Congratulations to Dr. Colleen Lucey for winning American Association of Teacher of Slavic and East European Languages Best First Book Prize for her book Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia.
"Colleen Lucey’s intriguing monograph offers new perspectives on Imperial Russia’s debates over prostitution and the cultural products that depicted the sexually transgressive women of St. Petersburg. Viewed within the context of economies of exchange, this book begins with state-regulated prostitution and charts various types of transactional sex until the first years of the twentieth century (1840s to 1905). Whether the fallen woman, the brothel worker, the demimondaine, the dowerless bride or the kept woman, Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia convincingly interrogates a variety of sexual commerce and sundry types of erotic behavior. St. Petersburg acts as the central location of both sexual fulfillment and deviant perversion; the epicenter of sexual licentiousness. Lucey takes this wonderful study beyond the walls of the brothel and the city streets to examine how prostitution was perceived to threaten the sanctity of marriage, disrupt the traditional roles of wife and mother, and prompt a distrust of female entrepreneurs. Drawing on both literary texts and visual sources, Love for Sale captures how the commodification of love was part of the larger disruption of Russian bourgeois society during a period of rapid modernization and Westernization."
AATSEEL website https://www.aatseel.org/about/prizes/recent-recipients/book-prize-winne…