Brazil has made international headlines for the government’s inept and irresponsible response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, sex worker activists have once again taken on an essential role in responding to the pandemic amidst State absences and abuses. Drawing on the theoretical framework of necropolitics, we trace the gendered, sexualized, and racialized dimensions of how prostitution and work have been (un)governed in Brazil and how this has framed sex worker activists’ responses to COVID-19. As a group of scholars and sex worker activists based in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, we specifically explore the idea of sex workers as “essential workers”, but also of sex work as, essentially, work, demonstrating complicities, differences, and congruencies in how sex workers see what they do and who their allies in the context of the 21st century’s greatest health crisis to date.

While there is a growing literature focusing on clients in sexual economies, much of this relies on heteronormative and/or unproven assumptions about masculinity and men’s motivations for purchasing sex. This collaborative ethnographic research takes a comparative approach by studying performances of masculinity in heterosexual and homosexual commercial sex venues in Rio de Janeiro. The authors argue that masculine performances not only are about homosocial male bonding between clients but also are aspirational performances in which actors must work within and across particular class- and race-based structures to jockey for position within the local hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity. They conclude that the connection between masculinity in heterosexual and homosexual venues is fractal, refractive, and coconstituitive. That is, even though the performances of masculinity look different in outward appearance, they actually operate within a shared ideology of gender and are coconstructed through actors’ own pretensions toward class distinction.

In many feminist and sociological accounts of sex work, the concept of exploitation resides on the subjacent notion of objectification, codified in the omnipresent belief that the sex worker sells their body. Sexual objectification supposedly indicates the peculiar and particular effect that sex work is supposed to have on the bodies of human beings involved in this form of toil, being one of the keystones for the belief that sex work is inherently exploitative. In the present article, we intend to investigate the canonical concept of objectification and its (ab)uses in the light of a comparative ethnographic study of sex work and other jobs in the service economy in the cities of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and New Orleans (USA). Our argument is that the concept of sexual objectification has its roots in pre-capitalist morality, encoded in Kantian philosophy, that is hardly applicable to real life in the 21st century. A more general and intersectional understanding of objectification and agency in the broader field of engendered labor relations is necessary for us to understand why people choose to engage in sex work, why laws which see sex work as synonymous with exploitation and slavery must be rethought, and how they might be rethought.

This article unites the co-authors’ years of empirical research with women in policed, stigmatized, and low-autonomy sex industry sectors in Brazil, China, Italy, and the United States to identify six prevalent forms of exclusion: economic, intersectional, health, safety, public vilification, and policing. We analyze the distinct manifestations of these exclusionary forces in all four sites to introduce criminal creep as theoretical shorthand for the global seepage of ideological, structural, and interpersonal exclusionary forces into social life, professional practice, and socio-legal procedures that marginalize women in the sex industry as victim-criminals in need of rehabilitation. Uniting and building upon literature on feminist engagement with and critiques of citizenship, conceptual uses of “creep”, carcerality and crimmigration, and critical anti-trafficking studies, we argue that criminal creep facilitates a perfect storm of exclusion that promotes sex workers’ de facto and de jure exclusion from citizenship through a set of wide-ranging set of harms. Furthermore, we identify “control creep” as a factor limiting - even radically - the political organization of and social scientific production regarding the vulnerable populations anti-sex work and anti-trafficking laws are supposedly designed to aid.

Abstract Brazil’s sex workers’ movement has long challenged hegemonic narratives about the sale of sex. In recent years, anti-prostitution sentiment has grown in Brazil, threatening sex workers’ rights. Simultaneously, the death of activist Gabriela Leite has lead to a renewal of leadership and a reformulation of theoretical approaches in the movement. In this context, putafeminismo is becoming established as an intersectional approach to race, class, and gender rooted in local historical contexts. The present article, based on 12 years of ethnography in sex workers’ movements, presents putafeminista understandings of sex, gender, race/color, and work. Inspired by Leite’s recovery of whore/puta as a self-identifier for sex workers, and rooted in feminist anthropology and historiography, putafeministas seek to resituate the term as a broader/deeper category. Putafeministas recover puta as a term applied to women working outside the family, unprotected from sexual violence. Looking at Brazilian history, they situate the sale of sex as a practical inevitability for a racially-identified female working population, whose horizons of possibility were bounded by cheap labor, marriage and prostitution. Finally, putafeministas use puta as a bridge to working class experiences more generally, questioning pornophobic understandings of ‘sexual slavery’ in a historical context in which women were often actual chattel.

The present article draws upon ethnographic research undertaken in the principal sexual commercial zones of the city of Rio de Janeiro and in the institutions and agencies responsible for combating sexual exploitation in Rio during the 2012-2014 period, as well as the analysis of media stories, to explain how and why carioca authorities have not been able to discover and repress the sex crimes they claim exist on a massive scale. We seek to show what effects the moral panic over child sexual exploitation during the 2015 World Cup has had in transforming security in Rio de Janeiro.

“O Trafico de Mulheres” e provavelmente a primeira versao em lingua portuguesa de um dos ensaios mais interessantes da mulher que certamente e a figura mais emblematica do anarquismo norte-americano: Emma Goldman. Pouco conhecida no Brasil, Goldman e uma das iconoclastas politicas mais duradouras do seculo passado. Suas criticas vivas tanto do nacionalismo e do capitalismo, quanto das utopias propostas por reformadores e revolucionarios, parecem ganhar em relevância enquanto nos afastamos do seculo que Hobsbawm (1994) chama de “A Era dos Extremos”. Esse e particularmente o caso de “O Trafico de Mulheres” que, embora escrito em 1910, continua a apresentar uma critica relevante para a questao do “trafico de pessoas” nas primeiras decadas do seculo XXI.

Analysis of sexual tourism has generally concentrated on subjugation of women as devalued objects of exchange shuffling between so-called developing and developed worlds. Basing our analysis on ethnographic fieldwork among tourists and prostitutes in Copacabana neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, we seek to demonstrate how women's ability to create and manipulate symbols enables international movement of both Brazilian women and foreign men. This article recovers agency of Brazilian women involved in tourism-related sex work, situating them as neither victims nor victimizers, but as active participants in creation and management of both affective and commercial sexual relationships. Discourses2 Regarding Sexual Tourism In discourses produced by Brazilian government, one commonly sees sexual tourist3 used as if it were synonymous with pedophile or linked to export of Brazilians for forced sexual labor overseas4. This hegemonic definition of phenomenon is routinely used by political agents in Brazil to justify new laws and social interventions5. Sexual tourism, however, is not defined by Brazilian law. In legal terms, a sexual tourist is any foreigner involved in sex crimes: to wit, production of pornography, seduction and corruption of minors, trafficking of women6, or violent attacks upon propriety.7 It's important to point out in this context that contracting an adult, self-employed prostitute for provision of sexual services is not a crime in Brazil and thus should not be considered sexual tourism in this sense. When we turn to realm of public opinion, however, we find a wider understanding of phenomenon. In this view of sexual tourism, term describes behavior of foreign tourists who seek out native sexual partners and it is applied whether or not these couplings are commercial or affective in nature. In public, commonsensical view of sexual tourism, legality is less important than an underlying moral code which stipulates that foreigners should not engage in promiscuous sexual contact with Brazilians, especially when this involves an exchange of money for sex. A final vision of sexual tourism has been offered up by World Tourism Organization (WTO) and is making itself felt in Brazilian policy-making circles. According to WTO, sexual tourism is organized travel using structures of tourism industry for principal purpose of facilitating sexual conduct between tourists and natives (Viera de Carvalho, 2005). Note that this definition of phenomenon ignores legal status of such activities, concentrating instead upon practices and objectives of tourists. The WTO's definition also presumes that there is a clearcut division between normal tourists (who supposedly travel without thinking of sex) and sexual tourists. As we shall see, such a division is problematic in Rio de Janeiro. The discontinuities between these definitions of sexual tourism are obvious, though one factor unites them all: a belief that problem is centered upon sexual behavior of gringos8. The term sexual tourist is perhaps best understood as an accusation which is deployable against any foreigner in Brazil. The logical point to begin a discussion of sexual tourism, then, is to ask who is almost always accused of it. Sex in City We initially encountered term sexual tourist while researching anglophonic immigrant population of Rio de Janeiro (Blanchette, 2002). We discovered that there was place in city which our informants (long-term gringo residents of Rio) claimed to avoid: Help Discotheque9 in Copacabana, widely labeled the most gringo nightspot in town. Universally, gringo residents of Rio evidenced disgust of disco, which they described as overrun by sexual tourists. As one informant put it, I'm not like those pathetic guys who should be banned from entering Brazil. They make me sick and ashamed and because of them, I don't go to Copacabana. …

O crescente pânico moral acerca do "tráfico de seres humanos" tem criado uma situação na qual os agentes que tratam do tema, ao tentar oferecer informações concretas sobre o fenômeno, muitas vezes, transformam termos de denúncias em categorias analíticas. Esse artigo analisa a produção recente nessa área, buscando recuperar e problematizar as fontes originais acerca do "tráfico", no sentido de evidenciar como dados contraditórios são transformados em "fatos" no processo de produção de saberes, no qual a militância política pode se confundir com a pesquisa científica.

A análise do turismo sexual e o tráfico das mulheres tem concentrada na subjugação das mulheres, situando-as como passivas - objetos de câmbio que são "traficados" entre universos nacionais subordinados e dominantes. Todavia, como Lévi-Strauss advém, as mulheres também são geradoras de símbolos. Baseando nossa análise em trabalhos de campo feito entre turistas sexuais e prostitutas em Copacabana, buscamos demonstrar como a capacidade feminina de criar e manipular símbolos potencializa o movimento internacional de brasileiras e de estrangeiros.