Selling Songs And Smiles
Subtitle: The Sex Trade in Heian And Kamakura Japan
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: March 28, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9780824830687
Subjects: Asian / Middle Eastern history: c 500 to c 1500; Social history; Women's studies; Psychology; Human Sexuality; History; History: World; To 1500; Asia - Japan; Japan; Prostitution
Description: "Selling Songs and Smiles explores female sexual entertainment ("songs and smiles") during Japan's Heian and Kamakura periods, examining the gradual construction of a transgressive identity ("prostitute") for women engaged in the sex trade. Over some four hundred years, the character and public image of sexual entertainment was shaped by growing restrictions on female sexual activity and increasingly negative views of the female body--themselves the result of socioeconomic change in society at large. Although it is possible to paint a picture of the general decline in the status of women in the sex trade, there were also ambiguities in how they were regarded by society in the very oldest extant references to them in historical sources. Using essays, diaries, legal documents, stories, and illustrated works, this original and distinctive study unravels social attitudes toward female sexual entertainers and examines changes in their trade and the treatment they received at the hands of the court, the bakufu, and religious institutions."--Book cover.