The Words On Flicks Show: Courtesans

For the June 2025 Words On Flicks Show podcast, I created a video to talk about Courtesans on film, but only made it through two films! 

My idea was to discuss narratives that focus on the courtesan. Here I am a contemporary AfroCaribLatina woman who is fascinated – OK obsessed -- by stories about these white women from another era. Why? I don’t know. It could be that I’m always interested in how people, particularly women, survived amid societies and cultures that are very different from our own. How women have always been separated into saints and sinners, Madonnas and whores, and courtesans managed to walk a thin line between these labels.

 I was talking to a friend of mine not that long ago about the Lerner & Lowe musical Gigi, which he said he had never seen. I started with “It’s about a girl in the year 1900 in  Paris being trained as a courtesan –”  

“What’s a courtesan?” he asked. 

And I had to stop. Maybe everyone is not aware. 

So here's the WOF breakdown of Gigi and Camille. Enjoy!