to writing about
non-normative subjects in Indian cinema with an emphasis on documen-
tary films. In Documentary Films in India: Critical Aesthetics at Work
she explores non-canonical documentary practices from India (2015).
She has previously written on Indo-Pak ties through documentary and
the representation of gender in Indian cinema. She works as Associate
Professor at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, UCLA.
Niamh Thornton is Reader in Latin American Studies at the University
of Liverpool. She is a specialist in Mexican Film, Literature, and Digital
Cultures with a particular focus on War Stories, Gendered Narratives,
Star Studies, Cultures of Taste, and Distributed Content. She has pub-
lished widely. Her books include Revolution and Rebellion in Mexican
Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2013), International Perspectives on Chicana/o
Studies: This World is My Place (Routledge, 2013), and Memory and
Trauma in Mexican Visual Culture (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2017).
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Lily’s exuberance in Exchange 52

Fig. 3.2 Symbolic ejaculation in Exchange 55
Fig. 3.3 Emil regains his confidence after sleeping with Lily 56
Fig. 5.1 Gona in I am a No. 77 girl 92
Fig. 5.2 Ihwa in Winter Woman 93
Fig. 5.3 Superimposition of Young-ja 98
Fig. 5.4 Winter Woman: ‘Ihwa belongs to everyone but at the same
time to no one’ 100
Fig. 6.1 A Brothel ‘Makossa Hotel’ and a Mosque at Osodi, Lagos.
Photo by Saheed Aderinto. Summer 2013 120
Fig. 7.1 Katy Jurado (left) and María Félix (right) in La Bandida 142
Fig. 8.1 Dialectics at a standstill: The prostitute as site of tensions
between the public and private, the community
and the individual 153
Fig. 8.2 Lola’s bedroom as meeting point for the semiotic
and symbolic, and illustration of the paradox of expressing
eradicated individuality 158
Fig. 8.3 Shirin: Self-expression and protest through the traditional
song 164
Fig. 10.1 Gina (Giulia Valentini) as ‘suffering actor’ breaks down
in Un giorno speciale 205
Fig. 10.2 Gina (Giulia Valentini) as ‘suffering actor’ finds her
voice performing her audition piece as Scarlett O’Hara
in Un giorno speciale 211

xv
xvi List of Figures

Fig. 11.1 Nicole Kidman as Satine, the Sparkling Diamond, during

the opening number, ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,’
in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! 227
Fig. 11.2 Satine displaying ‘consumptive chic’ in the finale
of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! 233
Fig. 12.1 Postcard of Chloe, front and back 249
Fig. 12.2 Postcard of Chloe, front and back 250
Fig. 12.3 Chloe takes a phone call at the intersection of Dundas St
West and McCaul street. The art gallery of Ontario
(with Frank Gehry’s glass corset redesign), Will Alsop’s
Ontario college of art and design building, and the world
famous CN Tower (the world’s tallest tower until 2010)
are clearly visible behind her 255
Fig. 13.1 Lin waits for Icy on stairs at Hillwood road 272
Fig. 13.2 A set of crossroads in Wan Chi at the end of Girl$ 274
Fig. 13.3 Mitsuko and Izumi are mirrored in the urban slum where
they work in Guilty of Romance 279
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Danielle Hipkins and Kate Taylor-Jones

In 2015 the French–Moroccan film Much Loved (Nabil Ayouch) found

itself embroiled in a serious controversy. The film, which explored the
lives of a group of female prostitutes, found itself labelled as ‘pornog-
raphy and debauchery’ and was banned from Moroccan screens. The
director and the lead actress, Loubna Abidar, reportedly received death
threats and were forced to appear in court to answer the charges of inde-
cency. The inclusion of multiple sex scenes alongside a portrayal of the
police corruption, sexual violence and child abuse aimed to explore the
murky and complex side of the Marrakesh sex industry and, as a result,
offended many in the film’s home nation.
The controversy surrounding Much Loved raises the question that this
collected edition seeks to explore, namely to understand more about
how women involved in sex work are represented in fictional screen nar-
ratives across a broader range of different national and transnational con-
texts than are usually considered together. This book is defined by the

D. Hipkins (*)
Department of Modern Languages, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
K. Taylor-Jones
Department of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

© The Author(s) 2017 1

D. Hipkins and K. Taylor-Jones (eds.), Prostitution and Sex Work in
Global Cinema, Global Cinema, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64608-4_1
2 D. Hipkins and K. Taylor-Jones

key idea that the figure of the female prostitute in all her varieties is a
malleable cultural symbol that has been used to address a myriad of social
fears and desires across global cinemas.1 As the example of Much Loved
suggests, the figure is still interpreted in the light of the ‘whore stigma’,
as a result of which her representation is felt to haunt all women,2 while
her body also often remains entangled with the discourse of nationhood.
With this book, we aim to ask how frequently nineteenth-century nar-
ratives of female prostitution, hence the label ‘fallen women’, are still
recycled in contemporary visual contexts, and to understand how wide-
spread and in what contexts the destigmatization of female sex work is
underway on screen. We do this by bringing together the forms of rep-
resentation in different national and transnational contexts and engaging
international scholars in the question of how cinema has represented a
figure that to many is simply labelled ‘prostitute’.
The terminology is important to consider here. The terms themselves,
‘sex workers’, ‘prostitutes’ and ‘sex-trafficked women’, are culturally
and politically loaded. All the chapters contained herein, explore how
the broad term ‘prostitute’ can cover a variety of experiences and repre-
sentations and we engage with the linked terms ‘sex work’, ‘sex traffick-
ing’ and the figure of the prostitute, and even ‘whore’. Contemporary
debates surrounding sexuality continue to remind us of persistent and
often highly damaging patriarchal ideologies, and the presence of pros-
titutes and prostitution in all its forms acts as an ideal site through which
to debate contemporary gender politics. In this way, visual representa-
tions of prostitutes/sex workers/sex-trafficked women enable us to
understand attitudes towards female mobility, sexuality, ethnicity and
emancipation that cross national divides and affect gender identities
(although all three figures function differently).
The rise of commercialised sex in the post-modern age has resulted in
a polarisation of the debate. For writers such as Feona Attwood, we are
seeing a sexualisation of western (and global) culture.3 This process of
sexualisation has resulted in female sexuality being constructed as ‘active,
recreational material, independent, consumerist and consumed, a key site
of conflict, resistance and division’.4 This rise in the academic study of all
aspects of sexuality has seen the figure of the prostitute once more come
into wider public circulation and debate. The sex worker movement and
its supporters, rejecting the word ‘prostitute’ as degrading, have called
for the movement of sex work into the category of embodied labour and
the end of stigmatisation.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

This postmodern, and indeed, often postfeminist sexual moment in

the West needs to be balanced with the continuing repression of women
seen in the presence of FGM, forced marriage, forced prostitution,
domestic abuse and rape. Indeed, on the other side of the argument,
scholar-activists such as Kathleen Barry, Sheila Jeffreys, Kat Banyard,
Gail Dines and Katherine McKinnon are clear in their pronouncement
of women’s sexuality as nothing more than a tool of enslavement with
all forms of prostitution and sex work as brutal and specifically gen-
dered exploitation. As Jeffreys notes, for her all forms of prostitution,
in all contexts, can never be anything more than a ‘harmful cultural
practice’.5 For Banyard, the argument that ‘sex work is work’ is just
another method to repress women via new dynamics of employment
laws and the neo-liberal consumer agenda.6
This polarisation can be seen in the visual field with the postfemi-
nist liberated narratives coming face to face with accounts of brutal-
ity and abuse. In the now infamous UK TV programme based on the
same-titled novel, Belle de Jour (aka. Secret Diary of a Call Girl), we
see a vision of a liberated ‘working girl’ who chooses to enter into the
neo-capitalist structures via her own bodily value. This narrative is ech-
oed across the globe in the East Asian dynamic of teenage compensa-
tory dating seen in films such as Girl$ (Kenneth Bi 2010) and Bounce
Kogals (Harada Masato 1997) or the student/prostitute film in Nigeria.
Indeed, 2016 saw two Polish films engage with this dynamic: Piggies
(Robert Glinkski 2016) focuses on young boys selling themselves to
men in Germany for the latest technological gadgets, while Katarzyna
Rosloniec’s Mall Girls (2016) explores the lives of teenage girls who sell
themselves to pay for the latest designer goods and luxury clothing.
The figure of the female prostitute is always marked by a profound
sense of ambivalence and it is this ambivalence that all the chapters share
as a common theme.7 As Patrice Petro notes, the prostitute can be seen
as ‘an emblem for the cinema as a whole, typifying literary intellectu-
als’ simultaneous contempt for and fascination with an openly commer-
cial (and hence ‘venal’) form’.8 For Petro, this ambivalent positioning
of prostitute resulted in the figure being marked by hostility and defen-
siveness and, as such, she became the primary icon that was imbued with
multi-faceted meanings across arts and cultural texts. Moving beyond
a perspective dominated by Anglo-American representation towards
the global is vital if we are to understand more about how these mean-
ings function, for, as Sarah Projansky explains, ‘to identify a dominant
4 D. Hipkins and K. Taylor-Jones

representation and then focus all one’s analytic attention there […] is,
at least in part, to reify that dominance.’9 Similarly, by focusing only on
one small, if powerful, segment of the heterogeneous mediascape—for
example, the globalised conglomerate of Hollywood’s film and televi-
sion production—we risk producing a limited and one-sided debate on
the representation of the prostitute and/or sex worker. A good exam-
ple of this is the highly influential Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall 1990)
that, as Hilary Radner notes, reflects a promotion of the American capi-
talist dream made attractive by the addition of romance.10 In this end-
lessly popular film, the prostitute has, therefore, become the idealised
neo-liberal subject that speaks to a small minority audience in the face of
global inequality. Not least of all, Julia Roberts’ iconic image keeps the
white female consumer at the centre of the narrative, while this collection
will tackle in detail visual representations of this figure from countries that
extend not only beyond Anglophone domination, to Romania, Germany
and Italy, but also beyond a white homogeneity with contributors writing
on Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, India, Nigeria and Mexico.
One of the formative books for considering the prostitute on screen
is Russell Campbell’s 2006 oft-quoted book Marked Women: Prostitutes
and Prostitution in the Cinema. Campbell’s study constitutes the first
and highly important attempt to look at representations of the prostitute
on the screen across cultures and has been fundamental to the develop-
ment of this book. While Campbell’s work covers a wide field of sur-
vey, he himself has declared that any claims to universal validity for his
models ‘are tentative and suspect’ as a result of his Western bias.11 With
our volume, screen studies from different national backgrounds, which,
in Campbell’s words typically ‘tend to work from too small a pool of
examples’ are finally brought into dialogue, thus building on his work.
A more recent 2015 book that addressed the representation of sex work
on screen is Selling Sex on Screen: from Weimar cinema to zombie porn; in
the introduction to this book, Karen Ritzenhoff and Catriona McAvoy
observe that ‘four main themes reappear: class differences and female
economic independence; law, crime, and sex work; capitalism/commodi-
fication; and war and violence’.12
Our book, which extends beyond the USA and European scope of
Selling Sex, will touch on all these themes. However, we argue that when
we examine these films on a global scale, representation is also marked
by many more intersections. Across the five sections of this book, the
affects generated by sex work’s increasing mobility; the rapidly changing
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

nature of the urban space; the prostitute as the site of transgression; and
the recurrence of the global melodramatic tradition repeatedly intersect
across cultures and over a time frame that stretches from the 1800s to
the present day. A leitmotif of this collection is a preoccupation with the
story of the ‘fall’ as a narrative that makes a statement about how poverty
penalises women in particular or reinforces women’s status as victims—
the return to this narrative across radically different contexts offers a
series of takes on ‘fallen women’, many of which are new, but some of
which are also haunted by an intersection with nineteenth-century affects
of pity and ambivalence.

The Chapters

Reviewing the Politics of Poverty and Pity

The most lamented figure of the modern debates on sex work is, of
course, the sex-trafficked girl. This globalised figure has become the
centre of several films and television shows from both Europe and the
US. Increasingly, public attention to the trafficking of women and girls
has resulted in the narrative of the prostitute (forced or enforced) being
played out on the stage with regards to immigration, intentional patterns
of abuse and global economic inequalities. Restrictive and limiting nar-
ratives of victimised women and bad men have become a dominant nar-
rative in the media (as the Rotherham sex scandal clearly illustrates) and
yet the variety of social, economic and global spaces and multiplicity of
guises that the prostitute concurrently works under is often neglected.
William Brown, Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, in their 2010
collection Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in
the New Europe explore how sex trafficking has come to intersect with
a series of other narratives involving economics, migration and the
debate on the boundaries of Europe as a geopolitical entity.13 Our first
essay in this section, ‘Distant Suffering, Proper Distance: Cosmopolitan
Ethics in the Film Portrayal of Trafficked Women’, engages with some
of the issues raised by Brown et al. as Jane Arthurs explores the ethical
and political issues raised by using film narratives to construct victims
of trafficking as objects of humanitarian intervention. Focusing on the
film Lilya 4-ever (Luke Moodysson 2002) and the two-part TV series
Sex Traffic (David Yates 2004) (both of which are about young women
trafficked to work in the sex industry in Europe), Arthurs examines
6 D. Hipkins and K. Taylor-Jones

how these texts were circulated and interpreted within particular discur-
sive contexts, in this case, NGO and government anti-trafficking cam-
paigns in Western Europe that took place in the early 2000s. Utilising
Lilie Chouliarki’s idea of a ‘cosmopolitan’ aesthetics of spectatorship (in
which our philanthropic compassion for ‘distant suffering’ needs to be
accompanied by a reflexive engagement with political questions about
causes and solutions),14 Arthurs argues that we need to see these women
as more than voyeuristic objects of compassion. Using Rosi Braidotti’s
vision of a nomadic ethic, she calls for us to take into account issues of
agency and the right to mobility when approaching the question of aid
to those who are victims of sex trafficking. As she concludes,

An open and reflexive subjectivity is the necessary condition for a truly cos-
mopolitan ethics to emerge in which we decenter our own privilege and
power and pay attention to emergent forms of representation that express
migrants’ embodied, shifting desires and experiences in all their complex-
ity so that we are open to being transformed by this encounter. Only then
might we be able to answer the questions ‘why?’ and ‘what needs to be
done?’ in ways that could promote global justice.

This idea of global justice and the right to mobility and indeed
agency are echoed in Alice Bardan’s chapter, ‘“Through Hardships To
the Stars”: The Moldovan prostitute in Nicolae Margineanu’s Schimb
Valutar (Exchange 2008)’. Focusing on the figure of the Moldovan
prostitute working inside Romania, Barden asks us to reconsider norma-
tive modes of representation of Eastern European sex workers as either
repressed victim or over-sexed consumerist. Her analysis of Exchange
opens up the reader/viewer to the multiple levels of ‘exchange’ that are
taking place inside the film and explores how the dynamics of mobility,
consumerism and vulnerability are presented via the relationship between
a Romanian migrant and a Moldovan prostitute. In particular, she uses
postfeminism as a critical tool in order to understand the female prosti-
tute’s complex complicity in her difficult experience.

Coming to the Cinematic City in Global Modernity

In her chapter for the final section of this book, Fiona Handyside refers
to the association between the prostitute and the modern, particularly in
relation to the city, identified by both Walter Benjamin and Mary Ann
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Doane. In Doane’s words, ‘the free and unanchored circulation of sexu-

ality and money epitomised the modernity associated with the increased
traffic of urban space’.15 In the second section of this book, we examine
how the narrative of arrival in the city has been explored through the
motif of prostitution in the context of a global modernity. The role that
the city has played in the cinematic representation of the prostitute is
seminal. Across the globe, as social and economic structures changed,
prostitution was intermingled with the notion of the increasing visibility
of women on the streets, in the workplace and the attainment of social
power. Polarised between woman as threat and woman as victim, as a
commodity to be bought and sold, the prostitute has been marked as
the site of capitalist consumption par excellence. Nevertheless, even as
a symbol of capitalism, the prostitute is also occasionally charged with
positive values, relating to social activism and determination. These
values allowed writers, including Bertolt Brecht, to deploy prostitutes
to voice social criticism. These tensions stretch across this second sec-
tion of the book in which the notion of ‘coming to the city’ is used to
explore the ambivalence about urban transformation and modernisation
across Japanese, South Korean and Nigerian cinema in moments of dra-
matic change.
With his chapter ‘Duality and Ambiguity: Prostitution, performance
and the vagaries of modernity in Japanese cinema’, Adam Bingham
takes us into the world of post-war Japan and the role that the prosti-
tute played in the works of three of the greatest Japanese filmmakers:
Mizoguchi Kenji, Kawashima Yuzo and Naruse Mikio. In the post-war
period, Japan faced a series of challenges in the wake of its defeat in
the Pacific War. The post-war period saw Japan undergoing a series of
economic, political and societal shifts. Using three films, all made in or
just after 1956 (the year that prostitution was criminalised by the Diet),
Bingham explores how, taken together, these films collectively depict
both Japan’s post-war policies and gender norms as well as the perva-
sive ambiguity that existed in the mindset of the average Japanese citi-
zen about the way the country was developing. As an advanced capitalist
culture emerged from the ruins of defeat and the subsequent American
occupation, Bingham shows how the prostitute and the allied figure of
the Geisha, were used as the means to explore the contradictions and
confusions of the post-war modern moment.
The role of the prostitute inside a national cinema has often been
a complex one as Molly Hyo Kim clearly explores in her chapter ‘The
8 D. Hipkins and K. Taylor-Jones

Idealization of Prostitutes: Aesthetics and discourse of South Korean

Hostess Films (1974–1982)’. The late 1970s to 1980s was a difficult
period in South Korean history. A series of military dictatorships saw a
curtailment of personal freedoms and rights simultaneous to a process of
compressed modernity thanks to which South Korean industry grew at
a remarkable rate. This mass industrialisation process had little care for
the individual and as people flooded into the urban environment, tales
of poverty, abuse and hardship were common. The Hostess films were
a series of popular features that explored the lives of women working in
the sex industry during this decade. Despite the sexual content, these
films managed to escape the vigorous eyes of Park Chung-Hee’s censors,
making them not only an interesting exploration of prostitution in this
era but also an important, yet often ignored, inclusion in South Korean
cinematic history. As Kim explores, the specific visual and narrative styles
of the Hostess films, meant that a split between reality and fiction was
established that allowed the fallen women to operate as more than just
a symbol of urban depravity. We see the ‘fallen woman’ in this sense
reborn, not via a narrative of redemption, but as the ideal self-sacrificial
symbol who functioned for the wider social good despite her own lowly
status, echoing the function of the prostitute figure in Italian nineteenth-
century opera, explored in Chap. 10 of this volume.
Saheed Aderinto’s chapter, ‘Inside the “House of Ill Fame”: Brothel
prostitution, feminization of poverty, and Lagos life in Nollywood’s The
Prostitute’ moves us to another region of the globe as he explores how
the popular Nollywood film The Prostitute channels a variety of contem-
porary Nigerian cultural and social concerns. While Aderinto does not
negate the very real ways in which African women are too often mar-
ginalised in cinema, he offers the argument that ‘the story of prostitu-
tion in Nollywood films goes beyond the depiction of women as objects
of sexual pleasure’. Via his positioning of the brothel and the prostitute
at the centre of the urban Lagos environment, Aderinto illustrates that
the prostitute functions as a means via which diverse topics such as class,
poverty, corruption and gender can be critiqued inside the Nigerian
state.

Transgressive Women?
This third section of the book offers an opportunity to drill down in
more depth into the ambivalence associated with the prostitute discussed
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

at the beginning of this introduction. Niamh Thornton and Teresa

Ludden’s chapters offer two very different approaches to understanding
how this ambivalence can be structured through the figure of the pros-
titute in cinema. Niamh Thornton’s ‘Where Cabaret Meets Revolution:
The prostitute at war in Mexican film’ focuses on the figure of the star
in Mexican cinema, demonstrating how María Félix performed and
was constructed in her performances as a prostitute. In the revolution-
ary melodramas produced during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema
(1930s–1950s) about the revolutionary war (1910–1920), the prosti-
tute is a common figure, onto whom anxieties about women’s place in
the new post-Revolutionary Mexico are projected. However, Thornton
argues that Félix’s performances as a prostitute in the films, La mujer de
todos (Julio Bracho 1946) and La Bandida (Roberto Rodríguez 1963),
enable us to identify ‘a distinctive performative style’. Through dance,
song and costume, camera and lighting but also in the ways in which she
occupies filmic space, she is able to challenge the relative containment of
the narrative outcomes and indeed escapes the punishment meted out to
prostitutes in other examples of the genre. Moving from a star-focused
study to a philosophically-inspired inquiry, Teresa Ludden’s chapter con-
siders two films from a key period of German cinema, the New German
Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. In ‘Distorted Antigones: Dialectics and
prostitution in Lola (Fassbinder 1981) and Shirins Hochzeit (Sanders
1976)’, she proposes an innovative approach to reading the prostitute in
these films through the lens of Hegelian dialectical relations. Rather than
focusing on the melodramatic aesthetic that the prostitute generates, one
that recurs as we have noted throughout this book, she considers how
the prostitute is used as a symbol ‘to intimate critical voices of opposi-
tion yet are contained within (Lola) or destroyed by (Shirin) patriarchy
and capitalism which both films suggest are inescapable.’ The figure of
Antigone, who as woman is both the foundation of and the excluded
from the polis, provides a new model for reading the prostitute as sym-
bol. Offering detailed readings of the way in which the two films’ aesthet-
ics construct the prostitute around this tension, Ludden demonstrates
how the figure of Lola retains an ambivalence that makes Fassbinder’s
film more pessimistic than Sanders’. Although it is in Sanders’ film that
the prostitute dies, while Fassbinder’s film ends with a marriage of com-
promise, Ludden argues that, informed by Sanders’ feminism, Shirin is
‘is also a character who says ‘no’ at crucial moments of protest against
injustice and exploitation and gains agency from being the narrator of her
10 D. Hipkins and K. Taylor-Jones

own story.’ Indeed it is less a realist depiction of ­prostitution that matters

in these films, than ‘the symbolism inherent in the figure of the prosti-
tute herself’. Yet Sanders manages to juxtapose a phenomenological form
of film-making with ‘elements of distancing which never disavow media-
tion and constitute a mode of dialectical empathy’. Such deliberate dia-
lectical empathy forms a thought-provoking contrast with the ‘discursive
contradiction’ identified within the Hindi melodrama in the following
chapter.

Suffering Heroines Revisited

If certain stars and directors foreground transgressive women through
the figure of the prostitute, perhaps more commonly, as we explore in
this fourth section, it is the figure of the suffering prostitute in a mel-
odramatic key that continues to dominate representations of prostitu-
tion, exploiting the affective and cathartic resonance of the narrative of
the ‘fall’. Nonetheless, as the chapters in both the previous section and
this section demonstrate, the prostitute’s predominantly ambivalent
mode creates a series of cinematic spaces in which she is able to tran-
scend momentarily her suffering, and like the heroines of the previous
section, reach towards new trajectories of becoming. ‘Becoming’ is the
key word for Aparna Sharma’s chapter ‘Becoming and Contradiction in
the Muslim Courtesan—The Case of Pakeezah’ as she examines Kamal
Amrohi’s Pakeezah (1971), a highly acclaimed Hindi film that surrounds
a Muslim courtesan, Sahebjan. This figure, Sharma argues, ‘provides
insight into a postcolonial society’s equations of otherness surround-
ing gender’. Drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray, in her examination
of the soundscape of the film Sharma argues that the film strongly sup-
ports the development or ‘becoming’ of the protagonist through a series
of six musical performances within the film that ‘articulate Sahebjaan’s
imagination and inner longing, a form of courtesan consciousness’. In
this way, the film’s treatment of the courtesan anticipates Sanders’ rep-
resentation of Shirin, discussed by Ludden in the previous chapter, as
the two physically oppressed women find self-expression through song.
These performances co-exist with a tension in the overarching narrative
framework of Pakeezah in which the figure of the courtesan is reinte-
grated into the nation through marriage. This ‘discursive contradiction’,
Sharma argues, reinforces a national heroic image tied to independent
India’s Nehruvian era (1950–1960s).
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

In the framing of the voice of the courtesan as powerful, but limited,

and in the identification of the national with male power (or lack of it)
as a rescuer for the prostitute, there are strong areas of overlap with the
following chapter. In ‘Le traviate: Suffering heroines and the Italian state
between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries’, Danielle Hipkins and
Kate Mitchell consider the relationship between what was considered the
most successful operatic melodrama in the newly emerging nation state
of nineteenth-century Italy, Verdi’s La traviata, first performed in 1853,
and a 2012 film addressing the theme of the suffering female and the
doomed romantic relationship in the context of contemporary prosti-
tution, Un giorno speciale (Francesca Comencini). The chapter explores
the potential pitfalls of melodrama; the director comes uncomfortably
close in the discourse surrounding the film to a moralising stance on
prostitution in which the girl prostitute can be constructed as victim.
However, in its recycling of the trope of the ‘traviata’, or Magdalene
figure, they conclude, the film itself does succeed in making a space
for youthful agency, of showing at least the potential for the suffering
heroine to find a voice as ‘suffering actor’, related to her inheritance of
elements of the Italian operatic tradition. The chapter explores the cul-
tural legacy offered by the opera heroine, in particular through operatic
theories of ‘envoicing’ the female protagonist according to which ‘any
contradiction that the suffering Italian opera heroine embodied […] was
surpassed by the sheer sonority of her voice’.
In the final section of the book, our authors consider the postmodern
re-visioning of the city, privileged locus of the ‘fall’ itself. In her chap-
ter for that section, Fiona Handyside refers to Parisian culture as the key
site of the modernist attempt to ‘grapple with the rapid shifts of moder-
nity, their impact on gender relations, sexuality, and spatiality, and art’s
role in the expression of all that.’ Katie Johnson’s chapter ‘Consumptive
Chic: The postfeminist recycling of Camille in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin
Rouge!’ forms a useful bridge towards the question of re-writing that
modernity in Luhrmann’s new vision of Camille. However, this discus-
sion of Camille belongs firmly in this fourth section because she is in
dialogue with the operatic tradition of the suffering heroine explored
by Hipkins and Mitchell. The figure is drawn from the same key source
text for La traviata, from the French novel (1848) and play (1852)
La dame aux Camélias, both by Alexandre Dumas fils. Moulin Rouge!,
Johnson argues, taps into a long tradition of re-writing the sympa-
thetic and doomed heroine, and appears at first glance, a ‘quintessential
12 D. Hipkins and K. Taylor-Jones

postmodern hooker chic film’. For all its flamboyant postmodern irony,
she argues, the film engages the very ‘master narratives’ of ‘prostitu-
tion discourse, gender norms, racialization, and hetero-normativity’.
Examining the film in relation to Cukor’s Camille (1936), another ver-
sion of Moulin Rouge (John Huston 1952), and ending with an analysis
of the ‘Lady Marmalade’ music video (2002) produced by Missy Elliot,
while drawing on Rosalind Gill’s notion of a ‘postfeminist media sensibil-
ity’, Johnson argues that the recent re-cycling of this figure of Camille
relates to a new and deadly (for feminism) attachment to the female
body as fetishised object. By contrast with what Hipkins and Mitchell
conclude about the feminist and female-directed Un giorno speciale in
relation to its re-writing of the ‘fall’, Johnson finds that this mainstream
popular narrative leaves little space for female agency. Returning to the
theme of the female voice that offers a fil rouge through this particular
section, women in Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge!, Johnson argues, are quite
literally drowned out by ‘men’s voices, plotlines, and songs’. If the per-
formances of the courtesan analysed by Sharma in Chap. 9 challenge the
dominance of the male gaze through an attention to female experience,
Satine’s performances in Moulin Rouge! stage her solely as the object of
desire.

Re-Viewing Women in the Postmodern City

While Moulin Rouge! offers a postmodern take on the Parisian myth,
in this final section, ‘Re-viewing women in the postmodern city’,
our authors examine further how screen cities and real cities are con-
stantly re-built, re-packaged and re-written in an era of radical uncer-
tainty and global exchange, one in which femininity itself is no longer
legible as object in a postfeminist era. Still haunted by Paris’s status as
‘the’ city of the prostitute as symbol of modernity, Handyside’s chapter
‘Postcards and/of Prostitutes: Circulating the city in Atom Egoyan’s
Chloe (2009)’ examines a film whose French original was set in Paris,
and whose screenplay set the story in San Francisco, which significantly
relocates the story to Toronto, while maintaining both Parisian and San
Franciscan palimpsests, revealing the complex postmodern recycling and
slippage around the pairing of woman and city that cinema in particular
can construct. Looking at the interlocking ways in which the eponymous
character, Chloe, plays a number of substitutes for characters within the
film, and how Toronto itself is often used by Hollywood as substitute
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

US city, Handyside examines ‘the invisibility of how both women and

cities are offered up as a series of fantasy substitutions, valuable only
in their readiness to shift sexual and spatial zones at the will of (male)
capital’s behest’. Considering the motif of glass, a dazzling new feature
of Toronto’s architectural landscape, a mirror of multiple images, and
deadly killer, as the film’s salient visual means of conveying this duplici-
tous reflectivity, Handyside explores the filmmaker’s own narrative of
compromise between commercial mainstream and his personal trajec-
tory as Toronto-based auteur. In highlighting Egoyan’s reworking of a
Toronto city landmark as a kind of Arc de Triomphe, Handyside’s chap-
ter also offers a useful metonym for the potency of the cinematic nar-
rative of the female prostitute, apparently echoing nineteenth-century
iconographical formulations, but with a postmodern twist. As Handyside
also makes clear, Egoyan’s narrative betrays the way in which major
global cities are very much about the expulsion of the prostitute body
from the city centre to its margins. Whatever centrality Parisian modern-
ism afforded the prostitute as object, the global city of postmodernity
limits the putative agency of the postfeminist subject by keeping her at its
margins.
The global city’s relocation of prostitution to its margins, while
depending on the opportunity to consume sex as an everyday commod-
ity, is also the topic of the following and final chapter. In ‘Handbags,
Sex and Death: Prostitution in contemporary East Asian cinematic urban
space’ Kate Taylor-Jones ‘explores how gendered dynamics of urban
space simultaneously open up and close down a vision of empowered
subjectivity’ in the cinematic cityscapes of Hong Kong, Japan and South
Korea. In East Asia the urban mode of existence has become the increas-
ing norm, and as we have seen in the chapter by Molly Hyo Kim, the
site associated with prostitution. Urban space, rather than place, emerges
as a key term for describing the differing modes of access to the city
space available to the teen protagonists of Girl$ (Kenneth Bi 2010), all
engaged in ‘compensatory dating’, but for some it is ‘the only means
by which lower-class girls such as Gucci can fully engage with the neo-
liberal consumer culture of Hong Kong’. When Gucci spies her own
brother, waiting outside the station to meet a mystery girl waiting to sell
her virginity (who unbeknown to him is his sister Gucci), we encoun-
ter a recurrent narrative trope in which the social hypocrisy of prostitu-
tion, morally outlawed but apparently practised by all, is underlined by
the perverse brother-sister encounter. This narrative has global resonance
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 CHAPTER VI
MAGNETS AND MAGNETISM

In many parts of the world there is to be found a kind of iron ore,

some specimens of which have the peculiar power of attracting iron,
and of turning to the north if suspended freely. This is called the
lodestone, and it has been known from very remote times. The name
Magnetism has been given to this strange property of the lodestone,
but the origin of the name is not definitely known. There is an old
story about a shepherd named Magnes, who lived in Phrygia in Asia
Minor. One day, while tending his sheep on Mount Ida, he happened
to touch a dark coloured rock with the iron end of his crook, and he
was astonished and alarmed to find that the rock was apparently
alive, for it gripped his crook so firmly that he could not pull it away.
This rock is said to have been a mass of lodestone, and some
people believe that the name magnet comes from the shepherd
Magnes. Others think that the name is derived from Magnesia, in
Asia Minor, where the lodestone was found in large quantities; while
a third theory finds the origin in the Latin word magnus, heavy, on
account of the heavy nature of the lodestone. The word lodestone
itself comes from the Saxon laeden, meaning to lead.
It is fairly certain that the Chinese knew of the lodestone long
before Greek and Roman times, and according to ancient Chinese
records this knowledge extends as far back as 2600 b.c. Humboldt,
in his Cosmos, states that a miniature figure of a man which always
turned to the south was used by the Chinese to guide their caravans
across the plains of Tartary as early as 1000 b.c. The ancient Greek
and Roman writers frequently refer to the lodestone. Thales, of
whom we spoke in Chapter I., believed that its mysterious power
was due to the possession of a soul, and the Roman poet Claudian
imagined that iron was a food for which the lodestone was hungry.
Our limited space will not allow of an account of the many curious
speculations to which the lodestone has given rise, but the following
suggestion of one Famianus Strada, quoted from Houston’s
Electricity in Every-Day Life, is really too good to be omitted.
“Let there be two needles provided of an equal Length and
Bigness, being both of them touched by the same lodestone; let the
Letters of the Alphabet be placed on the Circles on which they are
moved, as the Points of the Compass under the needle of the
Mariner’s Chart. Let the Friend that is to travel take one of these with
him, first agreeing upon the Days and Hours wherein they should
confer together; at which times, if one of them move the Needle, the
other Needle, by Sympathy, will move unto the same letter in the
other instantly, though they are never so far distant; and thus, by
several Motions of the Needle to the Letters, they may easily make
up any Words or Sense which they have a mind to express.” This is
wireless telegraphy in good earnest!
The lodestone is a natural magnet. If we rub a piece of steel with
a lodestone we find that it acquires the same properties as the latter,
and in this way we are able to make any number of magnets, for the
lodestone does not lose any of its own magnetism in the process.
Such magnets are called artificial magnets. Iron is easier to
magnetize than steel, but it soon loses its magnetism, whereas steel
retains it; and the harder the steel the better it keeps its magnetism.
Artificial magnets, therefore, are made of specially hardened steel. In
this chapter we shall refer only to steel magnets, as they are much
more convenient to use than the lodestone, but it should be
remembered that both act in exactly the same way. We will suppose
that we have a pair of bar magnets, and a horse-shoe magnet, as
shown in Fig. 13.
If we roll a bar magnet amongst iron filings we find that the filings
remain clinging to it in two tufts, one at each end, and that few or
none adhere to the middle. These two points towards which the
filings are attracted are called the poles of the magnet. Each pole
attracts filings or ordinary needles, and one or two experiments will
show that the attraction becomes evident while the magnet is still
 some little distance away. If,
however, we test our magnet
with other substances, such
as wood, glass, paper, brass,
etc., we see that there is no
attraction whatever.
If one of our bar magnets
is suspended in a sort of
stirrup of copper wire attached
to a thread, it comes to rest in
a north and south direction,
and it will be noticed that the
end which points to the north
Fig. 13.—Horse-shoe and Bar Magnets, is marked, either with a letter
with Keepers. N or in some other way. This
is the north pole of the
magnet, and of course the other is the south pole. If now we take our
other magnet and bring its north pole near each pole of the
suspended magnet in turn, we find that it repels the other north pole,
but attracts the south pole. Similarly, if we present the south pole, it
repels the other south pole, but attracts the north pole. From these
experiments we learn that both poles of a magnet attract filings or
needles, and that in the case of two magnets unlike poles attract, but
similar poles repel one another. It will be noticed that this
corresponds closely with the results of our experiments in Chapter I.,
which showed that an electrified body attracts unelectrified bodies,
such as bits of paper or pith balls, and that unlike charges attract,
and similar charges repel each other. So far as we have seen,
however, a magnet attracts only iron or steel, whereas an electrified
body attracts any light substance. As a matter of fact, certain other
substances, such as nickel and cobalt, are attracted by a magnet,
but not so readily as iron and steel; while bismuth, antimony,
phosphorus, and a few other substances are feebly repelled.
The simplest method of magnetizing a piece of steel by means
of one of our bar magnets is the following: Lay the steel on the table,
and draw one pole of the magnet along it from end to end; lift the
magnet clear of the steel, and repeat the process several times,
always starting at the same end and treating each surface of the
steel in turn. A thin, flat bar of steel is the best for the purpose, but
steel knitting needles may be made in this way into useful
experimental magnets.
We have seen that a magnet has two poles or points where the
magnetism is strongest. It might be thought that by breaking a bar
magnet in the middle we should get two small bars each with a
single pole, but this is not the case, for the two poles are
inseparable. However many pieces we break a magnet into, each
piece is a perfect magnet having a north and south pole. Thus while
we can isolate a positive or a negative charge of electricity, we
cannot isolate north or south magnetism.
If we place the north pole of a bar magnet near to, but not
touching, a bar of soft iron, as in Plate II.a, we find that the latter
becomes a magnet, as shown by its ability to support filings; and that
as soon as the magnet is removed the filings drop off, showing that
the iron has lost its magnetism. If the iron is tested while the magnet
is in position it is found to have a south pole at the end nearer the
magnet, and a north pole at the end farther away; and if the magnet
is reversed, so as to bring its south pole nearer the iron, the poles of
the latter are found to reverse also. The iron has gained its new
properties by magnetic induction, and we cannot fail to notice the
similarity between this experiment and that in Fig. 2, Chapter II.,
which showed electro-static induction. A positively or a negatively
electrified body induces an opposite charge at the nearer end, and a
similar charge at the further end of a conductor, and a north or a
south pole of a magnet induces opposite polarity at the nearer end,
and a similar polarity at the further end of a bar of iron. In Chapter II.
we showed that the attraction of a pith ball by an electrified body was
due to induction, and from what we have just learnt about magnetic
induction the reader will have no difficulty in understanding why a
magnet attracts filings or needles.
 PLATE II.

(a) EXPERIMENT TO SHOW MAGNETIC INDUCTION.

(b) EXPERIMENT TO SHOW THE PRODUCTION OF MAGNETISM

BY AN ELECTRIC CURRENT.

Any one who experiments with magnets must be struck with the
distance at which one magnet can influence filings or another
magnet. If a layer of iron filings is spread on a sheet of paper, and a
magnet brought gradually nearer from above, the filings soon begin
to move about restlessly, and when the magnet comes close enough
they fly up to it as if pulled by invisible strings. A still more striking
experiment consists in spreading filings thinly over a sheet of
cardboard and moving a magnet to and fro underneath the sheet.
The result is most amusing. The filings seem to stand up on their
hind legs, and they march about like regiments of soldiers. Here
again invisible strings are suggested, and we might wonder whether
there really is anything of the kind. Yes, there is. To put the matter in
the simplest way, the magnet acts by means of strings or lines of
force, which emerge from it in definite directions, and in a most
interesting way we can see some of these lines of force actually at
work.
Place a magnet, or any arrangement of magnets, underneath a
sheet of glass, and sprinkle iron filings from a muslin bag thinly and
evenly all over the glass. Then tap the glass gently with a pencil, and
the filings at once arrange themselves in a most remarkable manner.
All the filings become magnetized by induction, and when the tap
sets them free for an instant from the friction of the glass they take
up definite positions under the influence of the force acting upon
them. In this way we get a map of the general direction of the
magnetic lines of force, which are our invisible strings.
Many different maps may be made in this way, but we have
space for only two. Plate III.a shows the lines of two opposite poles.
Notice how they appear to stream across from one pole to the other.
It is believed that there is a tension along the lines of force not unlike
that in stretched elastic bands, and if this is so it is easy to see from
the figure why opposite poles attract each other.
Plate III.b shows the lines of force of two similar poles. In this
case they do not stream from pole to pole, but turn aside as if
repelling one another, and from this figure we see why there is
repulsion between two similar poles. It can be shown, although in a
much less simple manner, that lines of electric force proceed from
electrified bodies, and in electric attraction and repulsion between
two charged bodies the lines of force take paths which closely
resemble those in our two figures. A space filled with lines of
magnetic force is called a magnetic field, and one filled with lines of
electric force is called an electric field.
A horse-shoe magnet, which is simply a bar of steel bent into the
shape of a horse-shoe before being magnetized, gradually loses its
magnetism if left with its poles unprotected, but this loss is prevented
if the poles are connected by a piece of soft iron. The same loss
occurs with a bar magnet, but as the two poles cannot be connected
in this way it is customary to keep two bar magnets side by side,
separated by a strip of wood; with opposite poles together and a
piece of soft iron across the ends. Such pieces of iron are called
keepers, and Fig. 13 shows a horse-shoe magnet and a pair of bar
magnets with their keepers. It may be remarked that a magnet never
should be knocked or allowed to fall, as rough usage of this kind
causes it to lose a considerable amount of its magnetism. A magnet
is injured also by allowing the keeper to slam on to it; but pulling the
keeper off vigorously does good instead of harm.
If a magnetized needle is suspended so that it is free to swing
either horizontally or vertically, it not only comes to rest in a north
and south direction, but also it tilts with its north-pointing end
downwards. If the needle were taken to a place south of the equator
it would still tilt, but the south-pointing end would be downwards. In
both cases the angle the needle makes with the horizontal is called
the magnetic dip.
 PLATE III.
(a) LINES OF MAGNETIC FORCE OF TWO OPPOSITE POLES.
 (b) LINES OF MAGNETIC FORCE OF TWO SIMILAR POLES.

It is evident that a suspended magnetized needle would not

invariably come to rest pointing north and south unless it were
compelled to do so, and a little consideration shows that the needle
acts as if it were under the influence of a magnet. Dr. Gilbert of
Colchester, of whom we spoke in Chapter I., gave a great deal of
time to the study of magnetic phenomena, and in 1600 he
announced what may be regarded as his greatest discovery: The
terrestrial globe itself is a great magnet. Here, then, is the
explanation of the behaviour of the magnetized needle. The Earth
itself is a great magnet, having its poles near to the geographical
north and south poles. But a question at once suggests itself: “Since
similar poles repel one another, how is it that the north pole of a
magnet turns towards the north magnetic pole of the earth?” This
apparent difficulty is caused by a confusion in terms. If the Earth’s
north magnetic pole really has north magnetism, then the north-
pointing end of a magnet must be a south pole; and on the other
hand, if the north-pointing end of a magnet has north magnetism,
then the Earth’s north magnetic pole must be really a south pole. It is
a troublesome matter to settle, but it is now customary to regard the
Earth’s north magnetic pole as possessing south magnetism, and
the south magnetic pole as possessing north magnetism. In this way
the north-pointing pole of a magnet may be looked upon as a true
north pole, and the south-pointing pole as a true south pole.
Magnetic dip also is seen to be a natural result of the Earth’s
magnetic influence. Here in England, for instance, the north
magnetic pole is much nearer than the south magnetic pole, and
consequently its influence is the stronger. Therefore a magnetized
needle, if free to do so, dips downwards towards the north. At any
place where the south magnetic pole is the nearer the direction of
the dip of course is reversed. If placed immediately over either
magnetic pole the needle would take up a vertical position, and at
the magnetic equator it would not dip at all, for the influence of the
two magnetic poles would be equal. A little study of Fig. 14, which
represents a dipping needle at different parts of the earth, will make
this matter clearer. N and S represent the Earth’s north and south
magnetic poles, and the arrow heads are the north poles of the
needles.
Since the Earth is a
magnet, we should expect it to
be able to induce magnetism
in a bar of iron, just as our
artificial magnets do, and we
can show that this is actually
the case. If a steel poker is
held pointing to and dipping
down towards the north, and
struck sharply with a piece of
wood while in this position, it
Fig. 14.—Diagram to illustrate Magnetic acquires magnetic properties
Dip. which can be tested by means
of a small compass needle. It
is an interesting fact that iron pillars and railings which have been
standing for a long time in one position are found to be magnetized.
In the northern hemisphere the bases of upright iron pillars are north
poles, and their upper ends south poles, and in the southern
hemisphere the polarity is reversed.
The most valuable application of the magnetic needle is in the
compass. An ordinary pocket compass for inland use consists simply
of a single magnetized needle pivoted so as to swing freely over a
card on which are marked the thirty-two points of the compass.
Ships’ compasses are much more elaborate. As a rule a compound
needle is used, consisting of eight slender strips of steel, magnetized
separately, and suspended side by side. A compound needle of this
kind is very much more reliable than a single needle. The material of
which the card is made depends upon whether the illumination for
night work is to come from above or below. If the latter, the card must
be transparent, and it is often made of thin sheet mica; but if the light
comes from above, the card is made of some opaque material, such
as very stout paper. The needle and card are contained in a sort of
bowl made of copper. In order to keep this bowl in a horizontal
position, however the ship may be pitching and rolling, it is supported
on gimbals, which are two concentric rings attached to horizontal
pivots, and moving in axes at right angles to one another. Further
stability may be obtained by weighting the bottom of the bowl with
lead. There are also liquid compasses, in which the card is floated
on the surface of dilute alcohol, and many modern ships’ compasses
have their movements regulated by a gyrostat.
The large amount of iron and steel used in the construction of
modern vessels has a considerable effect upon the compass needle,
and unless the compass is protected from this influence its readings
are liable to serious errors. The most satisfactory way of giving this
protection is by placing on each side of the compass a large globe of
soft iron, twelve or more inches in diameter.
On account of the fact that the magnetic poles of the Earth do
not coincide with the geographical north and south poles, a compass
needle seldom points exactly north and south, and the angle
between the magnetic meridian and the geographical meridian is
called the declination. The discovery that the declination varies in
different parts of the world was made by Columbus in 1492. For
purposes of navigation it is obviously very important that the
declination at all points of the Earth’s surface should be known, and
special magnetic maps are prepared in which all places having the
same declination are joined by a line.
It is an interesting fact that the Earth’s magnetism is subject to
variation. The declination and the dip slowly change through long
periods of years, and there are also slight annual and even daily
variations.
At one time magnets were credited with extraordinary effects
upon the human body. Small doses of lodestone, ground to powder
and mixed with water, were supposed to prolong life, and
Paracelsus, a famous alchemist and physician, born in Switzerland
in 1493, believed in the potency of lodestone ointment for wounds
made with steel weapons. Baron Reichenbach, 1788–1860, believed
that he had discovered the existence of a peculiar physical force
closely connected with magnetism, and he gave this force the name
Od. It was supposed to exist everywhere, and, like magnetism, to
have two poles, positive and negative; the left side of the body being
od-positive, and the right side od-negative. Certain individuals,
known as “sensitives,” were said to be specially open to its influence.
These people stated that they saw strange flickering lights at the
poles of magnets, and that they experienced peculiar sensations
when a magnet was passed over them. Some of them indeed were
unable to sleep on the left side, because the north pole of the Earth,
being od-negative, had a bad effect on the od-negative left side. The
pretended revelations of these “sensitives” created a great stir at the
time, but now nobody believes in the existence of Od.
Professor Tyndall was once invited to a seance, with the object
of convincing him of the genuineness of spiritualism. He sat beside a
young lady who claimed to have spiritualistic powers, and his record
of his conversation with her is amusing. The Reichenbach craze was
in full swing at the time, and Tyndall asked if the lady could see any
of the weird lights supposed to be visible to “sensitives.”

“Medium.—Oh yes; but I see the light around all bodies.

I.—Even in perfect darkness?
Medium.—Yes; I see luminous atmospheres round all
people. The atmosphere which surrounds Mr. R. C. would fill this
room with light.
I.—You are aware of the effects ascribed by Baron
Reichenbach to magnets?
Medium.—Yes; but a magnet makes me terribly ill.
I.—Am I to understand that, if this room were perfectly dark,
you could tell whether it contained a magnet, without being
informed of the fact?
Medium.—I should know of its presence on entering the
room.
I.—How?
Medium.—I should be rendered instantly ill.
 I.—How do you feel to-day?
Medium.—Particularly well; I have not been so well for
months.
I.—Then, may I ask you whether there is, at the present
moment, a magnet in my possession?
The young lady looked at me, blushed, and stammered, ‘No;
I am not en rapport with you.’
I sat at her right hand, and a left-hand pocket, within six
inches of her person, contained a magnet.”

Tyndall adds, “Our host here deprecated discussion as it

‘exhausted the medium.’”
 CHAPTER VII
THE PRODUCTION OF MAGNETISM BY
ELECTRICITY

Fig. 15.—Diagram to illustrate Magnetic effect of

an Electric Current.

In the previous chapter attention was drawn to the fact that there are
many close parallels between electric and magnetic phenomena,
and in this chapter it will be shown that magnetism can be produced
by electricity. In the year 1819 Professor Oersted, of the University of
Copenhagen, discovered that a freely swinging magnetized needle,
such as a compass needle, was deflected by a current of electricity
flowing through a wire. In Fig. 15, A, a magnetic needle is shown at
rest in its usual north and south direction, and over it is held a copper
wire, also pointing north and south. A current of electricity is now
sent through the wire, and the needle is at once deflected, Fig. 15, B.
The direction of the current is indicated by an arrow, and the
direction in which the needle has moved is shown by the two small
arrows. If the direction of the current is reversed, the needle will be
deflected in the opposite direction. From this experiment we see that
the current has brought magnetic influences into play, or in other
words has produced magnetism. If iron filings are brought near the
wire while the current is flowing, they are at once attracted and cling
to the wire, but as soon as the current is stopped they drop off. This
shows us that the wire itself becomes a magnet during the passage
of the current, and that it loses its magnetism when the current
ceases to flow.
Further, it can be shown that
two freely moving parallel wires
conveying currents attract or
repel one another according to
the direction of the currents. If
both currents are flowing in the
same direction the wires attract
one another, but if the currents
flow in opposite directions the
wires repel each other. Fig. 16
shows the direction of the lines
of force of a wire conveying a
current and passed through a
horizontal piece of cardboard
covered with a thin layer of iron Fig. 16.—Magnetic Field round wire
conveying a Current.
filings; and from this figure it is
evident that the passage of the
current produces what we may call magnetic whirls round the wire.
A spiral of insulated wire through which a current is flowing
shows all the properties of a magnet, and if free to move it comes to
rest pointing north and south. It is attracted or repelled by an
ordinary magnet according to the pole presented to it and the
direction of the current, and two such spirals show mutual attraction
and repulsion. A spiral of this kind is called a solenoid, and in
addition to the properties already mentioned it has the peculiar
power of drawing or sucking into its interior a rod of iron. Solenoids
have various practical applications, and in later chapters we shall
refer to them again.
If several turns of cotton-covered wire are wound round an iron
rod, the passing of a current through the wire makes the rod into a
magnet (Plate II.b), but the magnetism disappears as soon as the
current ceases to flow. A magnet made by the passage of an electric
current is called an electro-magnet, and it has all the properties of
the magnets mentioned in the previous chapter. A bar of steel may
be magnetized in the same way, but unlike the iron rod it retains its
magnetism after the current is interrupted. This provides us with a
means of magnetizing a piece of steel much more strongly than is
possible by rubbing with another magnet. Steel magnets, which
retain their magnetism, are called permanent magnets, as
distinguished from electro-magnets in which soft iron is used, so that
their magnetism lasts only as long as the current flows.
Electro-magnets play an extremely important part in the
harnessing of electricity; in fact they are used in one form or another
in almost every kind of electrical mechanism. In later chapters many
of these uses will be described, and here we will mention only the
use of electro-magnets for lifting purposes. In large engineering
works powerful electro-magnets, suspended from some sort of
travelling crane, are most useful for picking up and carrying about
heavy masses of metal, such as large castings. No time is lost in
attaching the casting to the crane; the magnet picks it up directly the
current is switched on, and lets it go the instant the current is
stopped. In any large steel works the amount of scrap material
produced is astonishingly great, hundreds of tons of turnings and
similar scrap accumulating in a very short time. A huge mound of
turnings is awkward to deal with by ordinary manual labour, but a
combination of electro-magnet and crane solves the difficulty
completely, lifting and loading the scrap into carts or trucks at
considerable speed, and without requiring much attention.
Some time ago a disastrous fire occurred at an engineering
works in the Midlands, the place being almost entirely burnt out.
Amongst the débris was, of course, a large amount of metal, and as
this was too valuable to be wasted, an electro-magnet was set to
work on the wreckage. The larger pieces of metal were picked up in
the ordinary way, and then the remaining rubbish was shovelled
against the face of the magnet, which held on to the metal but
dropped everything else, and in this way some tons of metal were
recovered.
The effect produced upon a magnetized needle by a current of
electricity affords a simple means of detecting the existence of such
a current. An ordinary pocket compass can be made to show the
presence of a moderate current, but for the detection of extremely
small currents a much more sensitive apparatus is employed. This is
called a galvanometer, and in its simplest form it consists essentially
of a delicately poised magnetic needle placed in the middle of a coil
of several turns of wire. The current thus passes many times round
the needle, and this has the effect of greatly increasing the deflection
of the needle, and hence the sensitiveness of the instrument.
Although such an arrangement is generally called a galvanometer, it
is really a galvanoscope, for it does not measure the current but only
shows its presence.
We have seen that electro-motive force is measured in volts, and
that the definition of a volt is that electro-motive force which will
cause a current of one ampere to flow through a conductor having a
resistance of one ohm. If we make a galvanometer with a long coil of
very thin wire having a high resistance, the amount of current that
will flow through it will be proportionate to the electro-motive force.
Such a galvanometer, fitted with a carefully graduated scale, in this
way will indicate the number of volts, and it is called a voltmeter. If
we have a galvanometer with a short coil of very thick wire, the
resistance put in the way of the current is so small that it may be left
out of account, and by means of a graduated scale the number of
amperes may be shown; such an instrument being called an
amperemeter, or ammeter.
For making exact measurements of electric currents the
instruments just described are not suitable, as they are not
sufficiently accurate; but their working shows the principle upon
which currents are measured. The actual instruments used in
electrical engineering and in scientific work are unfortunately too
complicated to be described here.
 CHAPTER VIII
THE INDUCTION COIL

The voltaic cell and the accumulator provide us with currents of

electricity of considerable volume, but at low pressure or voltage. For
many purposes, however, we require a comparatively small amount
of current at very high pressure, and in such cases we use an
apparatus called the induction coil. Just as an electrified body and a
magnet will induce electrification and magnetism respectively, so a
current of electricity will induce another current; and an induction coil
is simply an arrangement by which a current in one coil of wire is
made to induce a current in another coil.
Suppose we have two coils of wire placed close together, one
connected to a battery of voltaic cells, with some arrangement for
starting and stopping the current suddenly, and the other to a
galvanometer. As soon as we send the current through the first coil,
the needle of the galvanometer moves, showing that there is a
current flowing through the second coil; but the needle quickly
comes back to its original position, showing that this current was only
momentary. So long as we keep the current flowing through the first
coil the galvanometer shows no further movement, but as soon as
we stop the current the needle again shows by its movements that
another momentary current has been produced in the second coil.
This experiment shows us that a current induces another current
only at the instant it is started or stopped, or, as we say, at the
instant of making or breaking the circuit.
The coil through which we send the battery current is called the
“primary coil,” and the one in which a current is induced is called the
“secondary coil.” The two momentary currents in the secondary coil
do not both flow in the same direction. The current induced on
making the circuit flows in a direction opposite to that of the current
in the primary coil; and the current induced on breaking the circuit
flows in the same direction as that in the primary coil. If the two coils
are exactly alike, the induced current will have the same voltage as
the primary current; but if the secondary coil has twice as many turns
of wire as the primary coil, the induced current will have twice the
voltage of the primary current. In this way, by multiplying the turns of
wire in the secondary coil, we can go on increasing the voltage of the
induced current, and this is the principle upon which the induction
coil works.
We may now describe the construction of such a coil. The
primary coil is made of a few turns of thick copper wire carefully
insulated, and inside it is placed a core consisting of a bundle of
separate wires of soft iron. Upon this coil, but carefully insulated from
it, is wound the secondary coil, consisting of a great number of turns
of very fine wire. In large induction coils the secondary coil has
thousands of times as many turns as the primary, and the wire
forming it may be more than a hundred miles in length. The ends of
the secondary coil are brought to terminals so that they can be
connected up to any apparatus as desired.
In order that the induced currents
shall follow each other in quick
succession, some means of rapidly
making and breaking the circuit is
required, and this is provided by an
automatic contact breaker. It consists
of a small piece of soft iron, A, Fig.
17, fixed to a spring, B, having a
platinum tip at C. The adjustable
screw, D, also has a platinum tip, E.
Normally the two platinum tips are
just touching one another, and Fig. 17.—Diagram showing
matters are arranged so that their working of Contact-Breaker for
contact completes the circuit. When Induction Coil.
the apparatus is connected to a
suitable battery a current flows through the primary coil, and the iron