Course Description

Instructor: Mandy Swygart-Hobaugh

Research on the sex work industry, contemporary or historical, is fraught with challenges, as communities are apt to actively suppress such narratives. This talk is one of several mini-projects within the presenter’s larger “Historic Harlots of Old Atlanta” project, detailing the rise and fall of Atlanta’s late-1800s-to-early-1900s prostitution district located within what today is the heart of Georgia State University’s campus. An examination of Atlanta’s prostitution trade of this period offers a compelling story regarding the contemporaneous politics of race and sexuality in the US South. Using historic Census data, city directories, maps, newspapers, arrest records, and legal code, the presenter weaves a narrative of Black and mixed-race women’s experiences in Atlanta’s prostitution trade at this time contextualized in the broader sociohistorical considerations of social construction of race, Jim-Crow segregation and racial violence, intersectionality and social inequalities, and racialized sexual politics.

Bio: Dr. Mandy Swygart-Hobaugh leads the Georgia State University Library's Research Data Services Department. She hails from the Hoosier state (Indiana), earning her Ph.D. in Sociology from Purdue University, where she focused her doctoral dissertation research on anti-prostitution crusades in Progressive-Era Chicago.