Malaria Urbana

Abstract

I intend my dissertation Malaria Urbana to be a genealogical study of prostitution as a social and cultural construction and of the prostituted woman as a category. Using a constructivist perspective I aim to trace those forces, willpowers and conceptions that have made possible not only the phenomenon of prostitution itself, but also the classifications of it. By focusing on the production of knowledge and its connections on the expression of power, I would like to deconstruct established truths about sexuality, morality and given conditions for a dualistic understanding of sex. However, I also hope to elucidate the individual's possibilities for resistance. Through the representations of the woman who prostitutes herself and her own narratives, I thus aim to write a history of modernity. The background and framework for the dissertation is Stockholm, as the ever-changing urban arena where modernity ccontinually reinscribes itself and where power and resistance find both physical and reflected expressions.