This paper explores the framing of prostitution in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and World War I (1914-1918) through an analysis of the word âşüfte. Following the Balkan Wars and World War I, the increasing visibility of sex workers in social life alarmed the Ottoman government. In 1916, the Ministries of War and Interior resettled vast numbers of female sex workers in Konya, a gradually industrializing yet secluded town in central Anatolia, to “protect public morals and rehabilitate sex workers.” The term that was used in the state records to define these women from different age groups and ethnoreligious backgrounds was the word âşüfte. Despite being used interchangeably with the Turkish word for prostitute, fahişe, the term âşüfte translates into English as "woman addicted to love; horny and mentally unstable; promiscuous." The direction that the wartime policy of resettling sex workers in secluded towns such as Konya by labeling them as âşüftes was a deliberate choice. In the elite and state discourses at the time, prostitution was framed as an act purportedly performed by women and girls with moral deficiencies. For instance, women whose outfits did not meet social norms, those engaging with any form of an extramarital relationship, including same-sex intimacies, started to be labeled as âşüfte and resettled in Konya as a part of the government's wartime rehabilitation policies. Against the background mentioned above, this article analyzes sex work as a liminal category incorporating women who practiced sex work as a profession and those who experienced their sexualities in a non-conventional and non-heteronormative forms. Deploying queer and historical methodologies, I argue that this particular perception around the sex work blurred the lines between a sex worker and “ordinary women” and destabilized the social categories such as age, sex, gender, and ethnicity defining the Ottoman woman. This liminality in defining sex work created an ideological climate that informed âşüfte women's experiences, vulnerabilities, exposure to sexual violence, and their social networks in the most chaotic episode in the Ottoman Empire. Using state documents, police registers, petitions, and newspapers, this paper explores sex workers as a liminal social category through discourses around âşüfte to explore these women’s experiences with the society surrounding them and the sociopolitical context shaping their interactions, subjecthood, and cultural representations.