Chapter Eight - Abstract

Chapter 8: “Dark and Delayed Labor: Sex Work and Racialized Time in Eighteenth-Century London”

Nour Afara

Abstract: This chapter explores both volumes of The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, as Supposed to Be Related by Themselves; these volumes are a collection of fictional stories about Magdalen inmates framed as a nonfictional series of memories offered by the imprisoned. My analysis takes up the text's representation of racialized sex workers, in particular as subjects who speak their experiences but are nonetheless portrayed as resistant to the temporalized labor values of sobriety, frugality, thrift, and hard work. They are, in other words, rendered idle. I magnify these caricatures to address how formations of race, gender, and sexuality cohere around the volumes’ racialized sex workers and the various temporalities they occupy.