Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged
artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male
patrons throughout history and around the world. Of a different
world than common prostitutes, courtesans deal in artistic and
intellectual pleasures in ways that are wholly interdependent with
their commerce in sex. In pre-colonial India, courtesans cultivated
a wide variety of artistic skills, including magic, music, and
chemistry. In Ming dynasty China, courtesans communicated with
their patrons through poetry and music. Yet because these cultural
practices have existed primarily outside our present-day canons of
art and have often occurred through oral transmission, courtesans'
arts have vanished almost without trace. The Courtesan's Arts
delves into this hidden legacy, unveiling the artistic practices
and cultural production of courtesan cultures with a sideways
glance at the partly-related geisha. Balancing theoretical and
empirical research, this interdisciplinary collection is the first
of its kind to explore courtesan cultures through diverse case
studies--the Edo period and modern Japan, 20th-century Korea, Ming
dynasty China, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past
and present. Each essay puts forward new perspectives on how the
arts have figured in the courtesan's survival or demise. Though
performative and often flamboyant, courtesans have been enigmatic
and elusive to their beholders--including scholars. They have
shaped cultures through art, yet their arts, often intangible, have
all but faded from view. Often courtesans have hovered in the
crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money,
courts and cities, feminine allure and masculine power, as
substitutes for wives but keepers of culture. Reproductively
irrelevant, they have tended to be ambiguous figures, thriving on
social distinction while operating outside official familial
relations. They have symbolized desirability and sophistication yet
often been reviled as decadent. The Courtesan's Arts shows that
while courtesans cultures have appeared regularly in various times
and places, they are universal neither as a phenomenon nor as a
type. To the contrary, when they do crop up, wide variations exist.
What binds together courtesans and their arts in the present-day
post-industrialized world of global services and commodities is
their fragility. Once vital to cultures of leisure and pleasure,
courtesans are now largely forgotten, transformed into national
icons or historical curiosities, or reduced to prostitution.
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