Questions of marginalization and the representations of ‘otherness' are increasingly important within geography. The author explores what such representations can tell us about the ‘centre’ rather than the ‘margins’. He does so by employing the tools of deconstruction to read a 19th century ‘historical geography’ of prostitution. This text, written by Horace St. John, forms a substantial part of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. Volume IV: Those Who Will Not Work (1861–62). Through an exploration of the textual strategies deployed within the text it is argued that it operates within a discursive space marked out by three sets of oppositions between ‘the same and the other’: forms of sexual relations, forms of state power, and forms of the self. The elaboration of these oppositions, and their inherent contradictions, suggests the conclusion that the ‘centre’ is made up of multiple power relations which are never able to achieve closure.
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