Classy Whores: Intersections of Class, Gender, and Sex Work in the Ideologies of the Putafeminista Movement in Brazil

Abstract

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.