"The study of Middle Eastern women, past and present, poses a number of methodological problems," wrote Nikki Keddie in "Problems in the Study of Middle Eastern Women." This is true for the study of all subaltern people, men and women alike, who live on society's margins--criminals, beggars, dervishes, magic-workers, the disabled, the mentally ill, sex-workers, and slaves. "The historian only has access to what her documents reveal," and most surviving medieval Islamic texts were written by and for "urban upper and middle class men." But Keddie also provides methodological insights that can help the social historian overcome these archival limits. She suggests that historians turn to "archeological records, chronicles, geographies, traveler's accounts, legal and theological writings, legal cases, prose, & poetry" ignoring conventional field boundaries and bringing together disparate disciplines in order to find those whose marginal social position is reflected by their marginalization in the archive. Taking seriously Keddie's critique and methodological insights, in this talk I bring together urban history and women's history in order to look at the urban fabric of sex-work in the medieval Islamic city--particularly Abbasid Baghdad. I use fatwas, medieval Arabic city chronicles (particularly Tarikh Baghdad and Mu'ajam al-Buldan), poetry, folktales, and belles lettres to think through the social production of space for the sex-worker in Baghdad from the 9th-11th centuries. I examine the following questions: What social spheres did the sex-worker occupy? Where do we locate sex-work in terms of the physical topography of the city? What place did sex-work have in the literary imagination of Baghdadi poets and belle lettrists? What were the economic implications of this practice—qui bono? Finally, I will make explicit the larger theoretical problems that accompany my chosen avenue of research: does an investigation of sex-work in the medieval Islamicate city merely add the brothel to the mosque, market, and Hammam? I argue that, when done with methodological rigor, taking subaltern space seriously as a site of scholarly investigation opens up archival heterotopias, disrupting old binaries and fueling new historiographical possibilities.