Regulating Heterosocial Space: Sexual Politics in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

This essay proposes a reading of the vice commission reports of the early 20th century USA and Canada as exemplifying projects to regulate ‘heterosocial space’. ‘Heterosocial space’ refers to the shifting and changing sites where young women and men come into contact and where transactions with potentially sexual dimensions arise or which others define in sexualized terms. ‘Space’ not only has a spatial, but also a temporal dimension exemplified in deep anxieties about the rapid expansion of the cities and life on street‐corners after dark. The city was constituted as an arena of dispersed agencies of surveillance; a myriad of sites, including dance, halls, movie houses, ice cream parlors and skating rinks; department stores and city parks, which evaded attempts at systematic disciplinary supervision. Attention is paid to the closely textured interaction between official bodies and private agencies of moralization whose attempts at regulating heterosocial life involved an expansion of regulatory activities which were often ill‐coordinated and conflictual. In the struggle between respectability and unrespectability, traditional notions of respectability were persistently submerged and outflanked. The vice reports can also be read as metaphorical narratives, such that prostitution can be seen as embracing multiple referents shifting from concern with ‘commercial vice’ to ‘casual prostitution’, and encompassing ideas of disease, disorder and transgression.