This volume brings together international scholars to engage in the question of how film has represented a figure that for many is simply labelled prostitute. The prostitute is one of the most enduring female figures. She has global historical resonance and stories, images and narratives surrounding her, and her experiences, circulate transnationally. As this book will explore, the broad term prostitute can cover a variety of experiences and representations that are both repressive and also have the potential to empower women and disrupt cultural expectations. The contributors aim to consider how frequently 19th-century narratives of female prostitutionhence the label fallen womenare still recycled in contemporary visual contexts, and to understand how widespread, and in what contexts, the destigmatization of female sex work is underway on screen.

Danielle Hipkins is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. She has written on gender representation in post-war Italian cinema, and has recently publishedItalys Other Women: Gender and Prostitution in Italian Cinema, 1940-1965 (2016). She is currently working on girlhood and contemporary European cinema, and was a Co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Italian Cinema Audiences project, a study of memories of cinema-going in Italy of the 1950s with the Universities of Bristol and Oxford Brookes (2013-2016).

1. Danielle Hipkins and Kate Taylor-Jones, Introduction.- 2.  Jane Arthurs, Distant Suffering, Proper Distance: Cosmopolitan ethics in the film portrayal of trafficked women.- 3. Alice Bardan, Through Hardships To the Stars: The Moldovan prostitute in Nicolae MargineanusSchimb Valutar.- 4. Adam Bingham, Duality and Ambiguity: Prostitution, performance and the vagaries of modernity in Japanese cinema.- 5. Molly Hyo Kim, The Idealization of Prostitutes: Aesthetics and discourse of South Korean hostess films (1974-1982).- 6. Saheed Aderinto, Inside the House of Ill Fame: Brothel prostitution, feminization of poverty, and Lagos life in NollywoodsThe Prostitute.- 7. Niamh Thornton, Where Cabaret Meets Revolution: The prostitute at war in Mexican film.- 8. Teresa Ludden, Distorted Antigones: Dialectics and prostitution inLola andShirins Hochzeit.- 9. Aparna Sharma,Becomingand Contradiction in the Muslim Courtesan The case ofPakeezah.- 10. Danielle Hipkins and Katharine Mitchell,Le traviate: Suffering heroines and the Italian state between the 19th and 21st centuries.- 11. Katie N. Johnson, Consumptive Chic: The postfeminist recycling of Camille in Baz LuhrmannsMoulin Rouge!.- 12. Fiona Handyside, Postcards and/of Prostitutes: Circulating the city in Atom EgoyansChloe.- 13. Kate Taylor-Jones, Handbags, Sex and Death: Prostitution in contemporary East Asian cinematic urban space.