An analysis of Puta Dei 6: a sex worker-led platform for social and political transformation

Abstract

The present work investigates the strategic role of cultural events to the Brazilian sex worker’s movement in its work to challenge stigma and discrimination. The thesis is initially set to understand the motivations why the event Puta Dei was incorporated into the activist work of two Brazilian sex worker-led organizations in Brazil – one in the North. Puta Dei is presented as a strategy adopted to challenge sex work stigma and to provide visibility to the movement. Such potential is explored through a cartographic analysis of the 2019’s Puta Dei organized within Jardim Itatinga – Latin America’s largest prostitution district, in the city of Campinas. The cartographical methodology offered a tool to map intensities shifting vectors of forces in our experiences as subjects. The subjective experience as (any) woman is defined by a stigmatizing threatening continuum imposed over women through whore stigma. The constant and incessant – or machinic – operations of stigma become ingrained, unquestioned and naturalized. The potential of sex workers to interrupt such machinic production of subjectivities is observed through Suely Rolnik and Felix Guatarri’s concept of micropolitics of desire. The thesis’ maps the elements evidencing how organized sex workers successfully operate and cooperate towards a micropolitical insurrection. Rolnik’s affective theory intervention provides a framework to register the political relevance of initiatives which challenge the terminology and the accepted practices within programmes funding sex worker-led activism for their incorporation of artistic and quotidian elements.