The Rise of a New Sexual Order

This chapter turns to the empirical analysis of sex work in Britain as a case that is especially significant for understanding capitalism’s sexual history. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the author considers how England’s political economic order was structured around distinctions between married and unmarried sex rather than those between economy and sexuality. Yet the marriage/whoredom dualism also provided the conditions of possibility for a new dichotomy between economy and sexuality to emerge in early modern England, for it enabled the sexual division of labor to be reconstructed in service of capitalist development. The chapter interrogates how this dichotomy was not only sexualized, gendered, and classed but also racialized due to the critical role that colonialism and imperialism played in capitalism’s rise and expansion.