Selling Songs and Smiles explores female sexual entertainment (songs and smiles) during Japan's Heian and Kamakura periods, examining the gradual construction of a transgressive identity (prostitute) for women engaged in the sex trade. Over some four hundred years, the character and public image of sexual entertainment was shaped by growing restrictions on female sexual activity and increasingly negative views of the female body--themselves the result of socioeconomic change in society at large. Although it is possible to paint a picture of the general decline in the status of women in the...