The Winner of the 2004 Women in German Dissertation Award is Jill Suzanne Smith, presently Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages, Union College for her dissertation: Reading the Red Light: Literary, Cultural, and Social Discourses on Prostitution in Berlin, 1880 – 1933.
Jill Susanne Smith’s dissertation offers an innovative, original approach to the German discourse on prostitution. The scope of authors, media and sources consulted is as impressive as the carefully crafted, yet radical argument. This study challenges traditional as well as feminist positions on prostitution thus advancing the scholarship and our understanding of a highly ambivalent, yet crucial figure of modernity. In a tour the force, Smith offers the reader a sophisticated, well-written, and tightly-argued analysis of the representation of female prostitution at the turn-of-the-century and the Weimar Republic. Her dissertation is an excellent illustration of feminist scholarship that takes a traditional configuration of femininity and reads it anew. In that process, she invigorates our understanding of the history of Germany, our theoretical understanding of commodity, pleasure, desire, and agency, our conception of German culture, and our feminist casting of our own history. Smith’s work is based on sophisticated research, subtle textual close readings, equal attention to diverse discourses, and a strong and clear voice that is not afraid to veer off trodden paths in German Studies. She not only reads the figure of the prostitute against the grain but several canonical theoretical, literary, and political texts, making them productive in a critical feminist framework.