Introduction he germ of this book was my doctoral dissertation, com- pleted in 1984. As plans for that thesis first began to take shape in 1975 — 76, I felt sure that I was embarking upon an r T important project. That palpable sense of having urgent work to do was fanned exclusively, however, by fires just igniting inside the academic speciality of art history. Those were the halcyon days of the conceptualization of a materialist history of art for a new generation — "the social history of art." Headquartered at the University of California at Los Angeles in the classes of Tim Clark, Carol Duncan, the late Arnold Rubin, and Karl Werckmeister, the daily discussions with teachers and fellow students were heady, empowering, and very confident. This book grew out of a dissertation first con- ceived in that warm and optimistic atmosphere, but it has been drawn to a belated conclusion under different conditions of urgency — political as well as professional. From the vantage point of southern California in the mid-1970s, later nineteenth-century Parisian worries over the morality and safety of prostitution seemed quintessentially Victorian and unfamiliar, if not thoroughly quaint to sexually free and antibiotically and contraceptively protected Americans like my friends and me. Ronald Reagan's presidency and the tragic AIDS epidemic make the story of Parisian fear and contempt toward the moral and venereal con- tagion of prostitution less foreign. It is instead ominously and painfully familiar. What sexually liberated young person of the 19708 could have predicted or imagined that in the 19805 an oppressive correlation would be drawn between the spread of a sexually transmitted disease, on the one hand, and (supposedly) deviant sexualities and life-styles, on the other? Relief in such a connection has become widespread and has served to heat up the aggressive scrutiny and suspi- cion of those on the fringes of our own social order — homosexual men, intravenous drug users, aliens, prostitutes, prisoners. In 1990, thanks to the witch-hunts conducted against certain re- cipients of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, artists were added to the list of the persecuted. As you read this book, you will be struck by similarities between then and now. Indeed, patterns of suspicion, scapegoating, and social policing have grown up in North Amer- ica that parallel in many ways the attitudes and institutions that arose from the nineteenth- century Parisian equation of prostitutes with deviant social and sexual practices and the spread of syphilis.1 xvii