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During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman."Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women's financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith's work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

Prostitution --- History --- Female prostitution --- Hustling (Prostitution) --- Prostitution, Female --- Sex trade (Prostitution) --- Sex work (Prostitution) --- Street prostitution --- Trade, Sex (Prostitution) --- White slave traffic --- White slavery --- Work, Sex (Prostitution) --- Sex-oriented businesses --- Brothels --- Pimps --- Procuresses --- Red-light districts --- Sex crimes --- Sex work --- European history

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What is the status of women's writing in German today, in an era when feminism has thoroughly problematized binary conceptions of sex and gender? Drawing on gender and queer theory, including the work of Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, the essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which "women's literature" has been conceived. With an eye to the literary and feminist legacy of authors such as Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Bachmann, contributors treat the works of many of contemporary Germany's most significant literary voices, including Hatice Akyün, Sibylle Berg, Thea Dorn, Tanja Dückers, Karen Duve, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Katharina Hacker, Charlotte Roche, Julia Schoch, and Antje Rávic Strubel -- authors who, through their writing or their role in the media, engage with questions of what it means to be a woman writer in twenty-first-century Germany. Contributors: Hester Baer, Necia Chronister, Helga Druxes, Valerie Heffernan, Alexandra Merley Hill, Lindsey Lawton, Sheridan Marshall, Beret Norman, Mihaela Petrescu, Jill Suzanne Smith, Carrie Smith-Prei, Maria Stehle, Katherine Stone. Hester Baer is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Maryland. Alexandra Merley Hill is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Portland.

German literature --- Women authors --- History and criticism --- 21st-century Germany. --- Christa Wolf. --- Contemporary German Authors. --- Female Authorship. --- Female Voices. --- Feminism. --- Gender Identity. --- Gender Theory. --- German Literary Landscape. --- German Literature. --- German Women's Writing in the Twenty-First Century. --- German Women's Writing. --- German women's literature. --- Ingeborg Bachmann. --- Literary Analysis. --- Literary Criticism. --- Literature and Gender. --- Women Writers. --- Women's Literature. --- contemporary Germany. --- female authorship. --- feminism. --- gender and queer theory. --- social justice. --- women writers.