Sex work materials—directories like Harris’s List, court records, prints, and the sex-work plots that structure novels—record forms of sex and gender that are explicitly laboring, performed, and negotiated in public. They therefore expose that gender does not follow easily from sex, as the great fantasy of the binary gender model would have us believe. Instead, sex work, and the documents that record it, shows gender and sex as work: aesthetic, emotional, sexual, and social labor that can be taken up, scrutinized, and exchanged.

This database attempts to make that labor visible at scale and across genres. As of March 2026, the database contains TXT files for six versions of the Covent Garden Harris Lists as well as the detailed individual entries for the 1788 Harris List. Through XML/TEI mark up, I highlight language used to describe these sex workers, with a specific attention to femininity, sexuality, sex, gender, and the body. Following recent calls to think about gender, sex, and feminism without centering cisness, this database invites audiences to think critically about how cisgender womanhood became the hegemonic standard. Instead of assuming that transness and cisness represent an unstable/stable binary, the encoding work in this project seeks to make clear the constructed nature of all gender and sex.

By structuring disparate traces into searchable, citable, and revisable records, I offer an eighteenth-century sex work database that supports both close reading and, hopefully and eventually, computational analysis while keeping interpretive stakes in view. It treats sex work as a critical archive for historicizing gender—one that shows how “cis women” had to be made into cis women, and how that making depended on stigmatizing, exploiting, and yet continually relying on the sex worker’s labor. To view the dataset, please follow the link below.

ECSW Database Dataset