Anna Drury | Lancaster University
In her work Putafeminista (2018), Monique Prada reflects on where feminism fits into sex worker activists’ struggle in Brazil, and vice versa. She recalls a particular moment, when Célia Gomes, one of the founders of CUTS (the Central Única de Trabalhadoras e Trabalhadores Sexuais/ United Centre of Sex Workers), sent Prada some sampler artwork for a t-shirt, which Gomes had created with Diana Soares, president of ASPRORN (the Associação de Prostitutas e Congêneres do Rio Grande do Norte/ Association of Prostitutes of Rio Grande do Norte). Featured was an image of a wardrobe, out of which came the words: ‘Tirando o nosso feminismo do armário’/ ‘Bringing our feminism out of the wardrobe’. The phrase, chosen by them together with other activists from APROSPI (the Associação de Prostitutas do Piauí/ Association of Prostitutes of Piauí) and the Articulação Norte-Nordeste de Prostitutas/ North-Northeast Prostitutes’ Organisation, spoke of a right: the right of sex workers to be both putas, and feministas.
As a word, puta, with its most recognised translation being the English word ‘whore’, is commonly used as a derogatory term to shame and stigmatise subjects, especially feminine subjects. Juana María Rodríguez notes how puta can stand in for ‘sex worker’, ‘prostitute’, ‘hooker’, ‘slut’, or ‘bitch’, and sometimes it is used to simply mean ‘woman’. In both Spanish and Portuguese, the quotidian uses of puta occupy a complex space. Puta can be deployed as an intensifier which, depending on context, can have a positive or a negative connotation (for example, ‘Puta que pariu!’/ ‘Holy shit!’, or ‘Filho da puta!’/ ‘Son of a bitch!’). Despite the derogatory associations with puta, a number of sex worker activists across Latin America have taken up the term in an effort to reappropriate the word. As with the resignification of the word ‘queer’, these sex worker activists have recovered puta as a ‘symbol of their refusal to be shamed and as a way to claim a politicized identity’. Considering the term putafeminista, then, we see how two feminine subject positions (‘whore’ and ‘feminist’) once seen as oppositional to one another have been united.
During a recent research trip, I came across a simple illustration as I was going through documents relating to the CNDM (the Conselho Nacional dos Direitos da Mulher/ National Council for Women’s Rights) in the National Archive in Rio de Janeiro. Featured on the front cover of a pamphlet created by the CNDM is a naked woman emerging from a closet. Such imagery is emblematic of the artwork discussed by Prada, with the simple but effective messaging that the issue of women’s rights in Brazil is being brought into the light. Here, we can see how the image of the closet, and everything that it connotes, has intersected with the advocacy efforts of some activists and feminists in Brazil.
What is ‘the closet’? The architect Aaron Betsky describes the closet as:
‘the ultimate interior, the place where interiority starts. It is a dark space at the heart of the home. It is not a place where you live, but where you store the clothes in which you appear. It contains the building blocks for your social constructions, such as your clothes. The closet also contains the disused pieces of your past. It is a place to hide, to create worlds for yourself out of the past and for the future in a secure environment… the closet contains both the secret recesses of the soul and the masks that you wear’.
‘Closet’, as an adjective, suggests secrecy; to not be open about something concerning oneself which, if revealed, could cause problems or embarrassment. More specifically, to be ‘in the closet’ is to conceal one’s sexuality or any other aspect of one’s sexual or gender identity. Geographer Michael P. Brown discusses how between 1968 and 1972, the closet came to signify the concealment and erasure of LGBT people, specifically in the USA. By 1970, the slogan ‘Come out!’ had become a rallying cry for the emerging gay liberation struggle in New York City. Crucially, the closet signifies the ways that power and knowledge work. Knowledge is, necessarily, constructed through a differential exertion of power that foregrounds some narratives and silences others. Here, such power can be recognised as homophobia, and/or heteronormativity, which prescribes heterosexuality as the norm. In a world centred on the knowledges of the white, heterosexual male, LGBT people are rendered the ‘Other’. The closet thus speaks to the anger and the pain of LGBT people – of their lying, hiding, being silenced, and going unseen.
How, then, has the closet intersected with the advocacy efforts of activists and feminists in Brazil? At the beginning of the period that is now known as the ‘political opening’ in Brazil, during which time the military authoritarian regime that took power in 1964 began a slow, gradual, and top-down process of liberalisation, Cláudia Pons Cardoso notes how contemporary women’s movements took shape and spread throughout the country. Feminist groups in Brazil were focused on specific issues related to opposition against the military regime, struggles for democratisation and amnesty, the fight against patriarchy, and confronting violence against women.
The CNDM was formally created in August 1985, with the express purpose of promoting policies that would eliminate discriminatory practices affecting all women. Ruth Escobar, the first president of the CNDM, reflected on how ‘Dez anos de organização de grupos feministas forçaram o Estado a reconhecer a opressão de que são vítimas as mulheres em nossa sociedade’/ ‘Ten years of organising by feminist groups have forced the state to recognise the oppression suffered by women in our society’. Some of the key issues highlighted in the above pamphlet included violence against women (in all of its different forms – ideological, physical, sexual, economic, and psychological), the implementation of crèches (guaranteeing the right to day care for the children of all workers), and campaigning for women’s participation in the Constituent Assembly (increasing women’s political participation). Other issues of concern for the CNDM, which remained consistent throughout the 1980s, included work, education, and health.
Crucially, this pamphlet was one of the first put out by the CNDM. Featuring this naked woman, emerging from a closet, then, suggests how the CNDM was setting out to bring the different faces of oppression impacting women’s lives out of obscurity and into the light. Utilising this image, as a way of exposing to the wider public the dictates of patriarchy (something which, in their view, had previously been concealed), shows how the female activists and feminists involved in the CNDM perceived themselves to be bringing their knowledges, and their feminist consciousnesses, out of the closet, after years of repression at an institutional level.
But precisely whose feminist subjectivities were the CNDM bringing out of the closet? In 1985, the CNDM’s Conselho Deliberativo/ Deliberative Council consisted of its president Escobar, 16 integrantes/ members – including Benedita da Silva, Hildete Pereira de Melo, Jacqueline Pitanguy, and Lélia Gonzalez – and 3 suplentes/ alternates. Their roles were to deliberate the CNDM’s policies and areas of concern. In another document, found amongst Melo’s papers and dated June 1985, are details of the CNDM’s drafting of their priority areas, policies, and practices. Interestingly, in the fourth section of this document, entitled Trabalho/ Work, are bullet points relating to women entering the labour market and their personal autonomy, as well as domestic work and domestic employment. In the fifteenth and final section, entitled Outros/ Others, reads a single, hand-written word: prostituição/ prostitution. Rather than being included in the original typed document, trabalhadores sexuais/ sex workers are inserted afterwards. It is unclear who the handwriting belongs to. Nonetheless, this is revealing, in terms of prostituição’s assigned status as Outro, and leaves us questioning the extent to which national organisations such as the CNDM – concerned with eliminating discrimination against all women – were, as part of this mission, engaged in combatting the discrimination against women selling sex.
Here, the particular subjectivities of the women, activists, and feminists involved in the CNDM at that time resulted in prostituição being categorised as Outro, rather than falling under trabalho. The knowledges the women of the CNDM were bringing out of their closet thus furthered the concealment of outros. Crucially, the feminism these women embodied speaks to the ambivalent nature of the relationship between feminist thinking and prostitution in Brazil.
Polarised views on the compatibility of feminism with prostitution include considering prostitution as the culmination of capitalist exploitation of the female body, as opposed to the understanding of prostitution as both a choice and a right. In the context of modern-day Salvador, for example, Erica L. Williams notes how low-income Black Bahian women often saw sex work as a more lucrative and autonomous alternative to domestic work. Domestic work was often seen as the ultimate form of exploitation, in which Black women were poorly paid, subject to harsh working conditions, and often susceptible to sexual assault by their employers. This reveals the need to move beyond dichotomies that situate sex workers as either victims or agents, as having agency or being oppressed.
This also relates to the issue evident in the CNDM document – of viewing sex workers as inherently different from domestic workers, or any worker in underpaid service work. Together, such positions form equal parts of a capitalist, patriarchal complex, in which women exchange sexual and affective labour for subsistence – but it is only the sale of sex that is either criminalised, stigmatised, or both, rather than the purchase of it. Indeed, the significance of prostituição being historically understood as disparate from trabalho is reflected in the philosophies of Brazilian putafeminismo.
‘Trabalho sexual é trabalho’/ ‘sex work is work’ is a key concept for a number of putafeministas in Brazil. Combatting the stigmatisation of and discrimination against putas selling sex is fundamental in creating social justice for sex workers and their families. Affirming their right to be both putas, and feministas, these sex worker activists are ‘Bringing our feminism out of the wardrobe’ in order to claim a place within the space beyond the closet doorway.
Refusing to be marginalised and segregated any longer, Brazilian putafeministas are actively demanding place beyond the closet, in a world dictated by – amongst other things – capitalism and patriarchy. Their powerful reclamation of the closet relates to their rejection of the label Outros, and their decentring of the knowledge(s) produced by those who have refused to listen to the voices of sex workers. They are amplifying their voices, and declaring themselves fully capable of defending their desires and choices. Certainly, their knowledge is their power.
Further Reading:
Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (London: Verso, 2022)
Memória e Movimentos Sociais, <http://www.memoriaemovimentossociais.com.br/pt-br/imagens/galeria/371>
Monique Prada, Putafeminista (São Paulo: Veneta, 2018)
Mundo Invisível, <https://mundoinvisivel.org>
The Stonewall Reader, edited by The New York Public Library (New York: Penguin Books, 2019)
Anna Drury is a second-year PhD student in Lancaster University's History Department. Her research historicises the estigma (stigma) attached to sex work, and to the subjects who perform it, through the philosophies of Brazilian putafeminismo.