The New Republic's

Abstract

Female prostitution in early modern Istanbul was transformed from a local moral concern into an issue of hygiene in the late Ottoman era, and under early Republican leadership prostitution became a matter concerning national progress. In the early twentieth century, prostitution was entwined with narratives on hygiene, abolitionism and women's rights to labor. Elites of the new Republic translated narratives on regulationism into particularly Republican idioms of race, sexuality and civilization. State policies on modernization employed prostitute's bodies as biological and symbolic capital in reproductions of the state as a modern polity. The urban spaces of Istanbul, as the major arena of regulated prostitution, represented contested sites where the state attempted to render ethics of gender and Turkish space at local and international levels. Rationalizing processes of authoritarian state power thus reproduced prostitution as a legal category through which conceptualizations of virtue, progress and modernity were legislated.