Putas narrativas: territórios da prostituição e putafeminismo

Abstract

Debates, considerations, critical analyses of feminisms and universalizing perspectives on prostitution are interwoven with narratives of prostitutes' experiences that aim to destabilize ready-made and general concepts on the subject. Inspired by putafeminismo, this research is built around the prostitutes' perspectives on their own work and way of life. Affirming prostitutes as knowledge-producing agents, I use feminist methodology, based on Donna Haraway's conception of partial perspective and localized knowledge, which is based on the assertion that feminist researchers have a perspective constructed by a marked body, and that they construct research through a perception that takes place from a certain place. In order to take readers to the whorehouses researched, as well as to bring the whorehouses to academia, and to translate the knowledge located in the areas researched, I intertwine feminist methodology with the mode of narration proposed by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, which enables another way of looking at current historiography and challenging hegemonic narratives about prostitution. This dissertation is constructed on the move, by a prostitute psychologist and researcher who walks between three different cabarets in different ways and working conditions, practicing sex work, while researching her experiences with her coworkers. Between trips from cabarets to the university, knowledge of the whorehouse, which I've labeled burlative knowledge, is affirmed in order to challenge the idea that feminist practices don't exist in whorehouses. In addition, ways of life are analyzed and narrated as a means of demonstrating that prostitutes not only survive, but live, and that there is inventiveness in whoring.