Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore

Abstract

Gabriela Leite was the founder of Brazil’s sex-worker movement and its most notable figure until her death in 2013. Her memoir, published in 2008 in Portuguese, is punctuated throughout its nearly two hundred pages by a subversive parody of the Ten Commandments, which she repurposes to provide advice to prostitutes sourced from her arsenal of professional wisdom. Rather than divulging intimate details about her relations with clients, Leite focuses instead on situating her prostitute colleagues and herself within the complex fabric of Brazilian politics, culture, and society. In simple, straightforward prose, Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore identifies sex workers as active participants in their country’s political and cultural opening in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, a process that resulted in an overhaul of its fundamental legal order and a reconfiguration of civil society after several decades of military rule. With her characteristic irreverent humor and occasional profanity, Leite narrates her adolescence and political awakening against a backdrop of massive social upheaval as Brazil grappled with the legacies not only of dictatorship and state violence, but also of slavery, patriarchy, and social conservatism and the burgeoning HIV/AIDS crisis. The book also tells the story of a deeply unorthodox life trajectory and, in doing so, paints a rich portrait of marginal spaces and people in São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, and Rio de Janeiro, a bohemian underworld shunned by middle-class society but cherished and lovingly portrayed by Leite. Finally, it articulates a grassroots Latin American feminism that is both sex-positive and class-conscious.