Invisible Bodies: Civilising Mission, Sexuality, and Prostitution in fin de siècle Russian Turkestan.

This paper examines the representation of indigenous bodies, namely those of women and young men, in observations made by the Russian imperial elite in Central Asia during the late nineteenth century. Civilising agenda, a central framework used by these observers, relied on interweaving empire-building efforts with colonised bodies. While indigenous women were fundamental in these narratives, they remained largely invisible to the male colonial enterprise, which, in turn, sought to make them visible through medicine and commercial sex. The latter combined the elite's anxieties over native sexualities with the desire to control and gain a glimpse of women's bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]