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The Whore and the Holy One: Contemporary Sacred Prostitution and Transformative Consciousness
Author(s) -
Gilmore Lee
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
anthropology of consciousness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 14
eISSN - 1556-3537
pISSN - 1053-4202
DOI - 10.1525/ac.1998.9.4.1
Subject(s) - spirituality , mythology , consciousness , ethnography , gender studies , rite , transformative learning , sociology , movement (music) , sex workers , empowerment , sex work , aesthetics , religious studies , art , anthropology , psychology , law , political science , philosophy , literature , pedagogy , population , alternative medicine , family medicine , pathology , research methodology , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , medicine , demography , neuroscience
This text explores the intersection of the women's spirituality and sex worker's rights movements in which a growing body of sex workers describe and experience themselves as "sacred whores." In this cultural encounter, the women's spirituality movement's vision of sexual empowerment has merged with the sex workers rights movement's recontextualization of prostitution and other forms of sex work as valid, fulfilling, and skilled labor. These women are establishing themselves as heirs to a mythology of ancient religious practices in which priestesses made love to men within temples as a holy rite and a spiritual service. My exploration of this movement is grounded in an inquiry into the history and mythology of the "temple prostitutes" of the ancient Near East, and unfolds into an ethnography of the currently emerging sacred whore movement.