Economies of Flesh: Event-Led Urbanism and the Impact on Sex Work in

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

by

Ester Elizabeth Amanda De Lisio

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of Exercise Sciences University of Toronto

© Copyright by Ester Elizabeth Amanda De Lisio 2016

ii

Economies of Flesh: Event-Led Urbanism and the Impact on Sex Work in

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ester Elizabeth Amanda De Lisio Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of Exercise Sciences Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

University of Toronto 2016

Abstract

Physical Cultural Studies has examined the extent to which a (sport) mega-event, like an environmental

disaster, can facilitate the implementation of a “shock doctrine” (Klein, 2007) in which controversial

policies, used to impose particular ideological ends, are pushed through in the wake of a cultural spectacle

(Boykoff, 2013; Hayes & Horne, 2011), and the urban environment is created as a series of

spectacularized spaces of leisure consumption, the ultramodern sanctuaries for bourgeois bodies

(Belanger, 2000; Friedman & Andrews, 2011; Silk, 2013). The sentiment of shock or enthusiasm is used

to distract from, and rationalize, the political-economic restructuring observed in a moment of crisis or

celebration. At the heart of disaster (or event) capitalism is the need to facilitate accelerated capitalist

expansion by reconfiguring the existent sociopolitical agenda. Celebration capitalism has been

characterized by the emergence of a state of exception, unfettered commercialism, repression of dissent,

questionable sustainability claims, and the complicity of the mainstream media (Boykoff, 2013). The

manifestation of narrow, market-driven ideologies, coupled with the aggressive pursuit of growth-

inducing resource material, has continued to foster resistance across host cities. In the current moment,

FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) and the IOC (International Olympic Committee)

have generated an increasing scale of dissent (Davidson, 2013; van Luijk & Frisby, 2012). Yet the

overemphasis on resistance has detracted from the everyday realities of those stuck in the pseudoshadow

of the mega-event spotlight. In my work I ask: How does the everyday react to the intervention of a mega-

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event? This dissertation focuses on the “lived experience(s)” of local women who embodied market-

oriented ideologies to react entrepreneurially to a FIFA-crisis/celebration, in order to create and enhance

their “survival circuits” (Sassen, 2009) within contested urban terrain. Through the collection and analysis

of ethnographic data, I document stories of everyday life from women involved in sexual commerce in

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the 2014 FIFA World Cup to connect their “everyday” with larger social

processes of global capitalist expansion, and demonstrate the manner in which these local women produce

(un)intended/under-examined embodied physical cultural legacies associated with the sport mega-event.

iv

Acknowledgements & Apologies

This acknowledgement section might precede the text but it was the final installation to this dissertation,

and it was probably the hardest to write. I will be brief, as I know that writing an acknowledgement is an

exercise in failure in front of those who matter most. It is fraught because the emotion — be it gratitude,

appreciation, inspiration, discomfort — defies articulation, no matter the effort devoted. It will fail to find

accurate expression on page. So it came last, and it will be succinct, though frequently rehearsed and

recited, repeatedly rewritten, and continuously felt and expressed across a lifetime.

To those who built the academic home in which I was so grateful to live and now refuse to leave —

especially Caroline Fusco, Michael Atkinson, Bruce Kidd, Etienne Turpin, and Robert VanWynsberghe,

as well as Danielle Di Carlo, Kass Gibson, Paloma Holmes, Patrick Keleher, David Marchesseault and

Nicolien van Luijk — I would relive all the angst and frustration of a doctorate for even a minute of the

counsel, laughter, and love I have known as a student, and will remain indebted to for life. As this house

is made and remade, I am so confident in the foundation on which all professional loyalties rest.

To those who miraculously made Rio de Janeiro feel like home for this small town gringa — especially

Thaddeus Blanchette, Ana Paula da Silva, Gregory Mitchell, Laura Murray, Vanessa Rodrigues, Julie

Ruvolo, Yaa Sarpong, João Sodré, Theresa Williamson, Gonçalo Zúquete and the women I met in the

field — your relentless altruism and commitment to social justice (fantasies of a better, more equitable

world) redefined exhaustion, enthusiasm, and will forever fuel me.

To those who have made and maintained home, no matter the distance — especially my parents (Louise

and Luigi), grandparents (Esterina and Luciano), siblings (Michael and Lara), nephew (John Luigi),

family-in-more-than-law (Draj, Glenn, and Nicolas), and Laura — the homesickness I masked in the field

served as a constant testament to the love I am so fortunate to feel, every day. I apologize for the concern

I caused as I strove in pursuit of an excellence that was never demanded.

And to Michael, the one who made it so difficult to be skeptical of love. It was his entrance, his absence,

and the mere utterance of his name that broke down the rational empiricist within me. If I entertain

abstract-theoretical imaginaries of futurity, it is he who has so often offered the concrete example in the

everyday.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements & Apologies iv

Table of Contents v

List of Tables vii

List of Figures viii

List of Appendices ix

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Proem 2

1.2 Sociological Inquiry & Sexual Commerce 4

1.3 The Everydayness of the Sport Mega-Event 13

1.4 On Language 15

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Deviant Development: Event-Led Urbanism 20

2.2 Within the Shadow: A Historical-Geographical Overview of Prostitution in Rio De

Janeiro

30

2.3 Women and the Informal Economies of Brazil: The Quest to Become “Gente” 35

2.4 The Role of Ideologies and Fantasies in Subject and State Formation, and Social

Revolution

39

2.5 Metamodernist Performance of Love, and the Right to the City 43

2.6 Sexscapes of Rio de Janeiro and the 2014 FIFA World Cup: Methodological Prescript 46

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

3.1 Entering the “Field” 53

3.2 Reading the Other 56

3.3 Talking to the Other 57

3.4 Observing the Other 62

3.5 Data Analysis 65

3.6 Presenting the Self/(Re)Presenting the Other 67

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CHAPTER 4: ROSA PEREIRA, MAKING LOVE/LOVEMAKING FOR A LIVING

4.1 Imitated Intimacies 78

4.2 The Phantasmagorical Impasse, Survival in the Everyday 82

4.3 Affexting: Metamodernist Sexting and the Question of Love 83

4.4 Closeted Identities, Fabricated Realities 88

4.5 Economies of Love, and the Accursed Share 91

CHAPTER 5: ISABEL COSTA, ATHLETICO-MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-COMPLEX OR THE MAGIC OF

THE STATE

5.1 Miseries at the Caixa 98

5.2 Miseries at the ALERF 101

5.3 Miseries in the Name of Amanhã [Tomorrow] 105

5.4 Miseries in the Everyday 109

5.5 The Not-So-Exceptional State 114

CHAPTER 6: GABRIELA GÓMEZ, THE (UN)MAKING OF THE INDEBTED (WO)MAN

6.1 Marx, Value, and Revolution 121

6.2 Fantasies of Futurity: Reproductive Futurism or the Search for Another Possible Life 123

6.3 The “Other” World: Lovemaking as “Divine Violence” 129

6.4 Debt Refusal as Everyday Defiance 132

6.5 Economies of the Flesh 135

CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION

References

141

Appendices 163

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List of Tables

Table 1. Overview of the overarching research objectives, questions, and data sources

Table 2. The (sport) mega-event in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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List of Figures

Figure 1. Main entrance to Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Figure 2. Niterói, relative to Rio de Janeiro, with the Caixa indicated with a star

Figure 3. Copacabana Sexscape: Help! (1985-2010); Balcony Bar (2010-2014); Mab’s Restaurant

and Bar (2014-Present)

Figure 4. Vila Mimosa, relative to the Maracanã football stadium, both indicated with a star.

Figure 5. Inside a brothel/bar in Copacabana Beach

Figure 6. Calm in Copa(cabana) amid Brazilian defeat to Germany

Figure 7. Inside a brothel/bar in Vila Mimosa

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List of Appendices

Appendix 1. The Caixa, Niterói

Appendix 2. Niterói (Re)Development Campaign

Appendix 3. Media Broadcast Centre in Copacabana

Appendix 4. FIFA Fan Fest

Appendix 5. Balcony Bar

Appendix 6. Billboard in Vila Mimosa

Appendix 7. Interview Guide

Appendix 8. Data Analysis

Appendix 9. Local Law Enforcement in FIFA Uniform

Appendix 10. Vandalism at the Caixa

Appendix 11. Niterói (Re)Development Campaign Installation

Appendix 12. Satellite overview of Porto Maravilha Project, relative to Niterói

Appendix 13. Ethical Protocol Approval

Appendix 14. Informed Consent Documentation

Appendix 15. World Cup Pamphlet

Appendix 16. Audience at Balcony Bar

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Figure 1. Main entrance to Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Approximately 150,000–200,000 people live within one square mile. Photo taken on March 16, 2015 by Amanda De Lisio

 

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Chapter 1: Introduction

When children are locked up in a football club, younger and younger, exhaustively

trained to be the next Ronaldo or Romário, this is not classified as exploitation. Children

made to eat high-protein, artificial food; forced to follow a strict diet, and even stricter

exercise routine. Run into the ground, never offered ice cream or a sweet. But this is not

exploitation! This is sport. It is great for our national image! Great to have retired bodies,

now fucked, torn from the inside out, sat like a puppet on some televised Globo panel.

(Personal communication with a sex worker affiliated to Davida, May 22, 2014)

On May 15, 2013, the famous Brazilian ex-futebol (football) player, Romário de Souza

Faria, declared on national television that “O Brasil abriu as pernas para a FIFA [Brazil

has opened its legs to FIFA]” (https://youtu.be/E-o54JOaenk). With federal and

municipal law rewritten to privatize profit and socialize debt, the Amazon rainforest (the

lung of Latin America) ransacked for a soon-to-be vacant 40,000-seat stadium and 20,000

families served with notice of eviction, his comment is hard to refute. Brazil has indeed

opened for business, with the new president/CEO named FIFA. Aside from the parallel

imaginary, there is also little hesitation or resistance evident in his remark. The “opening”

of the nation to an international fount of global capital is consensual, deliberate, and

calculated – a vision of grandiose capital accumulation positioned far above social,

environmental, or political realities. Be attentive to the similarities shared between these

women, chastised for entrepreneurialism, and the entrepreneurial men that now work for

FIFA. (Field note, May 20, 2014)

1.1 Proem

As a doctoral student, I have largely concentrated on the role of sport as a tool of urbanism, which

reconfigures physical culture, labour, and consumption and produces particular realities for different host

communities. Often regarded as a commercially viable and socially pacifying institution, sport has

rationalized development within postindustrial “world class” cities, promising the injection of global-

tourism capital, increased access to health and wellness facilities, and added opportunities for active, more

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environmentally sustainable transit. It is this (ab)use of sport within urban (re)development that has

continued to fuel my curiosities as both an academic and conflicted urban dweller.

In this research, I examine the role of sport in cosmopolitan urban processes that accentuate and

accelerate entrepreneurial tendencies of “global” cities. I approach this work from the belief that (sport)-

event-led urbanism cannot be contained within — or used solely to advance — the socio-political-

economic agenda of those in (supposed) power. And I am careful to attend to those who are discursively

constructed as “marginal” in processes that come to reconstitute urban life. Thus rather than (re)tell

stories about the suppressive nature of postindustrial development, I examine how — by accelerating

processes of urbanization through strategies akin to corporatist/neoliberal acupuncture — the sport mega-

event has created the conditions in which specific communities, otherwise deprived of social, economic,

or political power, cultivate a view of the body as a value-producing resource material. To resource urban

land or the body for sport (as often discussed in Physical Cultural Studies) is not unlike the

commodification of bodies for sex — all share the same economic motivation, similar risk, and a certain

level of romanticism. Indeed, the women involved in sexual commerce, the young boy from the favela

(shantytown) with the dream of becoming the next Romário, and those who seek to “modernize” urban

land despite obvious social and environmental degradation call on a needed element of romanticism — as

Gregory Mitchell (2015) has taught me — that is, a connection with the world that can privilege

aestheticism, emotion, and desire over rationalism. With an added dose of pragmatism, I am attentive to

the impossibilities of a “perfect” love in an imperfect world, the romantic fantasies people may tell one

another, and the role of bodies in commitment to these love stories. Even the most enlightened subject

cannot evade the propensities that encroach upon two bodies in love. The hastened heart, shortened breath

– to be in love is to feel love. These are the material efficiencies of ideologies, and the associated

fantasies, that are manufactured in affective-performative labour whether tied to sport, sex, or (deviant)

urban development.

To address parallel curiosities, I wanted to document the impact on sexual commerce, an obvious yet

often overlooked physical culture, in the midst of a sport mega-event. To do so, I collaborated with the

Observatório da Prostituição (Prostitution Observatory), an extension project of the Metropolitan

Ethnographic Lab (LeMetro/IFCS) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. As a research collaborator

from April 2014 to August 2014 and January 2015 to April 2015, I worked with an international and

national team including experts from within academia (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Fluminense

Federal University, the Gender Studies Centre at the State University of Campinas, the Mailman School

of Public Health and Faculty of Law at Columbia University, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at

Williams College), as well as the broader public (Davida: Prostitution, Civil Rights, and Health, ABIA:

Brazilian Interdisciplinary Association of AIDS, and the Brazilian Network of Prostitutes). I believe this

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unique community-oriented research collaborative will come to characterize much of the future work

done on “global” cities – especially as people come together to connect former host communities with

cities of tomorrow. For me, the allure of the event is the microcosm it will create to examine current

development strategies, political priorities, and cultural sensibilities that impinge upon, and thus require, a

network of allies and expertise as diverse as those embroiled in the process. As part of this research, I

frequented each zona (zone) known for sexual commerce in Rio de Janeiro (e.g., Copacabana Beach,

Ipanema Beach, Centro, Lapa, and Vila Mimosa) to interact with and learn from those involved in sex as

work, the clientele, and local law enforcement. For data collection, I relied upon the following

methodologies: (i) document analyses of prostitution and/or human trafficking–related information

material, (ii) participant observations of sex workers' rights organizations, volunteers, and the

working/living conditions of their members, and (iii) semi-structured interviews conducted with key

informants. These qualitative methodologies, coupled with the work done for the Observatório, allowed

me to better understand the peculiar impact of sport on sexual labour – the incursion of the event into

everyday life and the extent to which it (the event) can (re)write local desire, bodies, and land. Overall,

this research has been invested in the manner in which sex (work) is embroiled within broader structural

transformation and processes of urban reform, whether (sport)-event-led or not. While the reconstruction

of urban space for white tourist classes has shown to (re)produce colonial-capitalist domination, it can

also offer new possibilities for creative entrepreneurship, intimacy, and (transnational) desire. Before I

delve into the particularities of sexual commerce in Brazil, I will present an overview of the sociological

literature on sex work, conceptualize the term “everyday life” (albeit in the context of an event), and

decipher oft-conflated terminology associated with the profession.

1.2 Sociological Inquiry And Sexual Commerce

With respect to sociological inquiry, prostitution has forever been used to illuminate the moral difficulties

associated with the commodification of bodies for wage labour. As Marx and Engels (1844) wrote, it was

the “specific expression” of the “general prostitution of the labourer” (p. 99). Prostitution is thus

positioned as the commodification of the most “market inalienable” of human capacities:

You must make everything that is yours saleable, i.e., useful. If I ask the political

economist: Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale, by

surrendering it to another’s lust? (The factory workers in France call the prostitution of

their wives and daughters the xth working hour, which is literally correct.) – Or am I not

acting in keeping with political economy if I sell my friend to the Moroccans? (And the

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direct sale of men in the form of a trade in conscripts, etc., takes place in all civilized

countries.) – Then the political economist replies to me: You do not transgress my laws;

but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political

economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but – But who am I now

to believe, political economy or ethics? The ethics of political economy is acquisition,

work, thrift, sobriety – but political economy promises to satisfy my needs. (Marx &

Engels, 1844, p. 120)

For Simmel, prostitution leads to the moral degradation of personal value for all parties involved,

especially the woman who is said to lose her scarcity value. He cited the similarities between money and

prostitution as objectification, indifference, and lack of attachment. Prostitution reflects the “nadir of

human dignity” in that it offered that which is most intimate and personal for a woman in “totally

impersonal, purely extraneous and objective compensation” (2004 [1900], p. 379). Prostitution is

constitutive of the institution of marriage – one does not exist without the other. Marx and Engels asserted

that the advent of communism would dismantle capitalist monogamy and prostitution, whereas Simmel

stressed the need for free love (in which the contrast between legitimate and illegitimate was untenable) in

order to eliminate the need for a reserve of women intended to satisfy male sexual desire. He maintained

that the more “developed and noble” humanity became, the more likely marriage would be more than a

mere matter of “purchase or compulsion” and instead reflect the “purely inner mutual sympathy” of both

men and women from which promiscuity would not arise (1997 [1907], p. 267). Until then, the prostitute

will remain as a scapegoat for male vice, cast deeper and deeper into corruption, and thereby deserving of

criminal or delinquent treatment. Both writing within the same historical moment, Ruth Rosen in The

Maimie Papers (1978) and The Lost Sisterhood (1982) described the “quiet toleration” that circulated in

relation to sexual commerce in North America during the Progressive Era (1900-1918). This “tacit

acceptance” (to borrow from Shumsky, 1986) was used to understand commercial sex as a “necessary

evil” that could be tolerated within a confined zone of vice or “moral region” (Park, 1925, p. 43), often

located on the fringe of the central business district. Sexual commerce was viewed as evil and uncivilized

but also natural and inevitable within social order. For some, the creation of a “moral region” rendered

commercial sex invisible. At the same time, the relative proximity to the downtown core intensified

(made visible) the existence of sex-related industries, carved now in the urban landscape, as a site in

which men and women amassed to share a form of (illicit) sex. As Robert Park wrote in the first chapter

of The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban Environment,

It is inevitable that individuals who seek the same forms of excitement, whether that

excitement be furnished by a horse race or by grand opera, should find themselves from

time to time in the same places. The result of this is that in the organization which city

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life spontaneously assumes the population tends to segregate itself, not merely in

accordance with its interests, but in accordance with its tastes or its temperaments. The

resulting distribution of the population is likely to be quite different from that brought

about by occupational interests or economic conditions. (1925, p. 43)

In the next chapter, I further detail the sociospatial tolerance of sex work in Brazil (in relation to the

Global North) after the abolition of slavery in 1889. However, first I want to continue to examine the

progression of sociological inquiries and theories that have circulated in relation to prostitution. Reflected

in the work of Park (1864-1944) and the Chicago School, there was an attempt to build the scientific

enterprise of sociology, on the one hand, and sexology, on the other. This effort extracted the social from

the biological, and rendered sexuality outside the social sphere. Sociologists like Max Weber (1864-1920)

and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) remained rather silent on the issue of (commercial) sex and sexuality;

this issue appeared to be reserved more for those identified as sexologists, psychoanalysts, or structural-

functionalist sociologists (Bernstein, 2007). The limited scholarship from the Chicago School that did

explore sex and sexualities at this time, such as that of Paul G. Cressey (1932) on the taxi-dance hall,

started to focus on the broader desire for stimulation and adventure within the urban environment, which

unlocked the commercialization of all human interest. This introduced an alternative perspective to the

traditional emphasis on female “personal demoralization,” one that recognized the realities of an ever-

burgeoning consumer society. At the same time, the bibliographical shift to primarily sexological,

psychoanalytic, and structural-functionalist literature further positioned prostitution under the scientific

guise, as Freud (1963 [1912], p. 64) wrote:

In only very few people of culture are the two strains of tenderness and sensuality duly

fused into one; the man almost always feels his sexual activity hampered by his respect

for the woman and only develops full sexual potency when he finds himself in the

presence of a lower type of sexual object. . . . Full sexual satisfaction only comes when he

can give himself up wholeheartedly to enjoyment, which with his well-brought up wife,

for instance, he does not venture to do.

At once cast as a social evil, prostitution was now more “normalized” as a constitutive component of the

marriage institution. The employment of sex for a nonsexual end (i.e., pleasure, unproductive

expenditure) characterized prostitution as well as any institution with which sex was involved (courtship,

concubinage, marriage). As Kingsley Davis (1937) wrote: “Where the family is strong, there tends to be a

well-defined system of prostitution and the social regime is one of status. Women are either part of the

family system, or they are definitely not a part of it” (p. 755). In the interwar era (1918-1938), biomedical

approaches to sex(uality) and the broader prevalence of medicine rendered commercial sex an urban

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contagion. Still existent within the urban interstice, sex work was subject to moral and social

hygienization/sanitization.1 Women involved in sexual commerce were viewed as a social contagion in

need of regulated medical intervention to prevent the “spread” of degeneracy. It was not until sociological

research carried out in relation to deviance between 1960 and 1980 that the prostitute was viewed as the

“emblematic figure of the breakdown of normative consensus” (Bernstein, 2007, p. 10). The sociology of

deviance, far from echoing harmony and symmetry in social interactions, examined the occurrence of

ruptures, interruptions or deviations from the norm. C. Wright Mills (1943) wrote that the small-town,

middle-class tendencies of academia blinded sociology from the complexities “ranging from rape in rural

districts to public housing” (166) that remained systematically and theoretically unexplored. With the

emergence of a new emphasis on deviance in 1960, the prostitute – along with the other “Others” (Becker,

1963; Young, 1970) – was humanized, normalized, and henceforth, less moralized:

In the course of our work and for who knows what private reasons, we fall into deep

sympathy with the people we are studying, so that while the rest of society views them as

unfit in one or another respect for the deference ordinarily accorded a fellow citizen, we

believe that they are at least as good as anyone else, more sinned against than sinning.

(Becker, 1967, p. 100-101)

The (so-called) deviant processes assigned to prostitution, theft, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency,

drug (ab)use, etc., were rendered qualitatively similar to those assigned to more “normalized” or

“acceptable” behaviour. An individual could be labeled “deviant” but it was argued that there is no

intrinsic act that is deviance: “For deviance to become a social fact, somebody must perceive an act,

person, situation or event as a departure from social norms, must categorize that perception, must report

that perception to others, must get them to accept this definition of the situation, and must obtain a

response that conforms to this definition” (Rubington and Weinberg, 1968, p. v). As the sociology of

deviance blossomed, the focus on individual behaviour broadened to also include the subcultures and

identities of deviance. Nevertheless, the fascination with deviance continued to emphasize the most

dramatic and predatory stories of violence, and treated deviance mostly as belonging to the impoverished

and marginalized. The sociology of deviance thus failed to account for the manner in which political and

economic systems continued to thrive on more covert forms of institutional deviance (e.g., “white-collar”

crime). Becker (1967), in his analysis of the “moral crusader” or agent of social control, described the

misplaced emphasis on those labeled deviant in lieu of the political, economic, and social structure that

created the conditions for continued inequality and institutional violence. These are the stories that in-

depth ethnographic work (such as that of Becker, 1963, 1967) has afforded me the insight to tell.

                                                                                                                         1 During the First Republic (1889-1930), urban authorities worked to transform Rio de Janeiro to showcase

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Prior to the turn of the twenty-first century, feminism helped recognize the body as a main locus of

sociological and political inquiry. Within modern feminist thought (from 1970 to the contemporary

movement), the (female) body was viewed as a “text of culture” (Bordo, 1990) subjected to broader

institutional control. Feminist literature has argued that the female body (in particular) has been

constructed as an object of (hetero)sexual desire. This sexual objectification is integral to identity

construction but also served as a tool of oppression (Wesley, 2002). Irigaray (1985) and Cixous and

Clement (1986) argue that within a phallocentric/patriarchal order, women maintain limited control over

(or access to) political, economic, and social processes that matter (i.e., processes that perpetuate power

inequities) – historically and politically, female (feminine) bodies are made visible and valued as sexual

commodities, above all else. To this debate, Nagle (1997, p. 6) has contributed the question: “How do

[women] value our sexuality when 'to be valued for our sexuality' is a primary instrument of our

oppression?” The continued prevalence of sex-related industries (anecdotally, for example, the number of

women unapologetically announcing sex work as a chosen profession to cover tuition) has further

inflamed and polarized the victimization/liberation debate. Those who viewed prostitution as an act of

violence in which “patriarchy is the culprit and white supremacy and capitalism are merely the

accomplices” (Razack, 1998, 339) saw commercial sex as an exacerbation of existent structural

inequalities instead of associated with free will and agency. The work of Kathleen Barry (1979, 1988,

1996), Sheila Jeffreys (2008a, 2008b, 2009), Catharine MacKinnon (1979, 1987) and Christine Overall

(1992) have all played a central role in the coalition against the legalization/legitimation of sexual

commerce, arguing that prostitution is a violent, exploitative practice by individual men against individual

women. In direct opposition to this abolitionist discourse was a group who aligned with “prosex” (sex

positive) feminism, to whom sexual commerce is a legitimate form of work – not abuse or oppression (see

for instance Ericsson, 1980; Pheterson, 1989; Paglia, 1994). Carol Leigh (a.k.a. Scarlet Harlot) coined the

term “sex work” (and “sex work industry”) at a conference organized by Women Against Violence in

Pornography and Media in 1978 in reaction to a session entitled “Sex Use Industry” that she felt wrongly

obscured her role as an actor and agent (Leigh, 2004). As Anne McClinton (1993, p. i) wrote:

The female prostitute puts a price on her labors. The sex-worker cocks a snook at

Johnson’s famous edict that “on the chastity of women all property in the world depends”

– demanding, and generally getting, better money for her services than the average, male,

white-collar worker. Society demonizes sex workers because they demand more money

than women should, for services men expect for free.

The violence known to be associated with the profession is thus recast into a civil liberties framework that

emphasizes the need to respect individual choice, circumstance, and autonomy. This was the exact

premise of the COYOTE (Call Off Your Tired Old Ethics) lobby, which argued that through

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criminalization and the accompanying stigma, women involved in sexual commerce are forced further

underground and thus made more vulnerable to abuse (COYOTE, 2004). In line with the “sex as work”

discourse, Camille Paglia (1994) poignantly remarked: “I respect and honor the prostitute, ruler of the

sexual realm, which men must pay to enter. In reducing prostitutes to pitiable charity cases in need of

their help, middle-class feminists are guilty of arrogance, conceit, and prudery” (p. 56). It is important to

note that with this abstract, ideological dispute at the fore, little emphasis was directed at research that

better informed public policies based on actual lived experience. Sociological inquiry into sexual

commerce managed to establish competing theories relating to women as either exploited/oppressed,

empowered/liberated, but failed to take into consideration the referent, material realities of the women

and men imbricated/involved in this informal form of labour. To quote Kesler (2002, p. 229): “I find it

highly ironic that a feminist analysis of prostitution should objectify women in this way” without an

honest consideration of the everyday life of the women (and men) who decide to entrepreneurialize sexual

prowess in libidinal economies.

In arguing that the body and sex(ualities) are inherently political, feminist research challenged social

hierarchies that valorized the mind (associated with masculinity, culture, and reason) and denigrated the

body (linked to femininity, nature, and emotion), but in the same instance perpetuated dichotomies

between male/mind and body/female. The research of Kulick (1998), O’Connell-Davidson (2002),

Bernstein (2007), Goldstein (2013), and Mitchell (2015) worked to contest the “woman-as-victim” logic

that has informed much of the theoretical debate. This work has been careful not to reinforce a narrative

of sex work as exploitative, nor does it romanticize resilience; instead, it has addressed the complexities

of gendered, racialized, and sexualized hierarchies, and the “oppositional culture” (Goldstein, 2013, p. 98)

of women and men involved in transnational economies of desire.2 Former studies dehumanized and

silenced the lived realities of women and men involved in sexual commerce, whereas recent work has

engaged a more agentive framework to (re)humanize both the individual worker and her/his respective

clientele. These new approaches to the arena of sex neither reinforce (male) domination nor (female)

liberation, but instead attempt to better understand sexual economies as “a (set) of meaning(s) and

practice(s) that are both historically/culturally contingent and socially/politically contested” (Smith, 2011,

p. 538). Never to refuse the structural context (i.e., systemic class, race, or gender inequalities) but to treat

it as mutually constitutive of agency; prostitution is regarded as an informal economy which is deeply

implicated in, but not determined by, social relations of power. More recent ethnographic work on sexual

                                                                                                                         2 I use this term as a derivative from “transatlantic cultural economy of desire” – a term Samuel Veissière (2010, 2011) used to describe the North-South and South-North mobilization of culture, emotion, desire as inextricable from economic and material bases. Due to the more expansive nature of the sport mega-event, as well as the well-known reliance on trade between Brazil and China, I further extend his term to consider a broader/transnational context of mobilization.

10

commerce has thus better understood sex work as a form of labour that is not immune to or exempt from

broader historical, social, political, economic, and geographical tendencies – and as such, is reflective of

much broader processes at play.

Bernstein (2007), in her detailed ethnographic account of the San Francisco Bay Area commercial sex

scene, has demonstrated the manner in which sexual commerce should be “situated squarely within . . .

economic and cultural currents, rather than regarded as exceptions to be judged apart” (p. 188). For

Bernstein, a shift in production (i.e., from manual labour to service and consumption), political priorities

(state-led intervention to prevent street prostitution), and cultural sensibilities (normalization of indoor

sex work) will no doubt shift the sociospatial experience (from outdoor to indoor, individual to

technologically mediated), and meaning (from relational to recreational) of commercial sex. She argued

that a new “recreational” sexual ethic (termed “bounded authenticity”) has established “the emotional and

physical labor of manufacturing authentic (if fleeting) libidinal and emotional ties with clients, endowing

them with a sense of desirability, esteem or love” (p. 103). In contrast to “relational sexuality,” which is

touted as ideologically allergic to money, “recreational sexuality” is not antithetical to the commercial

sector. In fact, it is the financial transaction that has allowed both the worker and client to create an

emotional barrier while facilitating the “sale and purchase of authentic emotional and physical

connection” (ibid.). As in Mitchell (2015), with his work on homosexual male prostitution in Brazil,

sexual commerce is reframed from sexual labour to a performative labour in which the notion of

impression management (Goffman, 1959) is extended to account for the affective-performative element of

sex work that, within the more recent literature, often has little to do with the sexual act, and that

“resembles neither the informal barter of premodern exchanges nor the (prototypically modern) emotion-

free, Taylorized provision of sexual release” (Bernstein, 2007, p. 105). This work has thus illustrated the

emotional authenticities transmitted in economic exchange. As Hochschild (1983) explained, the labour is

more emotional than material, in the “commercial logic of the managed heart” (p. 332):

As the shift from an industrial to a service economy continues, less and less will people

make things for a living and more and more will they deliver services that require face-to-

face or voice-to-voice contact. A capacity to deal with things will matter relatively less on

the job, while the capacity to deal with people, relationships and feelings will matter

relatively more. In a capitalist, postindustrial culture, what this means, I think, is that a

commercial logic will penetrate deeper and deeper into what we used to think of as a

private, psychological, sacred part of a person’s self and soul. (p. 333)

A refocus on agency and performative labour means thinking about how, in service labour, a worker will

summon two strategies of acting in order to maintain her/his professional status: the first, “surface

11

 

acting,” is the mere outward appearance or performance (much like that described in the work of

Goffman), and the second, “deep acting,” is an emotional response that is self-induced; this emotion is the

basis of “acting” or impression management. For example, a sex worker could lean over, tilt her head, and

lift her brow to exhibit concern but for “deep acting” the individual would need to associate certain

imaginaries with the client in order to evoke the sentiment needed for the job. To paraphrase Mitchell

(2012), to those involved in sexual commerce (as a worker, client, or even casual observer), the idea that

commercial sex is a “fundamentally performative labour” is a rather obvious claim. The notion that cash

can influence the manner in which people construct, maintain, and perform certain identities is also self-

evident (p. 37). The performative element of commercial sex is obvious in observation and a matter that

women often discussed with me:

I see prostitution as an art, because I am doing a performance, I am acting. It’s like a

stage. I go to the street. I work. I can say my name is whatever I want. I seduce people,

people are seduced – by the character I invent – so I am an actress and director. And I

produce everything. I do the make-up, costume, everything. It is a performance, a private

performance, with a happy ending for him, and me. (Personal communication,

Copacabana, July 9, 2014)

During sex work, you need to control disgust, shame, and sometimes even pain. You

control all these things, and perform an illusion – show sincere desire for, and interest in,

the client. (Personal communication, woman from high-end sauna/terma in the South

Zone, June 8, 2014)

Both women indicate the overt, undeniable manner in which sex work is so often considered as

performative labour. It is useful to consider sex work as performative labour, especially as related to

Physical Cultural Studies, a somewhat sister discipline to Performance Studies. However, the

performative element of sex work does little to accentuate the “economies of affect” (Richard &

Rudnyckyj, 2009) that circulate, surface, and stick to that which is embodied, commodified, and

consumed in the labour. Whereas Fredric Jameson insisted on the “waning of affect” (1991, p. 10) in the

postmodern era (or late capitalism), the increase in immaterial labour (such as commercial sex) has helped

to parcel and package the performance of certain subjectivities but also affect. As Brian Massumi wrote:

“If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it. The problem is that there is no cultural-

theoretical vocabulary specific to affect” (1995, p. 27). The athleticism observed in sport, much like the

“bounded authenticity” communicated in sex work, is a surfeit of affect; that is, the “nonconscious and

unnamed, but nevertheless registered, experiences of bodily energy and intensity that arise in response to

stimuli impinging on the body” (Gould, 2009, p. 19). Affect, in this case, is more of an embodied force

12

that is also bound to consciousness; it is the corporeal response to stimuli at a precognitive and

prelinguistic level. Think of it as communication in the absence of language: the facial expression, breath,

tone, movement, sweat, and even orgasm essential to the sex work performance. These are observable and

yet transmit a particular affect. On occasion, some women would articulate the affective nature of sex

work to me:

Sex work is a way for me to be in this world, to affect people, and be affected by people.

All kinds of people, especially people that admit sexual needs. I like to feel people, and

that people feel me. And I think I seduce most with spontaneity. You know, spontaneity

is something that you don’t think about: you feel. (Personal communication, sex worker

in Copacabana, May 20, 2014)

The thing people tend to forget is that the work of a prostitute is not really selling sex. It’s

emotional work too. (Personal Communication, sex worker in Centro / Downtown, June

25, 2014)

It is all about the touch, the contact. Soft contact [softly graced my arm, and made each

little hair stand on end]. Sometimes clients come just to talk. My clients are old men, the

majority of them. Some of them can’t get an erection. They try but it just doesn’t happen,

it’s difficult. (Personal Communication, sex worker in Vila Mimosa, March 10, 2015)

In this dissertation, the term “affective labour” is used in preference to “emotional labour” because

“emotion” (as evidenced in the research of Wendy Chapkis (1997) on sex work) does not admit the more

abstract nature of this form of labour that is able to create value. Paired with performance, I found that

affect is thus better able to account for the unknowable or – to borrow from Mitchell (2012) – that which

is “simmering below the surface of these interactions and sometimes bubble up into the observable realm”

(p. 87). For me, as a gringa (foreign woman) ethnographer, an openness to affect accentuated the

meaningful possibilities for communication, unrestricted by language. The inclusion of affect theories

allowed me to circumvent structures of enlightened reason – the “fantastic reductions under which the

body is produced and written into successive systems,” to quote from Baudrillard (1993, p. 114) – which

otherwise enclose human experiences but lead us further from the material body. With a view of sex work

as both performative and affective labour, this research is thus intended to add to the literature discussed

above, to further problematize the manner in which a universal vision of a woman (sexualized, yet not

sexual) has continued to (in)form the foci of prostitution rhetoric. In turn, this rhetoric is used to organize

the (urban) terrain that these bodies (as a mother, sister, daughter, etc. of sexual commerce) must

manoeuvre/overcome in everyday life. While these realities could seem sexier than most, make no

13

 

mistake, these stories of everyday life are as banal as the next. With some subtleties, sex work is a mere

reflection of the “prostitution” we are all subjected to in labour and love. The everyday realities of women

(and men) that entrepreneurialize bodies, subjectivities, etc. will serve as a contribution to the existent

sociological literature that is (as illustrated above) saturated with studies that evade the actual “lived and

embodied experience” of women and men behind the processes described. The intention of this

dissertation is to illustrate the realities of women (and men) in the midst of event-led urbanism, a form of

construction (or rather destruction) that is an expression of the corporatist-entrepreneurial ideologies of

those in political-economic power. I now situate the use of the term “everyday life” in this research, albeit

in the context of an (sport) event.

1.3 The Everydayness of the Sport Mega-Event

The experience of everyday life for local communities within (supposedly) “global” cities has forever

been an interest of mine—the mega-event serves for me as a microcosm to examine current development

strategies, political priorities, and cultural sensibilities. This work is derivative of existent literature on

“everyday life” in that it focuses on the lived experience of particular host communities in the context of

an internationally recognized sport mega-event. To Lefebvre, everyday life was both a concept and

product of human (not bourgeois) relations (see his essay “The Everyday and Everydayness” [1987]). As

he wrote in Critique of Everyday Life (1991 [1947]):

Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their

differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground.

And it is in everyday life that the sum total of relations which make the human – and

every human being – a whole takes its shape and its form. In it are expressed and fulfilled

those relations which bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner

which is always partial and incomplete: friendship, comradeship, love, the need to

communicate, play, etc. (p. 97)

While I was in the field, I wrestled with the partial, incomplete, and contradictory (e.g., known/unknown,

ordinary/extraordinary, and obvious/enigmatic) nature of people’s everyday life now lived in the midst of

a large-scale urban intervention. I continue to utilize the term "everyday life," albeit in the context of an

event, because even in accelerated urban upheaval, the “everyday” cannot be avoided—especially for

those unable to enjoy the extended celebration a festival could occasion for some. For the urban populace,

everyday life is the one common denominator in constant (now accelerated) material and immaterial

14

urban reform. Production/consumption processes, dominant ideologies, and imaginaries all anticipate the

(re)production and (re)development associated with the event—far from an anomaly, the urban reform

imposed as a result of the event is a reflection of broader existent (historical) processes. The

extraordinariness of an event can thus never be divorced from life lived every day in the absence of a

festival. And indeed, there is a certain ordinariness to life lived in a megamoment. A question that

continued to anchor my curiosities in the field, and to which I respond to in this work, was: How does this

megamoment (re)write everyday realities, and in the process (re)construct local land, desires, bodies, and

identities?

In relation to the sport mega-event literature, I believe that my research is also an extension of existent

studies in that it does more than merely privilege processes of urban reform in lieu of everyday people. At

the root of my analysis is the manner in which everyday processes of urban reform (accelerated in the

event) strike local bodies—to reveal the material efficiencies of dominant ideologies, imaginaries, and

processes of production/consumption that are enacted on/through/in the bodies of host women. Processes

that are palpable in the heart hastened from excitement over the fiscal possibilities an influx in tourism

could create; the injection of silicon to bolster the Brazilian bunda for a “global” audience; the yellow,

blue, and green manicured hand painted to match the Brazilian flag; the bruise caused from the tight grip

of an officer sent to deliver an unkind message. In the analysis of data, I draw eclectic influence from

sociology (Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Franco Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato), anthropology

(Donna Goldstein, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Michael Taussig) as well as urban studies (Robert Park, Henri

Lefebvre and David Harvey), contemporary queer theory (Sarah Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Gregory

Mitchell, José Esteban Muñoz), and physical cultural studies (Michael Atkinson, Caroline Fusco, Bruce

Kidd, Michael Silk). Even if these are not neatly compatible with one another, the analysis of globally

constituted yet locally appropriated processes and realities will continue to necessitate a network of allies

and expertise as diverse as those required for the mega-event phenomenon. I thus harness theoretical

inconsistencies, in torment and toil, because it is somewhat “fun” (even if sadly defined) to have

(dis)similar people in conversation with one another. It is also reflective of the realities to which I attend

to in my work – the seldom coherent or linear nature of people in everyday life, and the constant injection

of (in)compatible, schizophrenic tendencies. I further elaborate on this relation between the “event” and

“everyday life” in the next chapter but I want to first make a brief comment on the terminology used

throughout this text.

1.4 On Language

15

 

It depends on the energy, if you are rude and say “sex service person, whatever” I am

annoyed. If you use “prostitute” in a respectable manner, I am happy. It all depends on

the energy, not the actual word. (Personal Communication, sex worker in Copacabana,

May 10, 2015)

To conduct this research, I considered commercial sex as a culture enmeshed within racialized, gendered,

and classed identities but also entwined with histories of consumption, entertainment, sport, urban space,

sexuality, tourism, and criminality. As I did so, I witnessed the extent to which the culture of commercial

sex is imbricated within the same complex, contradictory, globalizing tendencies and attendant (gendered,

racialized) inequalities that are inherent to most labour processes, which remain simultaneously

empowering and exploitative for the individual worker: “a life-line for some, a life sentence for others”

(Hubbard, 1999, p. 8). In this research, I focus on female prostitution in which women (whether

heterosexually, bisexually, or homosexually identified) offer services to (mainly heterosexual) men. At

this time, I would like to clarify terminology – "sex work," "prostitution," and "trafficking" for sexual

exploitation – as each signify distinct realities but also divergent sociopolitical orientations/agendas. For

one, "sex work" is more often used to connote the entrepreneurial labour opportunities, offered through

sex-related industries that empower and liberate the worker. By contrast, prostitution is used to signify a

more harmful cultural practice in which a criminal (even violent) transaction is made between a male

“client” and female “victim/deviant” (Pateman, 1988; Boyle, 1994; Jeffreys, 2008). The word

“prostitution” is meant to accentuate the exploitative nature of the exchange and uphold the physical,

psychological, and sexual risks. That said, “prostitution” is the term most often used in abolitionist

discourse – i.e., work intended to abolish prostitution as a modern form of slavery – in order to further

enact/enforce criminal penalties. In my experience, the pedantic difference between “sex work” and

“prostitution” took another form. While I received a proverbial slap on the wrist from a North American

sex-positive feminist scholar after I used the term “prostitution” in an email, in Brazil there is evidence of

a movement to reclaim the term “whore” [puta] and “prostitute” [prostituição] that followed the political

advocacy of the late Gabriela Leite: “If we don’t take words by their horns, we won’t change anything”

(interview with Laura Murray, published on June 12, 2013). In this dissertation, I make use of

terminology like garota(s) de programa which can be translated to “program girl” – often said to indicate

prostitute, although used also to refer to an “escort” or “high class prostitute” – as well as prostituta

[prostitute] or profissional do sexo [sex worker] interchangeably. A program or programa is the explicit

arrangement to exchange sex for money. I understand the sociopolitical significance of each term but on

some level, I actively disengage from this pedantic circus. As I found in the field, and evidenced in the

quote above, it has more to do with energy than terminology.

16

Trafficking is defined by three elements – (i) the movement of a person, (ii) with deception or coercion,

(iii) into a situation of forced labour, servitude, or slavery-like practice. Trafficking is thus not the same as

sex work or prostitution.3 While some people are trafficked into prostitution and sexually exploited, not

all women (or men for that matter) involved in commercial sex are or will be trafficked. There is a

difference between women trafficked into prostitution and those who autonomously decide to migrate for

(sex) work. Research conducted in Southern Africa, for instance, has illustrated the prevalence of migrant

women who independently choose to engage in sex work as a practical solution to economic deprivation.

In such a context, the idea that a migrant sex worker must be “rescued” does not account for

individual/autonomous choice; nor does it address the broader (more detrimental) structural inequalities

that led to such a decision (Richter & Monson, 2011). Not to diminish the seriousness of human (sexual)

trafficking, I want to allude to the manner in which this bipartisan issue is so often used to advance a

particular ideological goal at the expense of those it is intended to aid. Anti-trafficking strategies are far

too often based on unsubstantiated evidence, which causes “collateral damage” or hurts those it purports

to protect by wasting of needed resources, misrepresenting people and issues, violating the rights of

consensual sex workers, displacing sex workers and other marginalized groups in city “cleanup” efforts,

and restricting women’s travel. With an estimated 40,000 and 12.3 million people worldwide, fewer than

ten women and children have been found to be trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation at an

international sport event (see Mitchell, 2016). Despite great efforts to curb sexual exploitation, Richter

and Massawe (2010) also argue that there is limited evidence to establish a dramatic increase in demand

for commercial sex at a sport mega-event or an actual relation between sexual commerce and the sport

mega-event.

Irrespective of the terms, those involved in sex-related industries are almost always forced to navigate

moral condemnation and disapproval, and the attendant (often state-led) violence. Sex work, prostitution,

and trafficking/sexual exploitation are thus often conflated with expressions of deviance, to imply a

sexual exchange committed outside state-sanctioned or normalized “monogamous” (albeit heterosexual)

relations. The resultant manifestation of “whore stigma” (Pateman, 1989) is the crucial link between those

involved in sexual commerce and other (allegedly) deviant economies that mark a “spoiled identity”

(Goffman, 1963). Throughout this dissertation, I often use the term “sex work(er)” to denote a form of

employment, distinguishable from other low-status manual labour by virtue of remuneration, and to avoid

the shame and unworthiness that the term “prostitution” is so often used to connote – especially in the                                                                                                                          3 The information used to represent human sexual trafficking has been heavily scrutinized due to the scale of the issue and scarcity of data (from the reluctance to report and testify to the lack of government/legal aid). With respect to the sport mega-event, the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) wrote a report entitled, “What’s the cost of a rumor? A guide to sorting out the myths and the facts about sporting events and trafficking” (2011) to criticize data sensationalized in the media, and used to rationalize any “sanitizing/moralizing” campaign prior to the event.

17

 

Global North. Furthermore, in the discussion of the profession within a legal framework, I opt for the

term “prostitution” to echo the terminology used in law. That said, above all, I have tried to retain the

integrity of the translation – and wherever possible, used the term participants recommended. I elaborate

on the use of language only to make the reader aware of the divergent sociopolitical apparatuses that stake

claims on certain terminology, and to highlight my use of language in a nonneutral manner. To some

extent, some of the verbiage will seem bad-mannered at best. Should language offend, that is never the

intent. Rather the intention is to articulate the realities (and fantasies) of those entwined within shadow

economies of (allegedly) “global” cities to the degree of accurateness that the structure of language could

afford.

Given that this dissertation is concerned with how women involved in sexual commerce

experience/encounter/overcome event-led urbanism, in Chapter 2 I review theories of urban reform to

document FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association)/IOC (International Olympic

Committee)-sanctioned (deviant) development across host cities. The emphasis on (urban) land is not

intended to eclipse the realities of people housed on it, but to accentuate the extent to which FIFA/IOC-

sanctioned urbanism and entrepreneurialism is celebrated in host communities – land raped, pillaged, and

destroyed in the name of FIFA/IOC-defined “Ordem e Progresso” [Order and Progress], as written on the

Brazilian national flag – while all other urbanism and entrepreneurialism is vehemently opposed. I am

careful to contextualize these renewal strategies within the unique histories of Brazil. In the subsequent

chapter (Chapter 3), I outline data collection and analysis, and discuss the complexities encountered in the

documentation of everyday life lived in the context of a (sport) mega-event. After this methodological

overview, I examine each theoretically informed and empirically verified theme. I do this through the use

of a specific composite character. Each composite character – Rosa, Isabel and Gabriela – is built around

a distinct woman that I met in the field. But the voice of each character is not the voice of that woman

alone. It is a culmination of ethnographic data, collected and cemented in the “voice” of one person. I do

this to maintain the anonymity of each individual. As I discuss in this dissertation, to be a sex worker is to

be semi-closeted. While most of the woman had no objection to being named, especially outside of

Brazil, there is no guarantee with a dissertation that is publically available online. I also define consent as

an active and ongoing process to which each composite character served as one possible solution to the

permanence of the written word.

In the dissertation, I demonstrate the ideological play offered in the performance of sex and love as an

imitation of intimacies, a hyperreal accentuation or perversion of everyday life. This disruption or gap

(and the fantasies that circulate or operate within) is a key site of intervention, as illustrated in the

discussion of (i) Rosa and subject formation (Chapter 4), (ii) Isabel and State formation (Chapter 5), and

(iii) Gabriela and the everyday defiance realized in subtle, social revolution (Chapter 6). Rosa sparked my

18

initial interest in the complex role of fantasies in everyday survival and subject formation. Through Rosa,

I came to understand the porous boundaries between constructed binaries (such as masculine/feminine,

work/home) and the role of fantasies in subject formation. At work, fantasies fuel the affective-

performative labour of love, lust, and desire with a client. Outside of work, most evidently in the relation

with her abusive husband, fantasies make everyday life more livable. Rosa, like other women, would

often ask the rhetorical question: “What is lost?” [O que é perdido?] to counter the claim that women who

sell sex sell their most precious and prized possession. As I reflected on this, I believed that innocence is

most lost – or the awareness that the fantasies needed in survival are farcical, even cruel. Often called to

play therapist too, the women involved in sexual commerce pay constant witness to the miseries of

everyday life. In one breath, this is detrimental to innocence; in another, it is an avenue to a more honest

relation with the world. In either case, the question Rosa provoked me to ask the most was not unique to

the sex worker: How does one live life in the absence of illusion? How are identities, relationalities and

dominant view(s) of the world constituted without a certain element of fiction? Fantasies of futurity work

to formulate identities of the now and make it easier (even enjoyable) for me to remain committed to this

work despite exhaustion and isolated, internal turmoil. For Rosa, fantasies of the “good-monogamous”

life, demystified at work, still afford her optimism too – the optimism to survive nessa vida [this life].

Following Rosa, Isabel revealed the fantasies of the State that rationalize FIFA/IOC-sanctioned violence.

Through Isabel, State fantasies of futurity, the collective vision of the “good” life, warranted the theatrical

performance of State power observed in Niterói. With Isabel, one can observe the magic of the State and

the impact of FIFA/IOC-sanctioned violence “para Inglês ver” [for the English to see]. If magical realism

is defined as a highly detailed, realistic setting invaded by something too strange to believe, the chaos of

the Caixa confirmed that it is indeed a concept with a Latin American origin. Although not an initial site

of analysis (the Caixa), the close relation I maintained with Isabel in the midst of her State denounciation

made it an inevitable (yet difficult) addition to this work. In this chapter, I was careful not to term the

work of the State "performative, as I saw it more theatrical in nature – that is, nestled in magic and

falsehood, like the arrest of six men allegedly involved in sexual exploitation at the Caixa that the women

attest never occurred.

Next, Gabriela allowed me to recognize the subtle defiance in everyday debt refusal. Through Gabriela,

the voice of a woman who is aware of her exclusion from popular imaginariness of urban reform is heard.

Her existence in the urban realm is one of a ghost (or shadow host), and she is reminded of this in

constant affirmation of a “FIFA-quality” future. As a sex worker, her right to the city has been

conditionally afforded by the discretionary power of the State. I tried to accentuate the manner in which

State exclusion has led her to construct her own parallel, informal universe. By doing so, she has removed

herself from the ongoing crises of the State. From political corruption to exorbitant debt and

19

 

environmental and social degradation, the debt-free Gabriela cashes in on this patriarchal-imperialist

system under siege. Through her voice, I attempt to “queer” the State (not Gabriela) as precarious and

vulnerable, and recognize the calculated decision of the garota de programa [program girl] to

entrepreneurialize her body through the performance of certain subjectivities in search of tax-free, flexible

yet lucrative labour. In the final chapter (Chapter 7), I outline the contribution of this text to Physical

Cultural Studies, and reflect on the broader insertion of sport and sex in political-economic (urban)

reform.

20

Chapter 2: Literature Review

2.1 Deviant Development: Event-Led Urbanism

Contemporary cities are in a state of constant flux due to the perpetual negotiation, by various actors, over

what can be done in a city, by whom, and to what ends. Not unlike what occurs after human-made or so-

called natural disasters, the staging of a sporting mega-event exacerbates this state of urban contestation

with the construction of new, ultramodern athletic facilities. More often than not, as the literature on the

subject suggests, event-related construction demands a minimum level of urban erasure. The site of a new

stadium becomes what Yates McKee (2008), in his article on the post–Hurricane Katrina restoration of

New Orleans, describes as an “ecological tabula rasa,” a return to the prior formation of the heavily

designed, controlled, and scripted spaces of everyday life. A month after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf

Coast in August 2005, Richard Baker (a Republican politician and then representative for the Sixth

District of Louisiana) shamelessly said on national television: “We finally cleared up public housing in

New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Given the consequences of disaster capitalism – or what

we could call “event capitalism,” in the case of the sporting mega-event – we ought to reconsider the

parallels between the bioremediation of our cities and fantasies of urban erasure: both offer a false sense

of naturalization that is imagined to cleanse the land, and the bodies within it, but do so in favour of a

specific homogeneous vision for our collective future.

The existent literature has alluded to the establishment of a “competitive city model” (Kipfer & Keil,

2002) or rendition of this kind to describe the reconstruction of the urban environment in the vision of

ultramodern sanctuaries for bourgeois bodies (Belanger, 2000; Friedman & Andrews, 2011; Silk, 2013).

In relation to a city like Toronto, Kipfer and Keil (2002) have noted:

Shaping this process of constructing the future of Toronto is a metropolitan planning and

Olympic waterfront redevelopment vision driven by city planners, developers, architects,

and business lobbies with connections to transnational capital and the provincial and

federal governments. This vision continues to include nominally “progressive” elements

and a vocabulary of urban reform but is neoliberal and entrepreneurial in orientation and

faces no strategic, broad-based opposition. From this perspective, the “postmodern”

multiplication of oppositional claims and the years of urban reform may well turn out to

be a transitional phase in the history of urban planning in Toronto. (p. 229)

21

 

Molotch (1976) foreshadowed this kind of transformation within the urban environment in his work on

cities as “growth machines” intended to meet the market-oriented desire of each land-based elite. The key

premise of his theorization was that cities contained growth coalitions of actors and organizations, that is,

growth machines (e.g., political parties, media, utilities such as water or transit, universities), which share

a collective interest in local growth and thus compete (relentlessly) with other cities while promoting

growth as a public good amid dwindling public investment. In such a scenario, place is commodified as

an object from which to derive greater wealth. The contest for growth-inducing resource material (needed

to fuel development) combined with the collective drive for growth is now characteristic of most “global”

cities (Sassen, 2005). As Neil Smith wrote in the Harvard Design Magazine, “urban policy” has become

“little more than a euphemism for the process by which city governments huckster for private market

investments” (Smith, 1997, pp. 20-21). Situated within a context of fervent desires to revise urban form,

political parties in power (whether municipal, provincial, or federal) often prioritize strategies that work

to rapidly modernize local communities at the cost of social welfare. The simultaneous decline in federal

aid and rise in inter- and intra-urban competition (Peck & Tickell, 2002) has incited entrepreneurial

sensibilities across the urban populace (Harvey, 1987; Smith, 1984). Hall and Hubbard (1998) have

described entrepreneurial cities (much like an individual) as risk-taking, inventive, self-promotional, and

profit-motivated. Sassen (2005) has added that “Major cities have emerged as a strategic site not only for

global capital, but also for the transnationalization of labor and the formation of translocal communities

and identities” (p. 38). As an extension of this debate, Richard Florida (2014) has introduced the notion of

the creative professional – or rather the idea that in order to overcome the difficulties faced in capitalism

an individual must harness innate, creative potentialities to “apply complex bodies of knowledge” in order

to “solve specific problems” (p. 39) – that is needed to stimulate future (albeit economic) growth.

Whether the intent is to focus on labour or land, it is clear that the work of Marx and Engels has continued

to be relevant to contemporary urban theories:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of

production and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of

society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the

contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant

revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,

everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier

ones. (1848, p. 16)

The role of sport (event or franchise) within this moment to either overturn or advance growth for

“economic-corporate” interests (Gramsci, 1971) is of particular importance to my research. Theories of

urbanization have been introduced to not only (i) make sense of the rationales offered to/for/by cities keen

22

to host billion-dollar parties in the face of increased inequalities but also (ii) allude to the relation between

the built environment and the urban inhabitant, one that first initiated my curiosity in relation to event-led

urbanism as I became more familiar with the work of Robert Park:

The city is man’s [sic] most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to

remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world

which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus,

indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man

has remade himself. (1925, p. 3)

To critically interrogate processes related to urbanization (whether event-led or not) is to do more than a

mere evaluation of the built environment. To deconstruct the urban is to deconstruct the kind of citizen –

the ideologies surrounding sentience, nature, technological advancement, and so on – that the ruling

political-economic system has decided to defend, not discard, and in turn, (re)make.

Thus far, the sport mega-event literature has documented the extent to which an international

conglomerate such as FIFA or the IOC has offered one avenue from which cities can realize an

entrepreneurial (re)development scheme (Surborg, VanWynsberghe, & Wyly, 2008; Roche, 1994, 2006).

The welcoming of an internationally recognized sport event or professional sport franchise, in demanding

the construction of hypermodern sporting facilities, has reconfigured material (e.g., infrastructure

construction) and immaterial (e.g., public policies) urban orders and catalyzed processes that either

(re)produce or (re)imagine the dominant social structure. Andranovich, Burbank, and Heying (2001) have

labeled this the “mega-event strategy,” as it is said to allow “the powerful interests in cities to attach their

agendas to the Olympic process, creating the perfect policy mechanism for ensuring a growth agenda” (p.

127). Hosting a (sport) mega-event is said to garner regional, national, and international media exposure

at a “low cost,” increase tourism, and offer a clear timeline for urban redevelopment. As Hall (2006) has

articulated:

Imaging a city through the organization of spectacular urban space by, for example,

hosting a mega-event, is therefore a mechanism for attracting mobile capital and people

(of the right sort) in a period of intense interurban competition and urban

entrepreneurialism in which neoliberalism has become one of the major frameworks by

which the experience of urban development is understood. (63)

However, the vision for mega-event-driven urbanization has more often than not failed to reconcile the

extreme inequalities that increasingly afflict supposedly global cities; in fact, the literature has shown the

extent to which a sport mega-event has hindered access to public space, elevated (exposure to)

23

 

environmental risk, and naturalized an autocratic form of governance (Boykoff, 2011; Broudehoux, 2010;

Cornelissen, 2012; Gaffney, 2010). Research documenting the impact of event-led urbanization – such as

the review of housing rights violations conducted by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions

(COHRE) – has uncovered some of the devastating inequalities exacerbated in former host cities (see

www.cohre.org). For example, in Barcelona, housing complexes reserved for low-income families were

demolished to make room for further Olympicesque construction for the 1992 Summer Olympics (see

Hughes, 1992; Vázquez Montalbán, 1992). Even if properties are left untouched in the construction of

new facilities, the influx of people into an urban environment on the brink of a mega-event poses an

additional threat to low-income rental communities. The increase in tourism also causes a fluctuation in

the demand for single room occupancies (SROs), which increases the likelihood that those from lower-

income groups will be unable to compete in a more competitive market, and will be forced from their

current residences (Lenskyj, 2000). Sydney also had drastic increases in rent for low-income properties

situated next to the newly constructed Olympic Park for the 2000 Summer Olympics (Lenskyj, 2012).

Like the initiation of quasi-public agencies, the commonness of such rapid urbanization and the forced

evacuation that has been shown to follow has made the displacement of local communities a foreknown

outcome or “unknown known” (Horne, 2007) for former host cities.

The heightened amount of displacement experienced in host cities has also been continually cited in the

mega-event literature, as it is said to lead to the introduction of new “civil liberties” policies that act to

securitize specific areas and in so doing offer a sense of surveillance and safety for (certain) people. Since

the beginning of the millennium there has been an upsurge in research on terrorism and the sport mega-

event. As Atkinson and Young (2012) has illustrated, concerns about security at the Olympics closely

paralleled American fears about terrorism and the degree to which systems of civil protection could be

breached by “foreigners” (p. 287). Equally important to include in this notion of “foreigners” are those

marginalized within host communities, who have often been criminalized and policed via event-related

risk management strategies. For example, Lenskyj (2000) has demonstrated – quite admirably – that

activities otherwise recognized as basic human necessities (sleeping, eating, excreting) are barred from

host cities during the mega-event. Her work has also drawn attention to newly imposed anti-homelessness

policies enacted around the internationally recognized event that suddenly place homeless people at an

increased risk of harassment and unfair arrest. There has also been an intensified investment in

surveillance technologies and personnel, while urban architecture (even in space deemed public) can be

used to reinforce the law – park benches are shortened to hinder excessive loitering, retail doorways are

gated, and public toilets are removed (Mitchell, 1997). In Atlanta, the site of the 1996 Summer Olympic

Games, over 9000 homeless people, most of African-American descent, were arrested for activities such

as sleeping in park space or on the street of newly privatized (formerly public) space. All these kinds of

24

behaviours became criminalized in 1996, directly before the Summer Olympics. In Athens, local

authorities established a law that would allow land to be seized from host communities for Olympic-

related construction for the 2004 Summer Olympic Games. The slum settlements in Aspropyrgos and

Ano Liosia were demolished under this law, leaving families with no homes and a mere 100,000

drachmas (US$266) as compensation. New facilities were never built on either site, nor were the old

restored (COHRE, 2007). Unfortunately, these polarizing outcomes from event-led urbanization are

difficult to reverse once written into the legal system and physically rendered in stone, steel, and glass.

However temporary the event itself is, the impact on the urban landscape has, as demonstrated above,

created a permanent effect.

In the context of Vancouver, the 2010 Winter Games Olympic momentum was used to promote policies

that shifted public responsibilities to the private sector. One such initiative worked to address social

inclusion through market-based intervention. In an attempt to socially leverage Vancouver 2010, local

parties in power created “Building Opportunities with Business” (BOB), in order to mend the limited

labour opportunities experienced by those living in the Downtown Eastside (DTES). The program was

intended to support local business development and increase job opportunities for the inner-city

population. According to the website:

BOB is a connector, a resource and facilitator working to: strengthen the inner-city’s

community capacity; identify and build on untapped business opportunity; improve

employment opportunities and retention; and increase investment in Vancouver’s inner-

city. (http://www.bobics.org/)

VanWynsberghe, Suborg, and Wyly (2013) examined the effect of this (so-called) social inclusion

commitment on local host communities. With an emphasis on the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood

located on unceded Coast Salish territory, popularized as a zone of degeneracy consolidated in race, class,

and gender inequalities and repeatedly subjected to state violence (noted especially in the aggressive

policing of municipal zoning codes and bylaws and documented extensively in the legal activism of Pivot

Legal Society), VanWynsberghe and colleagues argue that social inclusion policies are crafted to further

relinquish public responsibility while still profiteering from the miseries of the margin:

The products for sale are the traditional duties and responsibilities of government and

civil society. The clients are already powerful politicians, bureaucrats, consultants and

business leaders who are accorded even greater special powers in the name of an “once-

in-a-lifetime” mega-event and its planning needs. (p. 2077)

25

 

Local governments (municipal and provincial) within Vancouver, when confronted with the transnational

corporatist force of an international (sporting) federation such as the IOC, were found to corporatize

social welfare policies (through the creation of intern and volunteer opportunities) and entrepreneurialize

the most vulnerable population within the greater Vancouver area. The nature of this effort caused the

local Olympic growth machine to act as a “neoliberal social trustee” (VanWynsberghe, Surborg & Wyly,

2013, p. 2089), creating a quasi-private organization with the intent to tackle structural inequalities of

inclusion in an era of real estate capitalization and land-market speculation. While land promised for

social housing, desperately needed in the Downtown Eastside, was sold for private development and

provincial legislation (e.g., the “Assistance to Shelter Act”) was passed to award police forces new power

to move homeless people from the street into a shelter, the marginalized communities of Vancouver were

encouraged to intern, volunteer, or work for minimum wage on constructing Olympic-related necessities:

“Medal podiums, ski racks and on-hill warming huts would have to be purchased one way or the other,

but through BOB these expenditures could also be used to turn an unproductive downtown population

into a productive one without having to address much larger social issues, such as public health or income

inequality” (VanWynsberghe, Surborg & Wyly, 2013, p. 2087). A globally constituted yet locally

implemented growth regime operating under the auspices of the IOC has found it suitable to exploit the

socioeconomic and political realities of some of the most vulnerable (or to use a term from the former

website, “untapped”) communities in Vancouver. These policies endorse entrepreneurialism via state

intervention yet fail to recognize the broader systemic realities that maintain income inequalities in the

Downtown Eastside (for further discussion, see Blomley, 2004; 2009; Ley, 2000; Slater, 2004). Reference

to “social inclusion” policies initiated in Vancouver (associated with 2010) is done to emphasize the state-

prescribed employment and skill development opportunities made available to an individual otherwise

contained and secluded from the popular imaginary – opportunities that create low-waged, undervalued,

manual labour. This is the FIFA/IOC-sanctioned entrepreneurialism celebrated in event capitalism. In the

same breath, we come to understand the reverse – that is, the entrepreneurial (often informal) labour

opportunities that are self-made in the absence of state intervention, which are popularly constructed as

culturally repugnant, vehemently opposed, and, as a threat to event enthusiasm, violently restricted. If

employment is popularly heralded as the panacea for social inequalities, only a certain kind of

employment is tolerated for those with an already limited hope. Social inclusion policies, which

“entrepreneurialize” the urban poor, do so as deemed fit within the dominant (neoliberal, capitalist)

development narrative. This is not to denounce capitalism – and the individualistic, entrepreneurial

qualities it has sought to accentuate – but rather to recognize (as I discuss in detail below) that the

strategies introduced in event-led urbanism (in celebration or crisis) perpetuate dominant ideologies

within the current political-economic system. Capitalism did not create the event but it does continue to

fuel the response – trickling down from the institutional level onto the everyday, individual citizen.

26

In an effort to better understand event-led urbanization and the attendant social and political economic

legacies, it is useful to consider the work of Naomi Klein (2007) and her notion of “disaster capitalism,”

which has illustrated the parallel manner in which a mega-event, like an urban crisis, can facilitate the

implementation of a neoliberal “shock doctrine,” guided by an extralegal form of governance that will

redistribute resource material across local communities. Recent critical work examining the effects of

mega-events has clearly demonstrated how the processes of event-led urbanization work to physically

entrench social inequalities in the urban form. The excessive policy manoeuvres, pushed through local

governments in a moment of celebration, share the dimension of necessity with Klein’s shock doctrine –

in order to respond to a disaster, or to host a world-class mega-event, certain transformations of the city

are presented as both imperative and inevitable. Shock is thus used to rationalize political-economic

restructuring at the level of policy, as well as the construction of new leisure and consumption facilities,

which are the ultramodern sanctuaries for bourgeois urban bodies (See Silk & Andrew’s (2006)

descriptions of these processes in Baltimore). As Klein explains, the use of shock is a technique to impose

a particular ideological goal, typically associated with a neoliberal, corporatist impulse. The shock

doctrine is therefore a practical tool for the analysis of mega-event urbanism because it can be used to

effectively illustrate the aggressive implementation of radical (i.e. free market-fundamentalist) policies

without requiring democratic consent. The result, according to Klein, is disaster capitalism, a form of

capitalist accumulation that relies on large-scale crises to create economic opportunities.

As a prime illustration of this economic shock therapy, Klein discusses the case of post–coup d’état Chile,

which, under the dictatorial control of the U.S.-backed General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973-1990),

undertook the “most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere,” one that, under the direction

of Milton Friedman, created a “rapid-fire transformation of the economy – tax cuts, free trade, privatized

services, cuts to social spending and deregulation,” (Friedman, 1962) facilitated by the speed, suddenness,

and scope of the economic shift that followed the violent overthrow of socialist President Salvador

Allende in 1973. According to Friedman’s logic, in order to restructure the dominant socialist economic

model, some form of shock therapy or major collective trauma was needed to temporarily suspend the

democratic process, or block it entirely, consequently and permanently transforming the environmental,

social, and political tenor of local communities. If this Cold War example is somewhat extreme, there are

similar if somewhat “softer” political strategies undertaken in the midst of environmental disasters and

sporting mega-events that also demand the reconfiguration of political processes by using devastation or

celebration to institute new policies that refashion urban space. At the heart of disaster and event

capitalism, then, is a need to facilitate capitalist accumulation by undermining or destroying outright

existing social relations. This is not a new idea. As Klein has noted, the exploitation of crises has long

been the mantra of Milton Friedman, pundit for unfettered capitalism and popularizer of the free market.

27

 

In the tendentiously titled Capitalism and Freedom (1962), he wrote: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived

– produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are

lying around” (p. ix). But even Friedman cannot claim to be the inventor of this crisis-driven doctrine. As

early as 1867, Karl Marx remarked that “[f]orce is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant

with a new one. It is itself an economic power” (Marx, 1990[1867]: 916). It was Marx who critiqued the

value of crises as a capitalist mechanism, one that could restructure and renew economic realities. As

such, crises were considered an essential component of the dynamics of reproduction. For Marx, an

effective form of force and the sense of shock it created would contribute to the extralegal context needed

to refashion cities in an authoritarian, antidemocratic manner – this Marxist theoretical critique is

ironically displayed in the ideologies of Friedman. It was a Marxist geographer, Henri Lefebvre (1991),

who later adapted this logic with his “theory of moments” based on crises; a “moment” marked a

significant period in which existing orthodoxies stood trial and could be radically overturned and altered.

In disrupting the everyday, a sense of shock created an extralegal context, thereby opening new

(capitalist) possibilities.

Building on the spatial-temporality of the event, recent literature has started to explore the applicability of

Giorgio Agamben (2005) and his notion of a “state of exception” to describe newly imposed strategies of

(de)legitimation or (de)legalization in the theorization of event-led urbanization. In relation to the

Olympic movement, the literature has vividly illustrated the obvious state of exception created as a result

of increased fragmentation and privatization imposed on behalf of the IOC (synonymous with FIFA) in

host cities before, during, and in the wake of an event (Boykoff, 2011; Coaffee, 2015; Sánchez &

Broudehoux, 2013). In the cases of former host communities, nongovernmental and private agencies

invested in the event decide the vision for urban revitalization and leave few opportunities for the public

to participate in processes that will drastically transform local communities. In addition, there is also a

discussion emerging within the legal community regarding the tension between internationalism (i.e., the

need for international sports to operate under a consistent, worldwide legal framework) and nationalism

(i.e., the desire of each nation to preserve its sovereignty and ensure that its athlete-citizens are protected

by its laws) (Mitten & Opie, 2010; Nafziger, 2011). A “state of exception” is thus seen to unfold as the

interests of private parties are positioned outside the traditional rule of law.4 The IOC and those affiliated

with the Olympic movement, as established within the Olympic Charter, secure the command of event-led

urbanization and thus create the conditions under which they can manoeuvre within the economic, social,

                                                                                                                         4 I think it is somewhat salient to note that sport is not the sole mechanism through which a “state of exception” could be established. For example, the recent Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), aim to restructure international commerce and trade so that capitalist expansion can flourish without the encroachment of countries' sovereign law.

28

and political urban terrain – and manipulate the physical terrain – without strict adherence, for example,

to the laws of a city.

It is especially troubling that this concentration of power awarded to FIFA and the IOC has worked to

create a whole “zone of arbitrariness” (see also Claes, Devroe & Keirsbilck, 2009, p. 22) in which the

universal sovereign law (such as a national constitution) is dismissed in favour of billion-dollar parties for

the ostensible elite. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), an independent, international arbitral board

based in Lausanne, Switzerland, established by the IOC in 1984, was designed to resolve disputes directly

or indirectly related to sport. The Swiss Federal Tribunal has ruled that the CAS's rulings have the same

force and effect as a judgment rendered in a sovereign court. But the CAS is not an international court of

law; it is an arbitration tribunal beholden to private parties. The globalization of sport has occurred in the

same moment in which the legal regulation of sport has shifted to private authorities (Mitten & Opie,

2010). This growth in private self-governance has led to the development of an international arbitral

institution that has the jurisdiction to operate autonomously and independently from national law. In such

a context, the sport mega-event has contributed to the establishment of a transnational legal system,

maintained via the IOC. This “zone of arbitrariness” is further extended to the urban context in which the

IOC/FIFA maintain the power (via a Host City Contract) to (re)write local law and impose redundant

“FIFA-quality” architecture. Mega-event research that has built on the work of Agamben (2005) has

further elucidated this trend to reveal the manner in which FIFA and the IOC have bound host cities to

processes that threaten the State, redefine “citizenship” (Ong, 2006), reshape urban realities (Gaffney,

2010) and restructure strategies of local law enforcement (Vonn, 2010). In the context of Rio de Janeiro,

Gaffney (2010) has documented the heightened fragmentation and privatization of the State that is

welcomed with the sport mega-event (such as the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic

Games). In November 2015, the Comitê Popular Rio Copa e Olimpíadas [Popular Committee for the

World Cup and Olympics in Rio de Janeiro] launched their fourth dossier, which detailed event-led

processes of exceptionalism (lack of information, participation, and transparency in relation to FIFA and

Olympic construction) and dubbed Rio de Janeiro the “cidade de exceção” [city of exception] (p. 8). The

consequence of these depoliticizing activities (to borrow from Gaffney, 2010) is that

nongovernmental/private entities invested in the event are able to decide the vision for the future without

democratic consultation. The histories of colonialism and spatial containment that mark elite (often white)

urban territories continue apace, this time via event-led urbanism. Segregated into tightly patrolled, newly

pacified (or rather, militarized), and ubiquitously feared communities, often of colour (to borrow from

Razack, 2000), the favela in Brazil is treated as a “threat” to bourgeois, bureaucratic bodies. Even Google

Earth removed the favela from the popular eye. The favela, home to more than 11.4 million people

(predominantly of colour, and poor) across Brazil is shown online as lush, green space.

29

 

The internationally heralded sport spectacle can be regarded as a reflection of broader political-economic

order, one that has been shown to further illuminate familiar asymmetrical development. Indeed, the

territories attacked on the field or court – a space in which powerful, sculpted bodies move and entertain

us – offer a visual metaphor for the contestation that some are forced to bear in everyday life. But while

most remain oblivious to the manner in which highly corporatized sport facilities (such as Maracanã) reify

social divides, those harmed or eliminated in the creation of the spectacle cannot avoid it. For some, this

struggle is neither chosen nor celebrated; it is the mere consequence of deviant development. The

aggressive pursuit of capitalist expansion that has continued to prompt shock and awe has also intensified

resistance. For instance, the anti-IOC movement in Vancouver organized around three main issues –

indigenous rights, economic concerns, and civil liberties – and found solidarity across libertarian groups,

human rights workers, environmental activists, and bystander publics (Davidson, 2013; van Luijk &

Frisby, 2012). At the Confederation Cup in 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, an event viewed as a precursor to the

2014 FIFA World Cup, a million people took to the street, protesting everything from corruption to

government priorities and demanding FIFA-quality health care, education, and working conditions. With

a police-estimated 2 million people in the street, the 2013 Confederation Cup represented a landmark

protest even for this “rebel” (Harvey, 2012) nation. The 2013 Confederation Cup proved to be the largest

urban uprising in Brazil since the 1992 protest against former President Fernando Collor de Mello. The

movement also initiated a series of public rallies against the government corruption and police brutality

associated with 2014 FIFA construction; from May to July 2014, approximately a million people took to

the street across FIFA host cities. This is a spirit of activism that has no doubt persisted post-Copa in the

midst of Dilma and Petrobras mayhem. Urban communities took to the street from March 15, 2015 to

April 12, 2015 and August 16, 2015 to December 13, 2015 to demand the impeachment of President

Dilma Rousseff due to corruption linked to the state-owned energy company, Petrobras. This wave of

“rebel” cities (Harvey, 2012) has continued to advertise a similar message: people are not ignorant of this

political-economic state of siege. And while the literature (and now media) has continually focused upon

the extent to which narrow, market-driven ideologies evoke resistance – highlighting the increasing scale

of dissent against megaparties and often glamorizing its associated protest – less is known about the

communities silently wrestling with the wreckage of legacies lost.

The question haunting these transformative processes is whether or not event-led urbanization can treat

certain local communities – with their complex memories, histories, and social relations – as erasable.

The notion of tabula rasa has been a naturalized phase of urban (re)development. Histories erased are not

mourned – the future is celebrated. Even Mayor Eduardo Paes traveled around the world to proclaim Rio

de Janeiro the “City of the Future” – this logic of erasure for future profitability is enacted on land and

bodies. Like the athlete injected with stanozolol, a sport mega-event is an injection of the neoliberal,

30

corporatist imaginaries into the urban environment. To summon Debord (1967), this form of collective

entertainment does more than offer a social opiate to pacify the masses. It has assemblies of people

actively cheering along with, and protesting against, the sporting spectacle while the rest (those less

recognized in the media and literature) circumvent the chaos of the moment. Rather than (re)tell stories

related to the suppressive or celebratory nature of urban development, this dissertation has been

concerned with the less acknowledged, more subtle (even somewhat productive) role of the event in order

to qualitatively understand how – in generating condensed, rapid, and exaggerated processes of urbanism

– the sport mega-event has also created a condition in which communities otherwise deprived of social,

economic, or political power might cultivate a view of the body as a value-producing investment. These

entrepreneurial tendencies are not an ad hoc response to crisis; for the women involved in sexual

commerce much like the men involved the event, it is an expression of the tendencies interwoven into the

urban fabric. In the next section, I examine the construction of commercial sex as an urban vice, which

made it possible to put (certain people) to death (Stoler, 1997). It is the (ab)use of sport as colonial tool

for capitalist expansion that has accelerated existent processes that historically and geographically

ostracize the sex worker in a rhetoric of either victimization or disease and degeneration. Nevertheless,

either construction (to be labeled victim or social contagion) has failed to account for the intricacies of

everyday “real” life for the women and men involved in sexual commerce. The focus is thus not on those

victimized or exploited by “bad businessmen” (to follow Bernstein, 2007) but on the structural realities

that inclined women and men to entrepreneurialize the body (race, femininity, sexuality) in pursuit of

profitability via sex, an undeniable yet often overlooked physical culture.

2.2 Within the Shadow: A Historical-Geographical Overview of

Prostitution in Rio de Janeiro

Sex work in Brazil and Canada has been regulated via the discretionary power of police.5 No law or

ordinance has ever existed in the Brazilian Penal Code to criminalize the exchange of sex for money, as

Sandra Lauderdale Graham has described:

In 1871 the chief of police recalled his own failed attempt in 1869 and that of his

predecessor in 1867 to persuade the city council to legislate against the consigning of

slave women to prostitution. Unwilling to grant police the necessary powers of

                                                                                                                         5 In Brazil, like Canada (even with the enactment of Bill C-36 [Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act]), sex work can be best understood as an extralegal form of regulation.

31

 

enforcement or assume the costs, the council backed off. A subsequent police chief in

1875 soundly opposed legal measures as meddling attempts to register women . . . And

there the question of prostitution was left. (1991, p. 684)

Rather than criminalize prostitution in Brazil, there was a subversive adherence to the spatial allocation of

vice that allowed for an individual to relieve himself (as was often the case) of the licentiousness that

social life could not otherwise restrain. In this sense, prostitution was viewed as a “necessary evil” that

required vigilant management to diminish the spread of “filth” (most markedly in the form of disease)

outside the heavily regulated boundaries of the urban shadow. Framed as a public health issue, local law

enforcement and medical authorities enacted a moral “hygenization” campaign to register and examine

women involved in prostitution. This was reminiscent of the hygienist ideologies that characterized public

policies in the First Brazilian Republic (1889-1930). With the abolition of slavery in 1888, the end of the

war with Paraguay, and the declaration of the First Republic, immigration from Europe increased at the

same time the nation experienced an internal migration of those once enslaved.6 The diaspora intensified

fear of social unrest (Blanchette & Schettini, 2014). This in turn led to a series of repressive policies that

imposed order and control in the burgeoning capital of Brazil.7

The 1890 Penal Code made the “facilitation” (i.e., pimping) of prostitution criminal. In 1904, Congress

ratified an international anti-white-slave-trade treaty. In 1915, legislation was passed that called for the

deportation of foreign men and women charged with “facilitation” and made it illegal to “operate houses

of tolerance [casas de tolerância]” or “rent rooms to facilitate prostitution” (Caulfield, 1997, p. 91).

Nevertheless, as reflected in the unresolved debate in parliament, legislation vaguely defined

“facilitation” and “casas de tolerância,” which subsequently complicated the enforcement of the law. The

                                                                                                                         6 It should be noted that colonialism in Brazil first relied on indigenous labour (even before 1532, with the first Portuguese settlement) and later on the Atlantic slave trade. From 1501 to 1866, Brazil received an estimated 4.9 million enslaved people from Africa – more than any other country in the world. The Port in Rio de Janeiro received 2 million enslaved people – four times the amount taken to the entire United States. In 1933, Gilberto Freyre wrote “The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization,” in which he celebrated Brazil as a racial democracy. He stated: “The majority of our countrymen are the near descendants either of masters or of slaves, and many of them have sprung from the union of slave-owners with slave women” (p. xi). He later added: “The influence of the African, either direct or vague or remote. In our affections, our excessive mimicry, our Catholicism, which so delights the sense, our music, our gait, our speech, our cradle songs – in everything that is a sincere expression of our lives, we almost all of us bear the mark of that influence” (p. 278). His work has since received much criticism, with his concept of “racial democracy” denigrated as myth. In Rio de Janeiro, racial segregation can be mapped geographically. The wealthier South Zone is home to approximately 90% white people. The darker the skin, the more likely a person is to live in one of the approximately one thousand favelas. At the national level, a black worker is paid on average 36.1% less than a nonblack worker, irrespective of educational attainment (Pesquisa de Emprego e Desemprego, 2013). However, this is not the case in realm of sexual commerce, in which the darkest-skinned women (and men) garner the highest pay (see Mitchell, 2016). 7 In 1960, Brasília became the new capital of Brazil, which led to a significant decline in employment in Rio de Janeiro.

32

ambiguities of the law created enforcement strategies that were (and continue to be) influenced by a

shifting public discourse, cash flow of sexual commerce, and the willingness of parties to negotiate with

local police. At the same time, illegalities surrounding the sale of sex were used to rationalize zoning

ordinances, misconstrue eminent-domain law, and sanction police violence. In 1920, the birth of the

Mangue in Rio de Janeiro, as documented in the work of Sueann Caulfield, foreshadows the tendencies

observed with event-led urbanism:

Brazil’s desire to portray itself as a modern nation involved obscuring prostitution control

in its capital city, Rio de Janeiro. How could Brazil regulate prostitution and still be

considered modern? While prostitution became an astonishingly frequent topic of debate

among diverse groups of public officials and professional elites, control measures in Rio

were never clearly delineated. Official regulation was considered by legislators to

contradict both Catholic morality and civil liberties guaranteed by Brazilian law.

Nevertheless, pressures to clean up the city so that elite families and foreign visitors

would not have to view prostitutes forced the police to follow extralegal policies. Their

actions, including the relocation of some prostitutes to less visible and less desirable parts

of the city, reflected the racial, ethnic, and class prejudices that informed elite ideals for

the nation. (Caulfield, 1997, p. 86)

Fast forward to a more recent time: these tendencies continue to be evident in the spatial containment of

vice in Rio de Janeiro and other postindustrial cities. As Elizabeth Bernstein wrote in her account of

postindustrial sexual commerce in North America: “Whether sex work is decriminalized, legalized, or

criminalized, the interests of real estate developers, municipal politicians, and business owners may

overshadow the concerns of feminists and sex workers” (2007, p. 20). In Rio de Janeiro, these extralegal

policies established the Mangue, an infamous red light district near the port district of Centro [downtown]

and the more “Europeanized” Lapa for carnivalesque, “luxury” prostitution. Prior to 1920 and the visit

from King Albert of Belgium, both Lapa and the Mangue were well known as “moral region[s]” (Park,

Burgess & McKenzie, 1984 [1925]) for “Europeanized” or exotic leisure. The tolerance of prostitution in

either area further cemented the profession as an informal form of labour within the urban environment,

subject to the discretionary control of local law enforcement.

Maintenance of this informal network contradicted the “abolitionist” or anti-regulatory disposition of

Brazilian law. Blanchette and DaSilva (2011) call attention to the manner in which the ideological debate

on prostitution (and the resultant lack of clear legislation) benefited those involved in sex work by

enabling them to build a network of powerful, parastatal allies (political parties, local businessmen, etc.).

At the same time, local law enforcement, shackled in ambiguities and caught in the midst of divergent

33

 

ideological approaches, further contained sexual commerce (and other related industries of vice) within a

tightly monitored “zone of arbitrariness” or “state of exception” similar to that discussed in relation to the

sport mega-event. In such a sphere, it became more difficult for the spectacle of prostitution to offend

“honest” bourgeois families or tourist classes. This parceling of the built environment fashioned sexual

“deviance” into the urban shadow and facilitated the establishment of an informal, parallel universe in

which sporadic sanitization or “hygienization” could occur. Promiscuous sexual behaviour was (and has

continued to be) tolerated as a containable nuisance. The “sexscapes” (to borrow from Brennan, 2004) of

Rio de Janeiro, are further described later in the text. However, it should be noted that high- and middle-

class, more “respectable” businesses are tolerated (with the “reasonable arbitrary power” [Caulfield, 1997,

p. 90] of local law enforcement) in the tourist-friendly South Zone (i.e., Copacabana, Lapa, Ipanema,

Leblon), whereas sex businesses that cater to a lower-income bracket are forced to the margin (e.g., Vila

Mimosa – the new Mangue). Movement in and out of the tourist zone afforded me the chance to better

understand the cross-race and interclass contact made possible in sexual commerce, and the variation of

businesses (and people) that come to create the sexscapes of Rio de Janeiro – those under the South Zone,

post-Giuliani street light, and those sequestered in the shadow.8

Within more recent histories, Brazil has actively supported prostitution, funding agencies that act in

support of sex worker labour rights, and recognizing sex work as an official occupation, through the

Brazilian Ministry of Labour and Employment, in 2002. The inclusion of the profession within the

Brazilian Classification of Occupations (whose acronym in Portuguese is CBO) has afforded a registered

profissionais do sexo (sex professional) social benefits through the Ministry of Social Security via the

National Institute of Social Security (INSS). As an autonomous worker, a sex professional can collect a

salário-maternidade (maternity pay) for a 120-day period, a retirement/pension fund, workers

compensation, disability aid, and medical care. Furthermore, in 2005, the Brazilian government rejected

$40 million from the Bush administration in American AIDS relief through the US Agency for

International Development in protest of the requirement that countries first sign a pledge “condemning”

prostitution (Mitchell, 2011). Blanchette and DaSilva (2011) document 278 prostitution venues in the city

of Rio de Janeiro, with “venue” defined as a single address or cohesive “moral region” (Park, Burgess &

McKenzie, 1984 [1925]). Vila Mimosa (the reconstructed Mangue) qualifies as a single venue, with

twenty-five separate clubs, houses, bars, and termas (sauna-brothels):

                                                                                                                         8 In 2009, the governor of Rio de Janeiro State, Sergio Cabral, hired Rudolph P. Giuliani (former mayor of New York City, now chairman and chief executive officer of Giuliani Safety & Security, Inc.) as chief of security for the 2016 Olympic Games (Boykoff, 2016; Mitchell, 2016). Giuliani was responsible for the “zero tolerance” campaign in New York that “cleansed” lower Manhattan of homeless people through revanchist gentrification strategies (Smith, 2009). In Rio de Janeiro, this “zero tolerance” campaign had local law enforcement detain any unlicensed street vendor, tow any car without proper registration, and remove homeless people from any major thoroughfare now ablaze with streetlights at night.

34

A prostitute needs a place where she can meet with clients. This involves the creation of

what Robert Park and Ernest Burgess [(1984) [1925], 45-48] call a “moral region,” a

space where a distinct moral code prevails. Such spaces must minimally attract clients,

offering anonymity and some degree of choice in sexual partners; they can be virtual,

such as an Internet site, or even interspersed with other spaces, as is the case of much

Copacabana, where “normal” bars also serve as meeting places for prostitution, but they

must exist for prostitution to occur. In Rio de Janeiro, surplus is generally extracted from

prostitution by third parties through the control of these moral regions where prostitution

is tolerated or permitted. (Blanchette & DaSilva, 2011, pp. 136-137)

In 2013, the Association of Prostitutes of Minas Gerais (ASPROMIG) entered into agreement with the

National Bank, Caixa Econômica Federal, the second largest government-owned financial institution in

Latin America, to provide the devices needed for sex workers to accept electronic payments, and offered

credit cards, cheque books, and lines of credit to those with an ASPROMIG identification card, Cadastro

de Pessoas Físicas (CPF or Brazilian Taxpayer Registry) and proof of address. Nevertheless, despite the

negligible entrance into the formal sector, consensual adult prostitution has failed to be regulated because

the activities surrounding the sale of sex remain illegal (e.g., operating or owning a brothel as well as

procuring, pandering, or profiting from prostitution).

While prostitution is labeled as “the oldest profession,” contemporary sexual commerce is always already

embedded in broader structural transformations that are intertwined with processes of urbanization

(Bernstein, 2007) and undeniably accelerated in event-led construction. The common focus of parties in

power has been to eliminate the visible manifestation of “booty” capitalism (to borrow from Weber, 2005

[1905]), needed to survive in the wake of diminished social welfare and chronic un- and

underemployment. In fueling informal (allegedly deviant) economies, the formal sector has also made

them the focus of punitive, state-initiated action. This dissertation offers stories told by those working in

postindustrial sex-related businesses that do more than describe the realities of women and men involved

in sex as work; they also reflect the wide-sweeping reallocation of urban space for white, privileged

tourist classes – a process Lisa Sanchez has described as “spatial governmentality” (1997; 2004) – in

which urban space (rather than individual bodies) is targeted in reform. In experiencing such spatial

tactics as the violent eviction of sex work from rapidly gentrifying “host” communities, the effort of local

law enforcement did not eliminate sexual commerce (neither supply nor demand) but rather, reconfigured

it. I illustrate that the (re)mapping of urban spaces to appease international tourist classes unintentionally

remaps geographies of desire – creating new forms of domination but also new possibilities for creative

35

 

entrepreneurship.9 Excluded from popular protest, these oppositional economies are located somewhere

between passivity and complete upheaval – their effort is subtle yet obvious, organized yet spontaneous,

dispossessed yet occupied. To better understand the involvement of women (less often men) in

commercial sex, in addition to the spatial organization of the profession I want to now turn to the

historical insertion of certain women (raced, classed) into the labour force, informal or otherwise.

2.3 Women and the Informal Economies of Brazil: The Quest to

Become “Gente”

The entrenchment of informal (allegedly deviant) economies has invited a heightening of state incursion

and violence, but it has also continued to offer an indispensable source of material sustenance for the local

populace, whether poor and impoverished or not. It is the pursuit of economic advancement that does not

mark a single (class/gender/race-based) social category. According to Blanchette and DaSilva (2011, p.

133), three potential employment opportunities are often cited in lieu of prostitution: paid domestic labour

as a maid, unpaid domestic labour as a household wife, or work as a supermarket checkout clerk. Despite

available work within the formal sector, women consider prostitution to be more lucrative and favourable

(flex schedule, tax-free employment). The work has shown that the main motivation to pursue prostitution

is ambition, the possibility of securing enough income to survive and even advance in current

socioeconomic status, that would otherwise be unthinkable in more formalized (yet accessible)

opportunities for employment. The impact of “modernized” waged labour in Brazil (see Illich, 1983;

Boserup, 1970) has had a particular consequence for women. Scheper-Hughes has described the extent to

which women are doubly exploited as “shadow worker[s]” – forced to forfeit autonomy and independence

in exchange for wage labour. In her book, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in

Brazil (1992), she focused on rural labour in Northeast Brazil to delicately detail the everyday violence

women encounter at work as a result of the precarious realities experienced at home:

The majority are clandestinas, women working without official “working papers” that are

meant to ensure rural workers their basic rights and benefits. As clandestine workers

(hired by plantations and usinas [mill or factory] through middlemen), women and

children are willing to accept even lower wages than the miserable minimum wage, and

                                                                                                                         9 The term “geographies of desire” is intended to gesture toward studies that have examined sexualities from a geographical perspective, and specifically the manner in which cartographies render sexualized spaces or zones of (sexual) containment (see Bell & Valentine, 1995; Browne, Lim & Brown, 2009). For literature more specific to geographies of sexual commerce, see Hubbard, 2001, 2004 and Hubbard & Sanders, 2003.

36

clandestinas naturally avoid participation in the new mobilizations of the rural workers’

unions. In short, they are viewed as scabs. Some are suspected of treachery, of spying and

reporting on the political activities of organized workers. The fact is that most female

workers in the cane are abandoned or otherwise stranded women – mothers of often large

families who have been left by their husbands or lovers and are therefore forced to

assume his place to survive. Their desperate straits make them vulnerable to exploitation

and to manipulation by their bosses. (p. 52)

In examining the relations between development and persistent underemployment in Brazil, Wood and

Carvalho (1988), building on Lluch (1979), predicted that “the relatively low rate of job creation in the

formal sector means that the number of workers making less than the 1970 minimum wage may increase

from 16 to 22 million by the year 2000, despite the high growth in output” (p. 245). In Brazil, wages are

defined by the notion of a salário mínimo (minimum salary), and income level is defined by how many

minimum salaries a person earns per month. In July 2016, the minimum wage in Brazil was R880/month,

or approximately US$273 per month (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/brazil/minimum-wages). The

Brazilian national minimum wage is adjusted annually according to the cesta básica (basket of basic

goods), which includes foods such as rice, beans, and farina that are meant to sustain a family of four over

a one-month period (Wood & Carvalho, 1988). The minimum salary is adjusted periodically to keep pace

with inflation and other consumer price indexes. Domestic workers typically earn one or two minimum

wages per month (Goldstein, 2013). Irrespective of the high rate of economic growth, the population of

poorly paid workers in Brazil has continued to rise. Some claim that the structural demand created as a

result of a federally mandated minimum wage is a main contributor to the relatively low rate of job

creation in the formal sector – even with an increase in labour supply and demand. In 1980,

approximately 35% of the Brazilian labour force was either self-employed, autonomous contractors, or

working without a signed work card (needed to access social benefits). While the informal sector does not

lend itself to precise measurement, this number was calculated based on the Monthly Employment Survey

(Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego, PME) (Bosch, Goni, & Maloney, 2007). Goldstein (2013) has written on

the hesitation of a patrão (employer) to sign the work card of a domestic worker. Despite the intention of

the 1988 constitution to enhance the rights of the worker, signing a carteira (work card) is a major

commitment on the part of the employer – most notably due to the percentage paid into the federal social

security system – and is thus still not a universal practice (Goldstein, 2013). Literature on late-nineteenth-

century Rio de Janeiro has documented the extent to which servant women were the largest single

occupational group at the time, yet most (even after the abolition of slavery) faced slave-like treatment

due to the fact that domestic work was left unregulated, “a matter of private negotiation and personal

control” (Graham, 1992, p. 130).

37

 

Since the abolition of slavery in 1888, prostitutes have been part of the carioca urban scene, mixing freely

with families and bohemians alike. Unlike many cities in Brazil, Rio has never had a delimited red light

district.

Vila Mimosa and the Mangue are the exceptions that prove the rule because they were

never able to keep us confined to those areas. When prostitutes are pushed out of public

sight and mind, however, it becomes easier to stigmatize and control them. A woman

who works a downtown privé is literally six meters away from help: a woman in a closed

club set out along the highway or segregated in a shantytown has little contact with

anyone but pimps, clients and other whores. She’s easily eliminated if she becomes a

problem. (Leite, 2009, p. 64, cited in Blanchette & DaSilva, 2011, p. 144)

In his writing on “advanced marginality,” Wacquant (2008) noted the consequence of the current state of

global capitalism that a large portion of the urban population is rendered simply irrelevant and excluded.

Indeed, as Perlman (2010) has demonstrated in her work on the favela, and as I have tried to reaffirm

now, there is current evidence of key structural dynamics of “advanced marginality” within Brazil. First,

with respect to social inequality, Brazil is one of the most economically polarized countries in the world.

Second, in relation to absolute surplus, most pertinently relevant to this project and future work, the

informal sector has risen (and has continue to rise). Third, there has been a continual retrenchment of the

welfare state whereby the Vargas era (1930-1945) and Cardoso presidency (1995-2003) saw an enormous

expansion of social services, especially in favour of the worker (e.g., the induction of the pension plan,

minimum wage, and the right to organize collectively, also discussed above, albeit with various,

unintended fallout). And fourth, there is a perpetual spatial concentration of stigmatized urban poor.

Using this as evidence of “advanced marginality,” Wacquant has argued quite compellingly:

At the end of the nineteenth century, the poor amassing in the disgraced districts of the

booming metropolis provided a willing labour force for the expansion of industry and a

restive populace suited to the flexing of the nascent protective arm of the welfare state,

with the invention of social work, the generalization of primary schooling, the

introduction of retirement schemes, and public ventures in sanitation, housing, health, and

human services. At the end of the twentieth century, they have been reduced to raw

materials for the crafting of the protean and prolific penal institutions that compose the

fierce face of the neoliberal state frowning down onto the rejects of the market society.

(2008, p. 16)

38

While Wacquant does offer a general narrative to describe the ongoing sociopolitical and economic

transformation in Rio de Janeiro and Brazil more broadly, these broader tendencies do little to account for

the unique realities of those situated in the midst of such a tumultuous terrain – that is, the people working

to overcome the broader metacontextual forces which Wacquant, despite his incredibly influential work,

seemed so determined not to discuss. To such an extent, and without ever diminishing the importance of

his effort or contribution, his work is used here to think against and through the business of daily survival

for the women working on the ground, so to speak, or maybe more literally, into the actual ground.

In her book Globalization, Prostitution and Sex Trafficking: Corporeal Politics, Elina Penttinen (2010)

has argued that globalization is both produced by and marked on bodies so that “what becomes the object

of interest is the actual bodies that are affected by globalization and how they are constrained and

empowered by it” (p. 65). The expansion of global capitalism is thus dependent upon (female) bodies for

cheap labour to which “a specific kind of woman that is the embodiment of a stereotypical sex object” –

that of the eroticized Other – and a specific kind of consumer – that of “the masculine subject that is

positioned as the one who consumes, who gazes and who is entertained and served” (pp. 52-53). In such

an account, however, the ontological and empirical possibilities for commercial sex as a site of

empowerment, liberation, and desire are not considered. Sexual commerce is seen as a site for the (male)

client to exercise sexual agency, whereas the sex worker has agency only to the extent that she can

perform the role of prostitute and “satisfy” the client (Smith, 2011). While local law enforcement

typically recycles strategies to confine and sanitize sex work in Rio de Janeiro, the women (and men)

involved in sexual commerce also rehash and revise strategies as well. For example, with the closure of

the bar Help! in 2010 many women migrated to work elsewhere in Copacabana (e.g., closer to Prado

Junior and to the Balcony Bar), Rio de Janeiro, or other Brazilian cities (e.g., São Paulo, Niterói,

Macaé).10 The post-Help! sex scene at the Balcony Bar, for example, exemplified the chaotic and

exploitative commercial sex that parties in power and local law enforcement sought to avoid.

Overcrowding of the smaller establishment forced much of the crowd into the adjacent plaza, where drug

dealing and child prostitution took place in the absence of bar staff and security personnel – security at the

time struggled to exit the bar let alone patrol the area around it. The wave of repression and urban renewal

forced many of the women to seek alternative possibilities for (sex-related) employment – reorganizing

the local commercial sex market (pushing some women underground or online) yet failing to eliminate it.

Caulfield (1997) has revealed the extent to which women continuously establish allies to defend

individual and collective liberties and find new possibilities within the interstices of incoherent,

ambiguous legislation (and the attendant enforcement). The account of everyday realities (and associated

                                                                                                                         10 The closure of Help! is described in detail in chapter 3.

39

 

strategies) can counter the narrow analyses offered in literature, such as that of Penttinen (2010), that

defines sex work as a form of patriarchal male privilege that must be abolished.

Prostitution has not only survived but also thrived within the interstice, personifying Rio de Janeiro as a

supposed sexual maverick in the global market, irrespective of the constant need to adapt to the current

social, political, and economic climate. Prior to the 2014 World Cup, however, Rio de Janeiro

experienced a wave of anti-prostitution policing activities, like other host cities (e.g., Blanchette and

DaSilva note the closure of 24 sex-related businesses in 2012, most within the rapidly gentrifying

downtown district and tourist-oriented South Zone). In conjunction with the parties in power, several

nongovernmental agencies published sensationalist stories of sex trafficking and slavery, aimed at

promoting anti-prostitution sensibilities and endorsing abolitionist strategies. These activities were not

dissimilar from the punitive processes undertaken in Vancouver, British Columbia, in which those

involved in sex as work reported a heightened amount of police harassment without arrest, decreased

availability of clientele, and increased difficulty in meeting clientele – despite the effort to strengthen

collaboration with local law enforcement (Deering et al., 2012). In Rio de Janeiro, sex-related businesses

faced heightened harassment from municipal authorities and forced closures; two women were even sent

to Bangu, a national maximum security prison (Murray, 2015). Mega-event development has furthered

the multigenerational struggle to be recognized as gente – to be known as people, visible and respected. It

is this erasure or displacement of certain racialized, gendered, classed people – stripped of the status of

“people” politically, legally, and socially – that has continued to maintain the informal sector; an entire

assemblage that is not “marginal” but integral to the formal market. These women (and men) maintain

families, local communities, and continue to fuel the image of Rio de Janeiro as a prominent tourist

attraction within a transnational circuit of desire. I now detour from the description of the local context to

discuss the theoretical curiosities and inquiries that troubled me most in the field, and remain difficult to

silence even now.

2.4 The Role of Ideologies and Fantasies in Subject and State

Formation, and Social Revolution

The intention of this section is to address the relation between ideology and fantasy, as this relation is so

often referred to throughout the text. I start with an articulation of fantasies that is built from the work of

Marx and Engels (1845). Before anyone else, even before Freud, Marx described fantasies as ideological.

In the work of Marx, this is most evident in his theorization of commodity fetishism, which is later

extended in the work of Freud (and his logic of fetishism) and established much of the bedrock (with the

40

aid of Lacan) for Žižek to articulate his notion of “ideological fantasies” alluded to in The Sublime Object

of Ideology (1989) and further detailed in The Plague of Fantasies (1997). Ideologies fuel fantasies and

vice versa. Often regarded in a pejorative sense to contribute to “false consciousness,” the “ideological

fantasies” described in the work of Žižek allow us to exceed structural boundaries. Fantasies of love and

the porous boundaries between identities (sex worker, mother, etc.) encourage optimism for a more

sustained relationship (like marriage) to form. It is for this reason that I call on Marx to build this

discussion. As Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology,

But even the saintliest man is not pure. . . . Saint Bruno, who in his lonely cell at

midnight struggles with “substance,” had his attention drawn by the frivolous writings of

the heretic Feuerbach to women and female beauty. Suddenly his sight becomes less

keen; his pure self-consciousness is besmirched, and a reprehensible, sensuous fantasy

plays about the frightened critic with lascivious images. The spirit is willing but the flesh

is weak. Bruno stumbles, he falls, he forgets that he is the power that “with its strength

binds, frees and dominated the world,” he forgets that these products of his imagination

are “spirit of his spirit,” he loses all “self-control” and, intoxicated, stammers a dithyramb

to female beauty, to its “tenderness, softness, womanliness,” to the “full and rounded

limbs” and the “surging, undulating, seething, rushing and hissing, wave-like structure of

the body” of woman. Innocence, however, always reveals itself – even where it sins. Who

does not know that a “surging, undulating, wave-like structure of the body” is something

that no eye has ever seen, or ear heard? (1845, p. 114; emphasis added)

In this instance, Marx and Engels articulate fantasies of “sensuousness” as antithetical to, and salvation

from, the “self-control” necessitated in societies of control (Deleuze, 1992). In the work of Bruno Bauer,

sensuousness “like a vampire, sucks all the marrow and blood from the life man [sic]; it is the

insurmountable barrier against which man has to deal himself a mortal blow” (Marx, 1845, p. 121).

Fantasies offer Bruno Bauer ("Saint Bruno") a channel to admit a “thirst for delights” that cause most to

“feast shamelessly” and “perish in rebellion,” but it is the work of "Saint Max" (Johann Kaspar Schmidt,

a.k.a. Max Stirner), used later in the text, that illuminate an alternative force of fantasy. For Saint Bruno,

fantasies limit the “lust of the flesh” whereas for Saint Max fantasies are “worked on” to (re)configure

that which has constrained the flesh. Saint Max demonstrates the tension between the conceived,

imagined (wo)man and the (material) realities of everyday life:

the man [sic] who, as a youth, stuffed his head with all kinds of nonsense about existing

powers and relations such as the Emperor, the Fatherland, the state, etc., and knew them

only as his own “delirious fantasies,” in the form of his conceptions – this man, according

41

 

to Saint Max, actually destroys all these powers by getting out of his head his false

opinion of them. On the contrary: now that he no longer looks at the world through the

spectacles of his fantasy, he has to think of the practice interrelations of the world, to get

to know them and to act in accordance with them. By destroying the fantastic corporeality

which the world had for him, he finds its real corporeality outside his fantasy. With the

disappearance of the spectral corporeality of the Emperor, what disappears for him is not

the corporeality, but the spectral character of the Emperor, the actual power of whom he

can now at last appreciate in all its scope. (1845, p. 137)

Fantasies, for Saint Max, can exaggerate control and thus are not an accurate depiction of that which is

experienced by/in the flesh. Max Stirner (or Saint Max) is an oft-cited figure in poststructuralist thought,

celebrated in the work of Jacques Derrida (1993) and Gilles Deleuze (1994 [1969]). To be free, Saint Max

argued, is to be both a creature of creation and creator; this differs from the traditional notion of freedom

associated with God (and defended in religion), as the bearer of eternal freedom and salvation. For Saint

Max, fantasies are often summoned to both distance and titillate the lust of the flesh – to establish

“relationships among private persons” (Benjamin, 1921, p. 289) that though popularly framed as violent

(particularly in conjunction with sexual commerce), often depend upon a deeper, more intimate, and

selfless notion of obligation (as in an obligation or debt to one another).

This contrast in imaginaries between Saint Bruno and Saint Max in the work of Marx, is later articulated

in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). In a citation that (for me)

cemented the contribution that Marx (with Engels) offered Berlant (2011) in her theorization of

relationality and affect, and the use of fantasies in everyday life. It is for this reason that I decided to

include it in detail, and draw on it further below to discuss the role of fantasies in urban revolution.

The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of

society – the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to

which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in

material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual

processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but,

on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. . . . Then comes the

period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire

immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such

transformation the distinction should always be made between the material

transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with

the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic

42

– in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it

out. (1859, pp. 11-13)

As Marx describes above, social relationality is bound to production (or the manner in which bodies,

people, produce material life) and has thus formed the basis of the “economic structure of society” (also

referred to as the economic base or infrastructure). An individual is not free to choose the social relation

into which she/he has entered; rather social relations are tied to material necessities. Bred from this

economic base, and with the intent to legitimate the power of those with ownership over the means of

production (e.g., facilities, machinery, technologies such as those owned/operated by FIFA or the IOC) is

the superstructure. The superstructure or the “definite forms of social consciousness” described above as

the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic tendencies, establishes hegemonic ideologies. As the

advocate of the superstructure, the function of ideology is to legitimate the power of the ruling class and

reinforce social division: “Ideology is not in the first place a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men [sic]

live out their roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images which tie them to their social functions

and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole” (Eagleton, 1976, p. 15). I should note

that the reference to men in the work of Marx, Engels, and Eagleton is reflective of the dominance of the

patriarch in the formulation of hegemonic ideologies and related subjectivities. Those not reflected in

popular categories are forced to emerge into the dominant social order from a failure of interpellation – to

be made known within a gap of the superstructure. I assert the importance of this ideological break

because hegemonic power is (mostly) antithetical to desire – that is, libidinal desire, which is different

from the reproductive urge or the “desire” for power. Stated differently, if the superstructure relies on

ideology to secure hegemonic power through the approval of particular desires, then any gap or fissure

within it will help maintain a certain measure of autonomy (or critical distance) from it.

In a world focused on production, labour is an important site for ideological perversion. To Eagleton

(2002 [1976]), ideologies do not merely (re)produce the dominant class but also the current “structure of

feeling” (Williams, 1977). Art, literature, like fiction and illusion, mediate and reformulate ideology but

they too are ideological. They have a certain relation to ideology that cannot be undermined. With

reference to the work of Althusser (1968), Eagleton (2002 [1976]) argued that art is a depiction (critique,

celebration, or mundane revelation) of popular ideologies: “art cannot be reduced to ideology: it has,

rather, a particular relationship to it” (p. 16). I would add that those involved in affective-libidinal

economies form a similar relation to ideology.11 In art or sex (work), the individual artist is in direct

                                                                                                                         11 Lyotard (1974) has referred to the “libidinal economy” to describe economies which harness, control, or (re)fashion sexual desire with the intention to (re)produce wealth. I decided to include the term “affective” to reference some of the more salient literature on emotional-affective-immaterial labour.

43

 

conversation with the superstructure. And while conversation alone will never change the course of

history, it is certainly needed in social change. To continue to quote Eagleton (2002 [1976]):

Ideology signifies the imaginary ways in which men experience the real world, which is,

of course, the kind of experience literature gives us too – what it feels like to live in

particular conditions, rather than a conceptual analysis of those conditions. However, art

does more than just passively reflect that experience. It is held within ideology, but also

manages to distance itself from it, to the point where it permits us to ‘feel’ and ‘perceive’

the ideology from which it springs. (pp. 16-17)

Ideological play like that offered in the performance of “good” sex (work) will allow for the imitation of

intimacies that are unmistakably connected to ideology but still maintain a crucial distance between flesh

and (super)structure. This distance (and the fantasies that circulate within) is the main site of theoretical

intervention for this work, as demonstrated in the discussion of subject formation, State formation, and

the everyday defiance realized in subtle, social revolution. The broader theoretical framework – into

which this discussion of fantasies and ideologies is inserted – is now further illustrated in the next section.

2.5 Metamodernist Performance of Love, and the Right to the City

Urban reform is the realization of a once-imagined futurity, the cementation of fantasies of the “good”

life. Reflective of the hegemonic cultural order, the urban environment is class struggle materialized –

from a structuralist stance, these are the surpluses made to benefit a select few. Whether intended or not,

the built environment will reformulate identities and subjectivities in the everyday, influence realities and

shift or reflect broader cultural sensibilities (e.g., as David Harvey [2008, 2010, 2012] has repeatedly

emphasized, a shift in the built environment can shift our relation to sentience, science, and nature). In

reading much of the earlier work of Robert Park, I often imagined the interrelation between the built

environment and the individual citizen in the context of accelerated financial abstraction. As referenced

earlier in the text, Park (1967) wrote: “The city is man’s [sic] most consistent and on the whole, his most

successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire” (p. 3). Yet to claim any

right to (re)make the city, Harvey elaborated, is to “claim some kind of shaping power over the processes

of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and re-made and to do so in a fundamental

and radical way” (Harvey, 2008, p. 2). Before Harvey, Lefebvre (1970) wrote in The Urban Revolution

that urbanization was central to the survival of capitalism and therefore bound to political and class

struggle. Lefebvre (1996 [1968]) used his dialectical method to emphasize the contradictory mediation of

44

lived space and the broader social order, and in doing so recognized the potential for revolution in the

sporadic, erratic tendencies of the everyday. Harvey (2012) further elaborated on this description of the

everyday as the localized response to global processes that can incite liberation or reinforce alienation,

and therefore will mark the basis on which revolution must occur.

Event-led urbanism (such as that initiated in 2014 Brazilian host cities) has offered an avenue, similar to

war, through which capitalist expansion and the contemporaneous pursuit of profit can reshape the world

we are condemned to live in, and in doing so, push the world we otherwise prefer onto the periphery. This

work is not meant to scorn the festive fit, opiate for our shared malaise, but to better understand the

manner in which host women whittle a right to the city in the suspension of the normative code the event

can afford – palpable in the heightened sense of crisis in us all. To host, to be hospitable, Derrida (2000)

said, is to welcome such interruption and the associated violence that undoes the self in the embrace of the

other. For Alain Badiou (1999, 2005), the “event” is the drama that can shock or create a radical break

into an open scene of ethical sociality. It thus formed the lynchpin to his revolutionary politic. Badiou

maintained that reality was firmly founded upon the “void” of “inconsistent multiplicity” and that this

void (the excessive, contradictory foundation) is masked in the everyday by the ruling-class ideology.

Nevertheless, and despite all effort, the State, in upholding this ideology (and in neglect of complicated

multiplicities) is condemned to the repetitive and perpetual task of masking difference. According to

Badiou, the event is able to make visible that which is normally excluded, to drastically rupture the

appearance of normality, and to open new space to rethink the basis of reality – the “inconsistent

multiplicity” that is otherwise veiled in the everyday. To me, the event is a critical disturbance or

interruption of the so-called rational, enlightened subject, privileged spectator and consumer of the

momentous event, that can seduce it/us to something else, lead us to an otherwise closed realm of former

impossibility. In this work, despite criticism of monotonous sport-facilitated construction that has

fashioned a “global” network of generic cities, and in solidarity with Badiou, I still remain attentive to the

productive potentialities of the event and the tactical (never fully determined) response it can occasion in

the everyday.

In doing so, I focus on the relation between host women and tourist men to illustrate the manner in which

local women reconcile broader structural processes of urbanization (globalization) in order to

entrepreneurialize their own right to the city. This research started as an investigation into the

entrepreneurial tendencies of a so-called marginal yet integral few, which are never included in fantasies

of urban (re)development. The (ab)use of bodies in labour is symptomatic of the limited opportunities

available to those excluded from the collective vision of tomorrow, barred from other plausible income-

generating resource material. Not quite congruous with the broader anti-capitalist “Right to the City”

movement, these women personify the ethos of neoliberal capitalism (entrepreneurial, profit-seeking

45

 

individualism) in order to survive amid dwindling social aid. Like the professional athlete, bodies are

used as a whittling tool. And in turn, I use these bodies as the privileged nexus to examine the manner in

which globally constituted urban reform is written on local communities. As Marx wrote, sex work is the

mere “expression of the general prostitution of the labourer” (2012 [1844], p. 99). In recognition of the

agentic potentialities of the labourer (even those involved in affective-performative labour) and the

increased defiance and skepticism directed at the normative code, the prostitute (puta) is now the

manifestation needed to carve a new semi-sovereign, anarchistic road to liberation. In fear of overly

romanticizing this more subtle form of rebellion and the liberation it can occasion, I attend to the manner

in which consensual sex with a stranger can offer an avenue to needed contact, relation, and recognition.

All of which supplement the exchange of money and afford the intimate reassurance to dream alternative

fantasies for tomorrow – fantasies that reflect and make visible the “inconsistent multiplicity” of

individual desire. Whether through continual negotiation with the dominant social order or the utter

refusal to conform to the common progress narrative – with an exalted No! – the defiance of a sex worker

is her own right to (re)imagine the city most after her heart’s desire. Grisélidis Réal, a sex work

revolutionary and writer from Switzerland who worked as an indentured sex worker throughout much of

Europe until 1995, a decade before cancer took her life, wrote:

Oh, the young girls around now are very clever, a lot more clever than I was at their age,

they already understand everything, they simply do what the others do. It’s very easy, on

one hand. You see, all the old social workers will tell you it’s the opposite, that they’re

plunged into hell, that these poor little darling[s] sob night and day begging to be saved,

but that’s not true at all. They are very pleased with themselves. They’re beautiful,

they’re young, they enjoy insane success, you just have to put yourself in their place.

Little girls who’ve been dragged through the shit all through their youth, some of them

have been in prison, or reform school orphanages, they’ve never had any pleasure in their

lives, and they['re] up here, elles s'en payent une tranche! (Hennig, 2009, pp. 130-131)

I mention above that the reliance on (informal) economies of the flesh is symptomatic of limited (more

desirable) labour opportunities. I also alluded to the fact that people do not passively accept social

marginalization or broader structural violence. The strategies employed in the informal sector are not an

aberration, characteristic of some kind of irrational netherworld. The seldom-exotic stories are actually

quite analogous to those told from within the formally recognized labour world. Aroused by the mere

mention of global capital, all women and men in deprivation enthusiastically scramble for a slice (even

crumb) of the capitalist pie. From the outset, this research has thus never intended to reiterate the feminist

literature that characterized the sale of sex as always and already exploitative – literature that failed to

account for the complexities of relationality, the specificities of individual circumstance, or the diverse

46

voice and experience of parties involved. Instead, this research has been more interested in the

“inconsistent multiplicity” so imbricated within everyday life and processes of rapid urban reform.

Labour exploitation is a serious issue that is bred from restrictive policies that limit (even criminalize)

civil liberties and individual freedom for those involved in both formal and informal employment. Make

no mistake: I understand that exploitation does occur in sex-related industries, and that such exploitation

can manifest in violence. I also understand that this is not restricted to sexual commerce alone. Nor am I

naïve enough to believe that the elimination of sex work will dissolve all societal exploitation. To claim a

right to the city through the informal sector has and will continue to be negligible at best, violent at worst,

but nevertheless an important option: one that can disrupt the uneven distribution of wealth and opulence

in some of the richest cities in the world and make visible the porous boundaries between love, sex, and

business as usual.

2.6 Sexscapes of Rio de Janeiro and the 2014 FIFA World Cup:

Methodological Prescript

As one of the most visited cities in the Southern Hemisphere, sandwiched between world-renowned

beaches and mountainous terrain, Rio has forever been in the midst of urban renewal – it is the literal city

of the future. More recently, the entrepreneurial mode of governance pioneered in Barcelona, prior to the

1992 Summer Olympic event, has influenced a wave of urban (re)development strategies enacted within

the downtown core. Jordi Borja, planning consultant and former deputy mayor of Barcelona, collaborated

with municipal authorities on the creation of the Strategic Plan of the City of Rio de Janeiro (Plano

Estratégico da Cidade de Rio de Janeiro). The document identified the (sport) mega-event as a desirable

chance to restore tourism and attract foreign as well as domestic investment (Ribeiro, 2006). The mega-

event offered an alternative or repackaged avenue to “civilizing” the public sphere – i.e., whereas health

and sanitation policies in the late nineteenth century were intended to “civilize” (those included in) the

populace, the current planning approach has allowed foreign capital to dictate terms of renewal (Gaffney,

2010). More than a mere catalyst within the Strategic Plan, an event of international status was believed to

be a crucial vehicle in (neoliberal) urban reform. Porto Maravilha, the port revitalization project in Rio de

Janeiro, has since embodied this aggressive, state-sponsored form of gentrification – representative of

event-led urbanism – in the creation of a zone of “extraterritoriality” wherein “political and ethical

responsibilities are blurred and sovereign law is suspended” (Sánchez & Broudehoux, 2013, p. 136). The

entire district has been leased to a private consortium, Concessionária Porto Novo, which is now

responsible for the management (demolition and construction) of urban infrastructure as well as the

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maintenance of basic amenities such as street lighting, drainage, and garbage collection (Porto Maravilha,

2011). With a tax exemption offered to businesses participating in the (re)development process and

municipal legislation (such as the right to build above the legal limit) sold to the highest bidder, it is not

surprising that some estimate that the area will house the most expensive real estate in the city – with a

square metre of residential or office space needing to be sold at a minimum of US$5,000 for a developer

to make a profit (Jorgensen, 2011). The illusion of inclusion (the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes,

touted 2016 as the “Games of Inclusion” with legacies of tolerance, peace, and social inclusion for the

“Cidade Maravilhosa” [Wonderful City]) has mobilized strategies of neoliberal entrepreneurialism in the

privatization of an entire municipal district.

On May 23, less than one month before the World Cup, approximately 120 women were violently evicted

from a well-known site of prostitution in Niterói, a municipality directly across the bay, overlooking an

area in Rio de Janeiro slated for an expansive urban facelift (see Appendix 1).12 The Caixa (as it is

known), an 11-storey building with a Federal Bank on the ground level, stood as the largest sex zone in

Niterói since the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1985 (see Appendix 2). In 2014, there were 85

small apartments (occupying the first four floors) rented and owned by women involved in sexual

commerce, servicing clientele during the busy business day – with some women banking roughly R8,000

(approximately US$4,000) each month. The violent removal of women in Niterói marked the most

egregious violation of civil liberties to occur in the context of prostitution before, during, and immediately

following the 2014 World Cup. Yet while some women continued to work outside the building despite a

24/7 police presence, the fallout from Niterói led several women, scurrying pre-Cup, to find a new place

of employment in Rio de Janeiro. I continued to follow much of the activity related to the Caixa eviction

(the public meeting at the Legislative Assembly for the State of Rio de Janeiro, preparation of the legal

case against the Civil Police, etc.) as I encountered women from Niterói within the Rio de Janeiro sex

scene or “sexscape” (as Brennan, 2004, described it). So to be frank, the Caixa was not a zone that I

returned to as frequently as other sex-related businesses in South Zone (e.g., Copacabana and Ipanema

Beach) and Vila Mimosa, but I do refer to the state-led violence and resultant relocation of women in and

around FIFA territories.

                                                                                                                         12 The metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro comprises 20 municipalities: Rio de Janeiro, Belford Roxo, Duque de Caxias, Guapimirim, Itaboraí, Magé, Japeri, Nilópolis, Niterói, Paracambi, Queimados, Nova Iguaçu, São Gonçalo, São João de Meriti, Seropédica, Mesquita, Tanguá, Maricá, Itaguaí and Mangaratiba; the most valued real estate is located in the South Zone, Barra da Tijuca, and some of the North Zone, as well as the area near the coastline of Niterói and the downtown area of Nova Iguaçu (Do Lago, 2014). In 2011, rental properties in Rio de Janeiro were the fourth most expensive globally and exceeded those in midtown Manhattan (Packard, 2011). Since 2011, real estate increased 29.4% in Rio de Janeiro (26.5% in Niterói). In 2015, the average price per square metre in Rio de Janeiro was approximately R10,631.00, or US$3,013.32. In Niterói, the average price per square metre was approximately R9,750.00, or US$2,763.61 (FipeZap Index, 2016).

48

Figure 2. Niterói, relative to Rio de Janeiro, with the Caixa indicated with a star

I want to introduce each zone of prostitution in Rio de Janeiro that thus became the focus for my data

collection. First, Balcony Bar in Copacabana, an infamous beach bar for working women and clientele to

meet – situated (in)conveniently across from FIFA Fan Fest and a block from Copacabana Palace,

temporary residence of the FIFA family – was closed on the morning of June 12 (opening day) over an

allegation of child sexual exploitation. Despite repeated state harassment (e.g., in 2012, local law

enforcement confiscated every computer belonging to the American owner, never to be returned) this bar

remained a key site for prostitution since the closure of the Help! discotheque in 2010. Help! was a

renowned beachfront disco located in Copacabana (on Avenida Atlântica) that has since become home to

the Museum of Imagery and Sound [Museu da Imagem e do Som], which some believe to be part of the

general “hygienization” strategies associated with the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic event. The

closure of Balcony Bar paralleled the destruction of the Help! discotheque, notorious in Copacabana.

Established in 1984, it served as the main hub for Carioca (heterosexual) sex work, which catered to a

predominately tourist market. Blanchette and Schettini (2014) state that Help! illustrated the intermingling

of sex work in the general Carioca social scenery, often with middle-class Brazilian families dining on

the patio in the midst of working women and clientele. This was indeed the case at Balcony Bar – families

were often found eating peacefully (especially during the day) on the patio while women worked the

room. Since the closure of Help! on January 7, 2010, women have moved elsewhere – some remained in

Rio de Janeiro, some moved across the bay to Niterói. Those that continued to entertain the tourist crowd

in Copacabana merely migrated to Balcony Bar, which welcomed over 600 women and men nightly

during the 2010 Carnival (Blanchette & da Silva, 2011) – occupying the space of the establishment as

well as the street and plaza directly next to it. During the 2014 FIFA World Cup, an international media

tent was located directly in front of the now-closed Help! while the television broadcast was filmed from

49

 

a newly constructed overhang that positioned the old Help! in the immediate background (see Appendix

3). Help! and Balcony Bar were similar in that women could meet men there (for the purpose of

prostitution or otherwise) but were not “employed” by the establishment and therefore did not adhere to a

schedule or strict uniform, or pay a percentage to the house. In the aftermath of the closure, the plaza

adjacent to Balcony Bar absorbed much of the business, with the informal street market capitalizing on

the newly displaced, alcohol-seeking clientele. As I overheard one woman exclaim to a member of the

Observatório, “O bar está fechado, mas a internet está funcionando! [The bar might be closed but the wi-

fi is working!]” (Communication with G. Mitchell, July 15, 2014). Due to the flock of local law

enforcement and constant harassment it would have been senseless for the bar staff to welcome underage

women or men inside. Nevertheless, with the bar shutdown, the adjacent plaza became home to a number

of local (working) youth. Some slept next to the action, wrapped in discarded Brazilian flags, while the

majority sold commodities to the crowd – one child barely tall enough to peer over his trolley made

caipirinha after caipirinha (a Brazilian drink made with cachaça, a distilled spirit made from sugarcane)

for the gringo mob that trickled out of the FIFA Fan Fest (see Appendix 4). The women continued to

attract clientele and used the now vacant patio area to dress, negotiate, and chat over wi-fi (see Appendix

5). Some women also migrated down the beachfront, occupying businesses near the intersection of

Avenida Atlântica and Avenida Prado Júnior – encroaching on an area more typically known for travesti

sexual commerce.

Figure 3. Copacabana Sexscape: Help! (1985-2010); Balcony Bar (2010-2014); Mab’s (2014-Present)

Next, Vila Mimosa, the red light district of Rio de Janeiro, near Maracanã Stadium. Local people refer to

this site as the place where favelados (derogatory term for people from a favela) go for prostitution. The

zone is approximately one kilometre from Maracanã, the only FIFA stadium in Rio de Janeiro. As a

50

dominant locale for sexual commerce within the urban network, some refer to the area as the Mangue

[literally, the “Marsh”] reincarnated – albeit in a new neighbourhood, with new businesses, women, and

clientele. On June 6, the Friday before the 2014 World Cup began, a massive billboard was erected in the

site, converting the area into a Potemkin village, and accrediting/acknowledging a number of state-

associated agencies in the bottom corner (see Appendix 6).13 I watched the first World Cup game played

at Maracanã (June 15, Argentina vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina) in Vila Mimosa, with mostly local men,

fixated on the TV. After the game, only one cab of three gringos (Argentinean men) drove through slowly

but never stopped, basically a DIY favela tour. I watched the men peer through the window of the cab,

gawking at the partially clothed (mostly black and mulatta) women walking in the street of the otherwise

decrepit neighbourhood. What the men missed from the cab was the smell – the unmistakable stench of

sewage and piss that lined the street – and the piercing funk music blaring from nearly every stereo

system on the block. This is hardly an attractive tourist destination; it is a place reserved for only the most

seasoned sex monger. Some women evicted from the Caixa in Niterói migrated to Vila Mimosa and

(occasionally) Copacabana to work.

Figure 4. Vila Mimosa, relative to the Maracanã football stadium, both indicated with a star

Not located far from the downtown financial sector, Vila Mimosa is also not far removed from the

notorious privé or fast fodas [literally, “fast fucks”] scene of the Brazilian working and middle class. My

research does not consider this scene as extensively due to the fact that many of the businesses located                                                                                                                          13 I was introduced to the idea of a Potemkin village in the work of Taussig (2010, p. 175). It is a term he used to describe the securitization of New York City prior to the 2004 Republican National Convention. As I researched the term, I found it surprising that it had not yet been applied (as far as my knowledge) to the sport mega-event. The term implies an impressive façade intended to mask an undesirable fact or condition. In Brazilian Portuguese, it would be similar to the term, “maquiagem” or to sugarcoat.

51

 

downtown were halted (for holiday or transit) as a result of the 2014 World Cup. As a result, the

downtown sex scene was incredibly quiet – with many women migrating elsewhere (e.g., Copacabana and

Vila Mimosa) to make up for lost revenue.

While it is difficult to observe each zone in isolation (as sex work is highly transient and often accidental)

it is crucial to distinguish between the Caixa, Balcony Bar, and Vila Mimosa in order to understand the

manner in which strategies of urban renewal – even if focused on one particular zone – influence the

entire network of commercial sex. As Blanchette and da Silva (2011) have explained: “Rio de Janeiro, by

any definition, is not just a singular and homogeneous sexscape (Brennan, 2004) but is better conceived

of as a series of overlapping and intertwining commercial sex scenes of almost bewildering variety and

complexity” (132). To understand each zone of sexual commerce in Rio de Janeiro is to admit that local

law enforcement has never fully sequestered or diminished this underground economy. The spatial

organization of sexual commerce within this community and perhaps other host communities can offer a

text to examine the manner in which urban (re)development is perpetually negotiated and rationalized

within a “growth regime” rhetoric. The welcoming of an internationally recognized sport event or

professional sport franchise, demanding the construction of hypermodern sporting facilities, has

continued to disrupt the material (e.g., infrastructure construction) and immaterial (e.g., public policies)

urban order and catalyze processes that either (re)produce or (re)imagine the dominant social structure. To

date, more than 20,000 families have been resettled due to Olympic/FIFA-related construction, most

without adequate employment opportunities, health facilities, education or utilities. While not all women

involved in sexual commerce are from the favela (most come from the middle-class suburban

communities that surround Rio de Janeiro), the entrepreneurial strategies embraced within local

communities have motivated much of my research. The data collected for this research were concerned

with the manner in which working women in particular, like those bidding for and staging the event,

entrepreneurialize mega-parties via affective, performance-based economies, and the difficulties

encountered as a result. In the next chapter, I detail data collection and analysis as well as the difficulties

encountered in the documentation of everyday life of local host women involved in sexual commerce.

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Chapter 3: Methodology

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man

in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by

the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that other being, on

recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. It is that

other being in whom the meaning of his life is condensed. (Fanon, 1967, p. 216)

Despite the exhaustive list of weaknesses (starting with Clifford and Marcus, 1986) and the endless

debate about representation), ethnography, which is premised on prolonged time in the field conducting

“fieldwork” (or quite simply, observing while constantly writing and reflecting), does offer an honest

attempt to reconcile historical, political-economic and cultural processes in stories of everyday life –

stories of real people navigating the real world. While the prescript (i.e., introduction and context

descriptions) described the socio-political-economic histories of urban reform in Rio de Janeiro, in this

chapter I will focus on the current context from which this project emerged – and make clear the rationale

for employing an ethnographic approach to data collection. The most central contribution of ethnographic

research (and the ultimate attraction for me) has been the detailed account of everyday life it has offered –

the stories otherwise excluded from popular debate – that eschew generalities in order to observe the

messiness of the specific. In relation to sexual commerce, ethnographies have been used to demonstrate

the manner in which state intervention does not necessarily protect those it has intended to protect

(Dewey, 2011; Zimmerman & Watts, 2003) or eliminate deeply ingrained social stigma (Kelly, 2011;

Mitchell, 2011) but rather establishes a new form of domination for the worker to circumvent (Bernstein,

2007; Izugbara, 2011). Indeed, if used in a mindful manner, future research could continue to redefine

cultural sensibilities and inform the development and implementation of public policies, legislation, and

enforcement strategies. Written to illuminate the realities enclosed in flesh (afflicted in broader social

processes) materialist-realist stories can “write against terror” (Taussig, 1989), reveal “la perruque” (De

Certeau, 1984), and allow the reader to see anew in a (counter)narrative.14 A more thorough, in-depth

review of relevant literature was offered in the preceding chapter. In this chapter, I will detail the

                                                                                                                         14 In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel De Certeau described “la perruque” (French, "the wig") as diversionary practice – “the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer” which “diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit” (p. 25). It is this silent, subtle defiance that I intend to recognize in the women I encountered in the field.

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methodological approaches used to build the empirical foundation on which I learned to understand the

mother, daughter, sister, friend, citizen who is also a sex worker – otherwise cast as a demon, sequestered

in the shadow. These methodologies inform the stories that, however “inherently partial – committed and

incomplete” (Clifford, 1986, p. 7), extend the discussion of sex work outside the abstract moral realm to

view women involved in sexual labour in the context of a mega-event as more than mere bodies or the

vectors of diseases. The messiness of the subtle, more situated stories describes a moment in the life of

individuals that now, cemented in text, still remain in a constant-continual state of flux. These are the kind

of intersubjective stories (inconclusive, rhizomatic) that ethnographies allow us to tell.15

3.1 Entering the “Field”

Sandwiched between two black bodies: I was forced to face the everyday life of shadow

economies in Brazil. Feel the sweat, flesh, and breath of the urban underbelly, with a

knife in mine. An eye for an i(Phone). I had been in Rio de Janeiro for one week when I

was mugged in Centro (Downtown) on an otherwise beautiful Sunday afternoon. If

thieves rest, it certainly wasn’t for the Lord. (Field note, May 1, 2014)

In proposing a dissertation topic, I argued, based on the literature, that sport can provide a conduit to

examine cosmopolitan urban processes, emphasizing the entrepreneurial tendencies of (allegedly) “world

class” cities in their bid to host an internationally recognized sport mega-event. Using Toronto and the

2015 Pan/Parapan American Games as a case to examine, and building from the “sport for development”

literature, I argued that (sport) event-led urban development could not be contained within or used solely

to advance the socio-political-economic agenda of the bourgeois, cosmopolitan class. Using this vantage

point, I developed an interest in investigating the more informal economies located in host communities

that seek to generate a profit from the influx of an international tourist market. Initially, I was curious

about the extent to which people in these economies use the sport mega-event as a platform to either

attract business or mobilize radically different cultural sensibilities. The relevance of sport mega-events in

urban life was demonstrated by the desire of a group of international scholars to hold a Second Annual

International Conference on Sport Mega-Events and the City (http://megaeventos.ettern.

ippur.ufrj.br/). As I stated earlier, with a developing interest in informal economies, particularly sex work

during mega-events, I presented a paper entitled, “Economies of Deviance: Sex Trade and the Sport

Mega-Event.” The paper detailed the current yet scarce literature on prostitution and the sport mega-event                                                                                                                          15 The use of the term “rhizomatic” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) is intended to remind the reader that the life stories so often learned in the field are never as linear, seamless, or even hierarchic as (maybe) illustrated in this text.

54

phenomenon available at the time. And as I alluded to earlier, this presentation led to an invitation to

participate in an ongoing research collaborative at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) as a

graduate student research assistant. The research collaborative was intended to examine the realities of

those involved in sex as work in 2014 FIFA host communities across Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I worked with a research team that Dr. Thaddeus Blanchette assembled to collect qualitative ethnographic

data in the period before, during, and immediately following the 2014 FIFA World Cup. In facilitating

data collection, Dr. Blanchette relied upon the anthropological research of sex work in Rio de Janeiro that

he has conducted over the last decade. In addition to his extensive knowledge of the local context, he is

also well connected to a number of agencies that support those involved in sex-related industries

throughout Brazil, such as APROSMIG and Davida: Prostituição, Direitos Civis, Saúde (Prostitution,

Civil Rights, Health). Davida is the world-renowned, nongovernmental organization acting in support of

women and men involved in sex-related industries across Brazil since 1992.16 In 2002, it worked with the

Brazilian Network of Prostitutes to establish sex work as an official occupation, recognized by the

Ministry of Labor and Employment, under the Brazilian Classification of Occupations (number 5198). In

addition to Dr. Blanchette, Dr. Ana Paula da Silva, Dr. Soraya Simões, Dr. Laura Murray, Dr. Gregory

Mitchell, and Dr. José Miguel Nieto Olivar also participated in the research collaborative, invited as a

result of their interest in studies related to the commercial sexscapes in Brazil. During the month of the

World Cup, we met weekly with the Observatório da Prostituição (herein referred to as the Observatory,

Observatório or OdP) to discuss the movimento (movement) and activities in the field. The Observatório

is an extension project of the Metropolitan Ethnographic Lab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro,

working in collaboration with experts from national and international universities as well as the Brazilian

Interdisciplinary Association of AIDS, the Brazilian Network of Prostitutes, Davida, and the Public

Archive of the State of Rio de Janeiro. A “satellite” team from the Observatório evaluated the local

impact of the mega-event on sex work in all the cities hosting the 2014 World Cup (Belo Horizonte,

Brasília, Cuiabá, Curitiba, Fortaleza, Manaus, Natal, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São

Paulo). As a researcher interested in event-led urban development and the role of sport as an urban

catalyst, this collaboration allowed me to concentrate on everyday realities of women who, not unlike the

athletes we celebrate, (re)source their bodies and, in effect, (re)claim the event in order to realize some

kind of economic benefit. With a direct focus on the event, I examined the manner in which global

                                                                                                                         16 It should also be noted that the name "Davida" was chosen in reference to the phrase “Mulheres da Vida / Women of Life,” a term that is often used in relation to prostitution in Brazil. In conversation, women often referred to life in prostitution as “da vida,” which is a term also used in reference to other informal economies such as the drug trade in Brazil, and positioned in opposition to a more “legitimate” life or form of labour associated with formalized, bureaucratic economies.

55

 

processes of cosmopolitanism and consumerism reconfigure everyday realities for local women involved

in sexual commerce.

As a Graduate Student Research Fellow with the Observatório, I frequented each zone known for

commercial sex in Rio de Janeiro (Copacabana Beach, Ipanema Beach, Centro, Lapa, and Vila Mimosa)

and observed activities from April 2014 to July 2014 in order to interact with and learn from those

involved in sex as work, the clientele, and local law enforcement. I also returned in January 2015, staying

until April 2015, to re-interview and observe the movements on the street in the aftermath of the mega-

event. In the field, I relied upon a number of data gathering techniques: first, a textual analysis was

conducted with relevant event-related and prostitution-related material in order to contextualize the

current sociocultural situation; second, in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with women,

clientele, local law enforcement, and allies encountered in the field took place; and finally, observational

data on each zone of prostitution (particularly Copacabana and Vila Mimosa) were gathered (See Table

1). In accordance with Malinowski, I will now detail the nature of the research – “the arrangements of the

experiments; an exact description of the apparatus used; of the manner in which the observations were

conducted; of their number; of the length of time devoted to them, and of the degree of approximation

with which each measurement was made” (Malinowski, 2002 [1922], p. 2). I invoke him now because he

so often cured the fraudulence I felt in the field. I would err not to reference the extent to which gender,

race, class, age, and like factors influenced data collection. Insider/outsider status was never static; it

depended upon the context, perspective, and the knowledge and identities shared in interaction. This was

the case in data collection; the stories told throughout this text are from the people I met under a particular

circumstance. Beverly Mullings (1999) has dubbed this the “positional space” in which situated

knowledges of both parties (the interviewer and interviewee) create a level of trust and cooperation. As I

reflect on the power in the field, I am careful not to sensationalize or reinforce the discursive construction

of “third world” women as passive or in need of rescue (as is often the case in white feminist discourse;

see hooks, 1989, 2000, for a critique). Some women encountered in the field were uninterested in my

research, and vocalized their lack of interest, sometimes with enthusiasm! More often, however, women

were interested but were completely uninterested in the ethical protocol (especially the associated

paperwork), and were more keen to move conversations forward. So as I scrutinize the power imbalance

between the Global North and Global South, the inherent methodological and ethical complexities, I

admit the interviewee is far from powerless. To paraphrase Rivers-Moore (2013, p. 155), the women and

men encountered in the field, especially those associated with the research, practice a range of strategies

to level the imbalance; they comment on the research and realize their own motives for involvement.

56

Table 1. Overview of initial research objectives, questions and data sources

Objectives Questions Data Sources

Determine the (envisioned

and/or experienced)

entrepreneurial opportunities

whittled from the sport mega-

event, in relation to sexual

commerce.

Examine the tactics (material or

immaterial) used to maximize

these opportunities and/or

overcome event-related

challenges.

Document the spatial

transformation observed in sex-

related industries as a result of

the sport mega-event.

To what extent is the sport

mega-event

perceived/experienced as an

income-generating, profitable

urban intervention?

What are some of the profit-

motivated strategies employed

by those involved in sexual

commerce, in the midst of an

international, male-dominated

sport mega-event?

How does the sport mega-event

materially (particularly with

respect to urban space)

transform sexual commerce, if at

all?

Document analyses of

prostitution, event and human

trafficking-related informational

material as well as relevant

media documentation.

(Participant) Observations of sex

workers' rights organizations,

volunteers, and the

working/living conditions of

their members.

Semi-structured interviews

conducted with key informants

identified through data collection

(i.e., in document analyses and

participant observations).

3.2 Reading the Other

Groggy from the night before, I followed the blazing light of the computer screen to the

kitchen, and readied a pot of sweet Brazilian coffee. In a city forever late, the sun comes

far too early. How unfit was I to keep the hours “like a whore” – tiptoeing in after 3am,

afraid to awake whoever shared the bed. Calculated companionship was for sale in the

street but solitude is the one thing I wish I could afford. This is home for now – no

shortage of curiosities for the mind or caffeine for the body. International press has now

erupted frenzied chaos and confusion across host communities – “The Birds” (Alfred

Hitchcock, 1963) would have made an excellent mentor. I was invited to an event for

“press” so I doubt I am better. The (or rather our) newly arrived presence is palpable in

the street yet amplified online, as stories flood social media – tweeted, liked, favourited,

57

 

shared. As I troll Twitter, I have to avoid the feed count – 1, 2, 10, 45, 130 unread stories.

(Field note, July 10, 2014)

Host cities, with the legion of foreign press personnel, become a chaotic hub for (international) journalism

and create a substantial amount of media attention. In my data collection, this online media/press material

was treated as an addendum to ethnographic data – an avenue to further examine the “unofficial” or less

celebrated stories from communities wrestling in the arena of legacies lost. In particular, I focused on

press, which discussed event-led urban renewal in Rio de Janeiro as well as trafficking, (child) sexual

exploitation, and prostitution. Via Facebook and Twitter, I was able to access anti-trafficking/FIFA-

related material, track relevant activities in the field, and connect with those people less interested in the

tournament itself. I was most attentive to material from the protest movement (e.g., Comitê Popular da

Copa e Olimpíadas [Popular Committee for the World Cup and Olympics]), Catalytic

Communities/RioOnWatch.org (a nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization that has reported on low-

income communities in Rio de Janeiro since 2010), and anti-trafficking agencies with a stated (or

insinuated) mega-event focus – e.g., the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking

(http://ungiftbox.org), Blue Heart campaign (https://www.unodc.org/blueheart/), and Exodus Cry

(http://exoduscry.com). In contrast to academic literature or the more “official” event-related

documentation (e.g., the 2014 FIFA Bid Book and Host City Agreement), media content offered a more

immediate (or “real time”) view of current social, political, and economic complexities faced by 2014

host communities – stories that, like those shared herein, illuminate realities in the host context from

behind the event façade. I hesitate to refer to the review of this material as a systematic media or even

document analysis – it is more an attempt to better situate the research (and future ethnographic

conversations) within broader social, political, and economic debate(s) at that time. At the same time,

aside from these documented stories, I also “read” bodies on the street. And, I admit, I too was read. One

Carioca told me that she knew I was not Brazilian because of the manner in which I walked; another

because of the water bottle I carried, and shirt I wore. As much as it was crucial to read and be aware of

the information online, time in the street to observe and communicate (in the absence of language) can

never be understated – even as I detail the interview process now.

3.3 Talking to the Other

Much of the written material (shared online) informed the collection of interview data. Stories written in

Portuguese also helped in my language acquisition, as I read and translated new or unfamiliar

terminology. Not having a definite grasp of the local language (Carioca-Portuguese), I was often

58

frustrated by my limited ability to communicate freely. Never was I more attuned to the affect needed in

communication, even verbal. I often made an earnest effort, saying something like “Desculpa, eu não falo

português, mas quero aprender [Sorry, I do not speak Portuguese, but I want to learn],” to elicit a

sympathetic (or pity) chuckle. I talk more about the relentless internal mirage of pessimism that festered

in the field (mostly as a result of my frustration with the language) but I want to make clear the

importance of laughter. Both Jerry Lewis, who said “funny had better be sad somewhere,” and Mark

Twain, who said “the source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow” both envisioned a world imbued

with misery yet flooded with laughter. For me, laughter has forever been a friendly crutch, in a time of

great unease. It was also a well-used tool of resistance for the women I met. Armed with a fierce tongue

and sharp wit, no one ever seemed far from laughter. In the field, I relied on laughter in otherwise unusual

(downright bizarre) life circumstances. Picture a lonely PhD, dressed in a button-down, sitting next to a

woman topless in a tutu, and summon Benjamin: “There is no better starting point for thought than

laughter” (1970, p. 95). After I read the work of Donna M. Goldstein (particularly her book, pulled from

the shelf of a mentor, Laughter out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown

[2013]), I became more conscious of humor and laughter as more than mere relief but as method – a

discursive device, outlook, or view of the world that aided, enormously, in data collection. As Derrida

wrote of mourning, laughter was the door to enter the “still open wounds, scars or hopes” to learn

“something essential of what remains to be heard, read, thought, and done” (Derrida, 2003, p. 118). It was

a technique I had unwittingly honed for quite some time. And believe it or not, I had become especially

good at making a fool of myself – a talent I exploited as best I could in the field.

As an undergraduate student, I worked as an international program manager for the local district school

board. Through the program, I met a number of young people from Columbia and Venezuela, and learned

a great deal about South America from both the young people who traveled to Canada to learn English

and experience Canadian culture, and the staff who chaperoned the trip. Aside from the mutually

beneficial cultural exchange, as a young(er) student I learned strategies to communicate with people in the

absence of a shared language, strategies that hinged upon an affable smile and the escape value or ebb of

laughter. I further tested this toolkit as I traveled in Europe (with the money made teaching English

abroad) and made effective use of it in Brazil as a qualitative researcher. As with the work of Goldstein

(2013) humor (manifested as laughter) became a well-used tool in this kit to unlock and observe

hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality in Carioca communities. Perched at a high top, cigarette

in hand with a drink in the other, casually interacting with working women, an adult version of a kid I

once taught, approached me from the other side of the bar. With a smile of reassurance, universes collide.

Nearly a decade later, I reconnected with a student from the international program and his father at a

beach bar in Copacabana. Self-doubt temporarily suspended, I was thankful for him, and those like him;

59

 

the people I had laughed with, learned from, and never forgot, despite the obvious language barrier. These

opportunities helped immensely in data collection.

The second week in Brazil, I attended language classes in Copacabana. Classes were held in the morning.

And while the time was not ideal for the sleep pattern I maintained, it did not interfere with data

collection. I soon found these classes to be rather useless, as the vocabulary learned failed to transfer to

the field. Unless someone needed to know the month, date, or weather, I had little to offer. Without a

noticeable benefit, I had no real intention to commit to the cost. I was able to befriend an instructor,

Pedro, and bartered food and drink for Portuguese instead. We had fun. He seemed fascinated by the

research, persistent with the language (a real stickler for enunciation), never not on time (atypically

Brazilian), and wonderful to look at for an extensive amount of time. He was also comfortable to facilitate

the research. We often met at a restaurant next to Centaurus, a luxury terma (sauna-brothel) in Ipanema,

to observe traffic and strike up conversations with the doormen about business. I continued to meet with

Pedro until his bar tab became far too difficult to maintain. We remained connected online but met less

often in the ritzier beachfront communities of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon which he fancied. From

him, I learned the basic lexicon needed to manage everyday Carioca life (e.g., order food, take transit,

formulate an introduction, ask for permission, clarification, or repetition, and apologize), and he offered a

continual (albeit online) source of instruction. For his assistance, I am forever thankful. After Pedro, I met

Oscar, a local runner. We ran three to four times per week. He practiced English while I worked on

Portuguese. It was a form of instruction that – despite heat exhaustion, sweat, and a little pain (never

could I let a Brazilian man know I was beaten) – I could afford to maintain.

I became more familiar with the local scene as it became more familiar with me. I trolled the sexscapes of

Copacabana for about a month before women (and men) started to nod in recognition, striking

conversation whenever the situation permitted. I was not the only one taking note. The first contact I

made was with a street vendor who sold candies in Copacabana, near a bar known for prostitution. In

time, he would make quite the profit from my sweet tooth, as I learned about the scar on his chin, his

daughter, wife, and ambitions for the future. He asked me about life in Canada in comparison to Brazil – a

common topic of conversation. From him, I also heard stories of the plaza in relation to the women,

clientele, and local law enforcement – the Perez Hilton of Copacabana. As we conversed, I felt more at

ease, and started to initiate conversation with other women and men around us. Still treated as an outsider,

similar to Perlman (2010) with her work on everyday life in the favela, the inquisitiveness of a gringa

(like me) was more tolerated: “Asking questions as a foreign student eager to understand and learn was

much easier than it would have been for a Brazilian student, who might have easily have sounded

condescending, impolite, or suspicious” (p. xxiii). Working with the OdP, I often took the role of bait in

the field, sent out to introduce the OdP and assess interest. If circumstances seemed favourable, I would

60

invite someone who was more proficient in Portuguese (and understood English) to the conversation.

Often I worked with Gonçalo, another OdP research fellow in the field. He was also a PhD candidate

from Portugal, living and working in Rio de Janeiro, interested in the “myth” (as he often had it) of

human trafficking. As a Portugal native, he spoke Portuguese fluently but his accent (and subtle slang)

revealed his status as a gringo. Nevertheless, he was more familiar with Brazilian culture, and seemed (in

conversation) to be less of an outsider. Consequently, he needed to be more apologetic with his ignorance.

And it was common for him to attribute an uncomfortable question with me or allude to the fact that I was

more interested in the answer as a foreigner or newbie to Brazil.

In time, allies in the field started to snowball thanks to “chain referral sampling” (as modeled in the work

of Becker, 1953 with respect to drug use). One informant would advertise the project to a friend or

acquaintance and soon it was not uncommon for us (me, Gonçalo, etc.) to be solicited in the street to talk

about the research, a recent encounter in the field, or to consult on business elsewhere in Rio de Janeiro.

One slow night, we “trafficked”/taxied two women to the other end of Copacabana, less known for sexual

commerce in an “unexpectant” or “innocent” tourist crowd. The women soon struck up conversations

with two men from Toronto (one claimed to be an athlete while the other worked for an investment firm).

We assisted in conversation as the four flirted and the ladies ordered (somewhat aggressively) from the

Portuguese menu. Once the expensive tab was covered, the two ladies scurried off with the men, and left a

mountain of picanha (the most expensive cut of beef) and a phone number to call or text to ensure they

were safe.

Those interested in a more formal interview were asked to discuss business activities related to the 2014

World Cup in detail. Each interview (eighteen in total) was conducted with one other research assistant

who was fluent in both English and Carioca Portuguese. A formal interview often teetered between semi-

structured and informal conversation – often starting with a noncontroversial, casual exchange before

proceeding to a more event-specific agenda. In line with more feminist-oriented methodologies, produced

in opposition to value-free, objective knowledge, conversation depended upon the comfort and readiness

of the interviewee. As discussed above, I had an interview guide (see Appendix 7) but it was never

followed in the same manner twice – nor was it ever not in a constant state of transformation. As the

research advanced, so too did the conversations. I found that the interview moved from a space in which

women could freely (maybe even therapeutically) “tell stories” to one that more frequently probed,

explored, and critically analyzed each worldview (as demonstrated in the work of Scully, 1990, in relation

to sexual violence). This shift occurred as I became more familiar with the material, but also as I made

allies in the field. Indeed, for me it was as Landes (1986) warned: “Through field work at the pleasure of

the host culture one learns one’s place there and that it is one’s only vantage point for penetrating the

culture. Mistakes and mishaps in the field are great lamps of illumination if one survives; friendships

61

 

there are the only greater source, besides being a divine comfort” (p. 139). Aside from Gonçalo, a

wonderfully talented jazz musician and eventual close friend, Vanessa, also assisted with the research. We

met on an excursion made with another researcher to interview/visit an owner of a hostel in a favela in

Zona Sul (the South Zone). Sitting at the next table, she overheard that I was Canadian and struck up a

conversation. Much to the surprise of those we interviewed (and me that day), Vanessa is also Canadian.

That proved beneficial for me because she had a knack for parlaying cultural subtleties and Carioca slang

into a familiar frame. Vanessa accompanied me most often to Vila Mimosa, during the day, while

Gonçalo and I worked together more informally at night. With respect to the Niterói case, another sort of

expertise was required. I sought the assistance of João, a young lawyer and friend, introduced to me by

another researcher at the Observatório. He was born and raised middle-class Brazilian and spoke both

English and Portuguese fluently. He also had the crucial legal expertise, and was fascinated by the

complexities of the case. In his free time, he further investigated (and later, methodically explained) the

unique set of (il)legalities used to rationalize the Niterói eviction.17 The Niterói eviction built much of the

discussion in this document, which culminated in the narrative of Isabel Costa.

At the start of an interview, I would introduce the research and the translator and obtain consent. The

interview location varied from place of employment to favourite café, home, praça [piazza], and even

alleyway. I would also inform each interviewee that the conversation would be audio recorded and

transcribed with the aid of someone other than me. As with Don Kulick (1998), the audio recorder

became an additional appendage in the field – those who knew me knew it was never far. I would tell the

informant that the red light meant it was recording, and to ask should they ever wish for it to stop. At first,

the audio was sent to a third-party translation service in New Delhi, India. I found the business online and

haggled for an affordable rate. I was desperate for help but I would never let that be known. Each audio

file was shared via Dropbox with the Observatory only after identifiable information was omitted. It was

not until I returned to Brazil that I used Vanessa and João to help in audio translation/transcription,

officially terminating the “offshore” business arrangement. Re-listening to the audio while reading the

transcript was another chance to learn Portuguese. I shared this process with each informant, who was

encouraged to contact me via email or “Facei”/ “Bookie” (i.e., Facebook, incredibly popular in Brazil)

should ever an issue should arise. Whenever possible (or requested), I shared the translated/transcribed

document with the interviewee (again, most often via Facebook). The transfer of an interview transcript or

photograph taken in the field would be secured through a Facebook direct/private message; never on the

more public profile page (or “wall”) of an individual. Often the interviewee was interested to learn some

                                                                                                                         17 While I discuss this in further detail below, I want to reiterate that the inclusion of the Niterói narrative was not to (re)produce uncontested stories of state-sanctioned violence and the realities that remain unchanged but rather to (re)articulate realities that the State so diligently attempted to silence.

62

English, and requested the transcript to do so. Online, I relied on Google Translate (or an equivalent

application or website) to translate conversation with a surprising amount of accuracy – technologies, in

this case, satisfied the need for a human translator. Aside from the online contact I had with those I

interviewed, in order to further reconcile some of the complexities inherent in the collection of interview

data, observation (and the approaches to data collection advanced in cultural anthropology and sociology

since 1920) was needed to further elucidate the realities of the women and men “hiding in plain sight” on

the fringe of normal, everyday host communities. In the next section, I detail the collection of

observational data. Combined, these methodologies informed the stories shared throughout the text –

stories that, while fascinating, are still riddled with uncertainties.

3.4 Observing the Other

The final contributor to the collection of ethnographic data was participant observation – the most

exhaustive of the data obtained, in relation to time and material. Given the extensive work Dr. Blanchette

has done on sex work, he was well aware of each site known for sexual commerce in Rio de Janeiro – and

has tracked the opening and closing of each venue throughout the South Zone. With him and/or another

member of the Observatory, I would frequent each venue (bar, strip club, restaurant, plaza, street corner,

etc.) to observe the presence of law enforcement, clientele and working women. I collected most of

observational data on the sexscapes of Copacabana that surfaced in and around the FIFA Fan Fest as well

as Vila Mimosa. From April to August, I lived on the street. I retreated “home” if I needed to sleep,

shower or use wi-fi. “Home” was a shared studio apartment, rented with one other mega-event aficionado

– although several more often filled the space. Rather than sit in an overcrowded room, I was curious to

chase the “imponderabilia of actual life and of typical behaviour” as Malinowski (2002 [1922], p. 18)

would have it. If I am to be lauded for the time I dedicated to the field it was because I had zilch to do

otherwise. Most allies were found in the field, so it felt normal for me to head there to socialize. I was

also (at most) a metro ride or walk from Copacabana, so it was never too far. Vila Mimosa, however, was

riskier to travel into or from alone and for that reason, I often coordinated/scheduled time with someone

else to escort me there. The issue was not the street on which Vila Mimosa was situated but rather the area

in and around the metro station that I was advised never to saunter into alone, especially at night. After

the first week, I adhered to this kind of advice. “Not wisdom, caution. In doses. As a rule immanent to

experimentation: injections of caution” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 150). Never one to let fear paralyze

me or inform the direction of the research, I was responsible in self-destruction, and as a student in a new

and unknown environment, I valued the time in the street too much. With the alternative of being alone at

63

 

a random (maybe, safer) bar, I tended to favour the candor and frankness of those known for their sexual

commerce.

The bulk of data collection was focused within the geographical sphere of Copacabana Beach, particularly

at night, on Avenida Atlântica (the main street before the beach) between Avenida Prado Júnior and Rua

Rodolfo Dantas (the Copacabana Palace Hotel – ironically, the temporary residence of the FIFA executive

– is located at the intersection of Rodolfo Dantas and Avenida Atlântica). As the month-long tournament

progressed, women started travelling to Copacabana to seize the high tourist traffic and more consistent

flow of clientele – some worked at their typical place of employment until 12 a.m. in Vila Mimosa before

heading to Copacabana to work freelance through the night. During the day, I would often run through

Copacabana or take the metro to Vila Mimosa (staunchly defiant, it has stood one mile from Maracanã

Stadium since 1979) to interview women in the quiet of the morning or early afternoon. And while it was

not unusual for me to stay and watch a game or two in Vila Mimosa (and make the most out the cheap,

cold beer purchased in excess in expectation of FIFA pandemonium), I tended to travel back to

Copacabana at night (before the subway closed for the evening) to catch the action near the beach and

watch the rowdy crowd tumble out of FIFA Fan Fest. Aside from Copacabana and Vila Mimosa, I also

worked with, observed, and interviewed the women and men involved in the infamous Niterói eviction

(discussed in further detail elsewhere), and befriended the only woman willing to publicly denounce state

authorities in relation to the violent event that occurred less than a month before the commencement of

the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Somewhat incidentally, I was present on the day of the eviction and witnessed

the monstrous removal and detention of nearly 200 women. Quite naturally, I attended (audio recorded

and documented) all public assemblies related to the case and formally interviewed a number of the

people involved in an effort to try to rectify the string of illegalities these women experienced at the hand

of the state (those people included two legal aid attorneys, interviewed on two separate occasions, two

different yet highly involved sex worker rights activists, and one member of the police force that executed

the unlawful eviction). Through this particular case, I was able to observe the legal exceptionalism of

prostitution legislation in Brazil (not dissimilar to Canada), which is purposefully written to serve the

discretion of state authorities or those in a position of power. So while I returned to the site on occasion to

monitor opposition (and have lunch with the working women now relegated to the street), I was more

attentive to the legal ramifications of the case as well as the movement/migration of former Niterói-based

women throughout the Greater Rio de Janeiro Area (Grande Rio or officially, Região Metropolitana do

Rio de Janeiro). That said, this was not a site that I frequented as often as Vila Mimosa or Copacabana,

yet the location still greatly informed empirical analysis as it helped to establish new (otherwise unlikely)

allies in the field. I focused less on participant observation during my second visit, and reconnected with

the women I befriended in the bedlam of the mega-event. For those who have yet to experience a sport

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mega-event, there is something to be said about the frenzied chaos in host communities, even those far

removed from the spotlight. For some, especially those with sufficient resource material, the cadence, the

tempo, the rhythm on the street can be better controlled. Some ride the wave, some are buried in it. Even

in the aftermath, as the collective blood alcohol level returned to zero, the host needed time to unwind.

For this reason and due to a dangerous scenario that involved a sex worker friend in her denunciation of

state authorities (described in more detail later), as well as the time constraint of a tourist visa, I had to

leave with the intention to return. Throughout data collection, I continued to focus on the processes

associated with (or characteristic of) event-led urbanism and the extent to which these have influenced

sexual labour, yet casual observation became much more focused and direct as time went on.

To first establish some form of comfort in a new and unknown terrain, I made a conscious effort to

conceal my status as researcher or student. I found that this clandestine behaviour was needed in order for

me to determine the role I would later take in the field. I was cautious also with those I invited into the

field for fear that they would not welcome unwanted attention. I remember the first nod of acquaintance.

With one nod, I froze: Was I ready to be acquainted? It was important for me to blend into the bar or

street scene in a nonhostile manner. In frequenting each site, I became better known to the women as

neither a worker nor client but a mere student at the bar. Even still, I refrained from blatantly recording

observational data in a notebook until the most opportune moment to write a “jotted note” (Lofland,

1971) inconspicuously at the bar (often on a napkin) or in the bathroom (another excellent source of

observation). I would elaborate on these notes immediately after I exited the field (e.g., at a 24-hour

restaurant/café or on the metro). Later I would make time to transfer this information into more

contextualized stories (often with some interpretation and reflection) that further detailed the place, time,

event, conversation observed. As I recorded observational data, I also noted curiosities that could later be

discussed in the interview process or in a casual conversation struck up at the bar. These curiosities

ranged from a needed clarification on a mere comment overheard in the field (which I would often ask

about to learn the language) or an interaction between two or more people (e.g., a bartender and working

women). Whenever appropriate, I was recording observations from the field. Whatever was written in my

notebook was later transferred into a Microsoft Word document. All interview and field observation data

were included in the same document, while each individual interview or audio transcript was kept

separate – on rare occasions observational data would also be later added to an interview transcript, if

there was an important visual cue or incident that occurred in conversation. For example, as I interviewed

women in Vila Mimosa, it was common for me to also observe other women prepare for or elicit a

programa, which I included as observational data on the larger Word document. However, if the

interviewee reacted noticeably (with an eyebrow raise, glare, or even softening of her voice) to someone

in the vicinity, I would note the time and point of conversation and later add this to the interview

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transcript. Sometimes that was appropriate to do in the moment but often it required me to make a mental

note for me to elaborate upon as soon as possible after. Within the document I was better able to

parcel/separate the material into stories that were more descriptive, reflective, and interpretive/analytical.

As I reread and wrote observational data, I was subconsciously engaged in simultaneous yet overlapping

processes of data collection and “open coding” – the attempt to sociologically classify, define, and

organize data. The coding and analysis of this notebook is more thoroughly outlined in the next

subsection.

3.5 Data Analysis

As a member of the OdP, I focused on the impact of a sporting mega-event– the FIFA 2014 World Cup –

and observed processes of event-led urban renewal in Carioca host communities. Like the mega-event

construction that occurred in Rio de Janeiro in the name of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer

Olympic Games, this document is reflective of a certain moment in time for the author (me) too. The

histories of revitalization represent impending-incessant-omnipresent processes across urban

communities. The prescript was intended to illustrate this point. The municipality of Rio de Janeiro has

been in an unrelenting state of urban renewal since its inception – a city constantly refashioned for tourist

classes. The staging of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games mark yet another moment of

urban (re)development but it does not mark the end. Like this dissertation, all future progress will be

based on this pseudo-permanent material thing; to speak of permanence is thus (for me at least) to speak

of collective memories, imaginaries (or the intangible, intelligible affects) of urban life. As such, creative

analytical practices were used to share stories (that were even now contradictory, complementary, or

both) while not “relieving the researcher of having to be judge and arbiter; and it can give voice to what is

unspoken but present . . . When the material to be displayed is intractable, unruly, multisited, and

emotionally laden” (Richardson, 2000, p. 934). Following Richardson and Jensen (2003), the aim of

analyses was to wrestle with the sociospatial realities evident prior to, during, and in the wake of a sport

mega-event and to question the material constraints and possibilities as forced upon or navigated by the

body, city, and nation. In doing so, I maintained an awareness of processes and power relations that

occurred (or were upheld) at both the local and the global scale – to probe deeper into the globally

constituted yet locally appropriated processes of urban reform. This approach to scale, one that is both

fixed and fluid, is better equipped to tackle the discontinuous and contradictory flow of capital in mega-

event host cities. This is also in line with the work of Doreen Massey (1994, pp. 147-151) and her

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discussion of “power geometry” in the time-space compression of globalization.18 The flow and

movement of both time and space is disrupted in host cities, and thus will reconfigure local-cultural

sensibilities, identities, and the relation to space/place.

As such, a general inductive approach to data analysis was used while I was still in the field (collecting

but also interpreting). Specifically, I followed the work of Thomas (2003) to guide the process as I had

done during my graduate work at the University of British Columbia. Similar to the strategies suggested

by Altheide et al. (2008) and their work on Qualitative Document Analysis, the approach of Thomas

promotes movement among concept development, sampling, data collection, data coding, data analysis,

and interpretation. In using this model, I carefully read or listened to the data collected while

simultaneously writing in my journal – a process Coffey and Atkinson (1996) refer to as meaning

condensation. I also thought (sometimes in bed, leading to countless sleepless nights) about each chapter

and the different possibilities for the breakdown of the dissertation. In the journal, I either visually

recorded my idea in a sketch or recorded the unfolding of the dissertation (and each layer) in text as a list.

Once at home, removed from the field, I went through each transcript and created a separate Word

document for each code to build a broader categorization (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996). For example, most

of the women described (in detail) the manner in which bodies were resourced as an instrument at/for

work, which I first coded as “corporeal labour.” Later I broadened this code to include the “performative”

nature of the work (one category) as I understood the body as more than a mechanical (material)

instrument but also a tool needed to manufacture a certain (immaterial) affect. Once prominent categories

were established, the approach became (somewhat) more deductive (Miles & Huberman, 1994), or at least

a different form of induction (Morse & Mitcham, 2002). In order to determine a relationship between

categories (e.g., performativity, affect, disgust, resilience, humour, horror, imaginary), I continued to

build visual displays and conceptual maps (as I had done in the field) to facilitate the process. These were

drawn on plain white computer paper and kept in a folder at home (see Appendix 8). With more time to

reflect, out of the field, I was better able to examine the more core (conceptual) categories that were

recurrent across each data set. Theoretically informed yet empirically driven, these categories allowed me

to be more selective in the coding process (Atkinson, 2012).

When I returned, I was right to assume that the second time would be easier but I had no idea I would

miss the uncertainties and anxieties of my first visit to Brazil. As Malinowski projected, “I had to learn

                                                                                                                         18 First articulated in the work of David Harvey (1989), the time-space compression phenomenon refers to the manner in which qualities of and the relationship between time and space collapsed in (post)modern societies (e.g., communication technology, transit, abstract economies). For Massey, the compression of time and space fused histories, communities, and identities to create a troubled, fractured era. Her term “power geometry” is used to reference the different way in which certain people access and influence this time-space compression or are “more in charge of it than others” (1994, p. 149).

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how to behave, and to a certain extent, I acquired “the feeling” for native good and bad manners” (2002

[1922], p. 8). I was careful to wrap finger food in a napkin, to wear local fashion (especially on my feet),

and to keep bottled water at home: “What generally started as a broad and overwhelming venture into the

cultural dark transformed into a defined research venture” (Atkinson, 2012, p. 43). It was easier to

differentiate between direct observation and indirect information, and further examine curiosities that

were now more narrowly defined. I further interrogated these categories in conversation and observation

that was also now more thoroughly defined. I would continue to work to revise emerging categories (and

to tighten and broaden wherever necessary) throughout my writing process. For example, after the

“performative” nature of sexual commerce was broadened to include the affective (immaterial)

component of the act, I started to note the manner in which fantasies contributed to subject formation with

significant impact on the material realities of the everyday. This minor modification allowed me to

reconsider the role of the spectacle and simulation in everyday love and commercial exchange. I still

organized data in a visual manner. I found the intricacies of these disjointed and complicated stories far

easier to observe, and therefore easier to interpret and connect when represented visually. Like a

microscope, I could zoom into and out of a concept while still enclosed within a certain frame. Rather

than privilege one data source (or form of analysis, whether visual or not) over another, pluralism or

analytical diversity allowed me to explore the different categories to build and connect each theme

(Coffey & Atkinson, 1996). Crystallization (Richardson, 1994, 2000; Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005)

revealed certain similarities that existed across diverse yet related life stories but also allowed for the

continuous injection of self-doubt and reflexivity (e.g., the optimism sustained in search of one “true”

love contrasting with the unrelenting belief that monogamy is unrealistic). As a methodological tool,

crystallization is meant to combine different approaches of analysis and representation into a coherent,

thoroughly partial text that will problematize the construction of (allegedly new) knowledge and account

for the positionality of the researcher. Moving from a description of the “context of discovery” I will now

discuss the “context of presentation” (Plath, 1990) and describe the crises of representation that I

encountered as a white, middle-class, cisgender woman and consumer/researcher of transatlantic

economies of desire.

3.6 Presenting the Self / (Re)Presenting the Other

As a white, middle-class feminist academic, my claims to speak with authority about the

lives of individuals whose worlds I initially entered on a “provisional and deliberate”

basis are both politically and methodologically fraught, despite the many lasting and

important friendships that emerged for me as a result of this fieldwork. Nor can I fail to

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recognize the degrees of social distance that, in many cases, made this entry into others’

worlds possible in the first place, and allowed me to return home to my own

comparatively comfortable surroundings at night’s end. (Bernstein, 2007, pp. 195-196)

I imagine that the task of translating culture into text is daunting for even the most capable, confident

writer. But does membership in that (sub)culture make it easier for a writer – and if so, what does

membership entail? I am not the women (or men) I interviewed and observed for this research, yet we are

similar. The stories shared herein are rooted, first and foremost, in similarities. Following the advice of

Atkinson (2012): “To be sure, people’s lives are strikingly similar when we allow our minds to see the

similarities and the fragmented, lonely, anomic nature of hyper reality so often described by late modern

qualitative researchers may be more of a product of late modern social philosophy than any empirical

reality” (p. 47), before I discuss these similarities in more detail, I want to note the obvious dissimilarities,

and the manner in which I worked to reconcile these in the field. I referred to these as mini-crises of

representation – crises that continue to haunt me even now. In her own work, Richardson (1992) has

illustrated some of the uncertainties I wrestled with in relation to (re)presentation:

Whose authority counts when? How can/should authorship be claimed? Where do

validity/credibility/reliability fit? How does one’s writing reflect one’s social privileges?

What part of my biography, my process is relevant to text writing? How do I write myself

into the text without being self-absorbed or unduly narcissistic? How can I write so that

others’ “voices” are not only heard but listened to? For whom should we write? What

consequences does our work have for the people we study, and what are my ethical

responsibilities for those consequences? These are not only my personal issues; they are

ones that engage (enrage) both feminist and postmodernist researchers. (p. 108)

Even before I commit to a (pseudo) response to these queries – and distill the subjectivity I inescapably

objectify/represent – I have to elaborate on my own (re)presentation in the field. Wengle (1988) discussed

the symbolic death of identity or “identity crisis” experienced as a result of extensive fieldwork, quoting

one participant: “I just lost my sexuality. I was nothing” (p. 91). I too lost a bit of the Amanda I knew. As

one does with travel, I had the chance to (re)create/establish the person I am (or expected to be) at home.

Indeed, as Fanon has discussed: “In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself”

(1967, p. 229). In this case, I found I became a quasi nonperson (or at least, someone unfamiliar to me) –

a person without an identifiable race (after a month in the sun, I started to look a bit mulatta), class (I

never wore anything that could be construed as “expensive”), or gender (one woman asked if I was a

travesti). In the field, these nonidentities made it easier for me to blend into the crowd – I was never too

much of one thing. This somewhat visible erasure reflected the internal battle with power, privilege, and

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perspective – a battle that forced me to surrender much of the worldview I had at one time defended – to

(re/un)learn with the Other. It was a simultaneous construction that made me wonder: Do I truly

understand the realities that are now forever written onto me? Stories I heard or observed before I

retreated back to an overpriced, air-conditioned apartment, ate organic groceries, Skyped a loved one, or

watched Netflix? The inherent disconnect, the difference that lingered, made me doubt I could ever (even

with a poststructuralist approach to incomplete and partial stories) “adequately” or “accurately” retell the

stories from women I met (and befriended) in the field. This fear (the sense of fraudulence and academic

folly) fuelled data collection in sleep deprivation, anemia, even the flu. In the search for similarities, I

admit, I became entranced in the “cachet of exoticness” (Kulick, 1998), and wished it to be (even semi-)

reciprocated.

To follow Bernstein (2007), I recognize the “provisional and deliberate” basis from which I entered and

exited the field was both politically and methodologically fraught. The fact that I am not a sex worker – or

desire to be one – further distanced me from the “reality-congruent” (Elias, 1987) social-scientific

knowledge I wished to obtain. In order to overcome this distance, I tried to follow similar beauty

practices, and tested the embodiment of different personalities in (and out of) the field (e.g., from more

masculine to hyperfeminine). From the haze of sensory anesthesia (herald in “scientific” research) and

language deficiencies, I welcomed the chance to feel the field. Katie Altork (2003) decried the “objective

straitjacket” that has confined the fieldworker to the cerebral (rational, logical, thought) in a semi-

schizophrenic, detached yet intensely engaged manner:

Although we may subjectively know that our senses work together with our intellects to

provide us with data in complex and elegant ways, we persist in asking fieldworkers to

operate predominately from their eyes and ears and – most certainly – from the waist up.

(2003: 113)

While I remained detached from the waist down, I rendezvoused with women, relished the attention, even

contributed to the allure as a potential “double” for a session. I was happy to be wined and dined in

exchange for the performance of subordination. Men were aware that I was a “student” but often left it at

that. So often, they were was absorbed in their date. In dress, behaviour and movement, I mimicked “this

ruler of the sexual realm, which men must pay to enter” (Paglia, 1994, p. 57) with immense failure, and

admiration. For me, the taboo of the exchange kept me from further involvement – not the

commodification of sex – and I (maybe naively) envied these women for the utter disregard they

displayed both day and night. As I sat at the bar of a well-known sex establishment, accompanied women

on a date, walked in the street near and around each zone of prostitution, I acted subordinate. I performed

the “subservient” role to the extent that – like Bernstein (2007) – I doubt sex-for-pay would reveal a

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tremendous amount in relation to the sociological inquires I sought to explore. If women were not on a

date, I asked that each interview be treated as a programa (i.e., in the same room, with a similar routine). I

found that these strategies (however minor) afforded me a renewed or heightened sense of embodiment –

as I sensed the effect/affect of stigmatization (the “whore stigma” as Gail Pheterson, 1993, would have it)

or the sociopsychological warfare a sex worker (like anyone involved in a highly scrutinized profession)

is likely to inflict on her/himself. I needed to do this, as I feared that somehow I would reinforce or

perpetuate shame, and further fuel the distrust these women so often felt in relation to “mainstream”

societies.

I did not have to be a sex worker to understand the need to conceal illicit behavior from an individual with

a notepad – I have been to a clinic before! And I could conceive of a scenario in which heavily

stigmatized “criminal” activity would be difficult to share with a student from a federal institution. As

manifest in the need for “consent” (one example of a debated ethical concern) the cost of “valid” research

has far too often come at the cost of those it has purported to benefit. It would be absurd to ask a woman

to sign a form that identified her as a sex worker. It was a standard of practice that did not translate in the

field. For the women (and men) involved as collaborators and curators of the work, informed, enthusiastic

consent was demonstrated in conversation. As is often the case in shadow economies, a verbal

conversation trumped a written contract. As one informant scoffed in reaction to a consent form: “[Go

ahead] Sign, sign, sign so you can get sued, sued, sued” (Gabriela, sex worker in Vila Mimosa).

As with the clientele, I also needed to ensure the active consent of the women involved in the research. As

a white, female, middle-class researcher, I understood the freedom needed to move in and out of each

anomalous zone of prostitution. I also admit that I did so in search of a favour (time, stories, sentiment,

etc.), and that this favour would never resolve the violence that, on the one hand, marked such a zone and

the related identities, and on the other, built/defended the reverse – the tourist neighbourhood and the

bodies located within the zone I called home. As described in the work of Razack (1998, 2000):

Their temporary abandonment of societal norms does not weaken these men’s claims of

respectability, but, rather, it puts the mark of degeneracy on the women in prostitution

and thus reaffirms the men’s position within the dominant group. That is, once men leave

the space of degeneracy, having survived it unscathed, they return to respectability. In

this way, prostitution reaffirms not only the hierarchies of gender but also of class, race,

and sexual orientation. (1998, p. 357)

Unlike Razack, however, I do not maintain that the transgression into/out of a zone of degeneracy left me

unscathed. I do so not to sensationalize “white vulnerabilities” (so often disproportionate to the actual

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violence) but to contend that such a transaction does (deeply) impact an individual, and that it had an

undeniable influence on me; even if not visible, the realities encountered in the field cannot be unheard,

unseen, or even unlearned once far removed. I alluded to the fact that I was a bit naïve before I entered the

field – from this, one could claim a certain amount of innocence was robbed as a result, but that somehow

does not sit well with me. To claim I was somehow innocent before I entered the field would be to further

idealize the virtue of docile, unsullied women so often not associated with sex work, and likewise further

reinforce the role of men as active, ambitious, and in control of or free to sanction and enact desire. These

polarities however are infinitely more complex than merely innocent/passive versus noninnocent/active.

Work (whether sex-related, research-related, or otherwise) is constituent of the continual identity-making

process that is life; the women, clientele, and observer are all involved in a simultaneous transformation

of the self and Other in which each individual is both able to affect and be affected. In “Race, Space, and

Prostitution: The Making of the Bourgeois Subject,” Razack (1998) viewed subject making in a linear,

unidirectional fashion and thus failed to account for the manner in which women involved in sex-related

industries benefit from the (dialectical, simultaneous, multifaceted) transaction. The boundaries erected to

segregate degeneracy from respectability are both impermanent and porous – hence the somewhat fraught

reference to time spent “in the field” that can be used to discursively embellish, even fabricate a strict

divide between (field/sex) work and home. A crucial difference in the work of Razack (1998, 2000) is that

it is based on a certain context and the associated form of extreme colonial violence. The murder of

Pamela George, a sex worker of the Saulteaux (Ojibway) nation, by two white middle-class men does not

reflect all stories of women (less often men) involved in commercial sex.19 It is more often the case that

women are able to secure some form of subsistence and survive due to the financial opportunities made

available via sex-related industries – it is thus both men and women who come into close contact with the

(not necessarily malign or in the extreme, violent) Other and survive to tell the tale.

Nevertheless, it is not without constant critical self-assessment that I realize the bravado needed to

demarcate the “field” in which I maintain the freedom to enter and exit at will. It is from this imagined

(artificially framed, homogenized) backdrop that I suspend certain identities, subjectivities, and realities

(mine as well as that of the Other) that appear fixed but remain fluid and far from known (Katz, 1994).

And as I write, I admit to this power (im)balance – the marking of an object, fixed now in text – that is

inherent to the research method. A method that, despite the best most earnest effort, has objectified and

even exploited the women (less often men) I describe now. This is the nature of the beast – the need to

turn over academic, peer-reviewed material – that does not (in an immediate or even more distant sense)

                                                                                                                         19 Pamela George was a woman of the Saulteaux (Ojibway) nation and a mother of two young children. In 1995, at the age of 28, she was brutally murdered by 20-year old Steven Kummerfield and 19-year old Alex Ternowetsky (both celebrated athletes) in Regina, Saskatchewan. Kummerfield and Ternowetsky were charged with first-degree murder for her death but received a lesser charge of manslaughter and were granted full parole in November 2000.

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serve those that have coauthored the stories. In recognition of this truth, I can use this new knowledge to

further advance moral-political debate, redefine cultural sensibilities, and inform future policies and

legislation. I can also continue to seek (as I did in the field) opportunities with a more direct and

immediate benefit. For one, I alluded to the circumstance in which I assisted a friend in her denounciation

of state authorities. For another, the Observatório disseminated two research summaries that were well

received in media across the world, which arguably influenced or added to popular discussion and

debate.20 Furthermore, the most immediate and direct benefit from this research was the financial

reimbursement I was able to offer the women that choose to treat the interview as a programa or sacrifice

time at work to inform this project.

In a creative yet analytic ethnographic voice that borrows much from narrative literature and fiction, most

obvious in the creation of a composite or representative character for each theme, the stories told adhere

to the criteria of CAP [Creative Analytical Processes] Ethnographies. That is, these stories were written to

contribute to our understanding of social life; invite other interpretive and creative responses; demonstrate

a substantive level of self-awareness, self-exposure, and continued reflexivity; and generate impact, or

move the reader to action (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). In adherence to these criteria, the stories also

use a creative flair to maintain the utmost confidentiality and anonymity of each informant, a condition of

the work I would not compromise. While women were enthusiastic about the chance to appear in

published material it was often with a caveat (e.g., identities could be made known but not within Brazil).

Furthermore, if a real name was recorded on a consent form, this document would identify the individual

(as well as her/his status as a sex worker) to the federal university to which much of this work was

accredited (further discussed above). There was also the likelihood that this same consent form could be

lost or stolen. Due to the stigmatization of sex work and the time-sensitive nature of the profession, it is

still even now plausible that a woman (in the near or distant future) might choose to disassociate herself

from this vilified career choice. Given the permanence of a written document (such as this dissertation)

and the failure for it to account for future contingencies, I decided (with the encouragement of my

supervisor) to create a distinct-yet-related, quasi-sister composite character for each theme. Each

character will effectively symbolize the collapsed experience of each informant (and the related

observational data) into one representative narrative. As Klein (1993) created a fictitious gym, Goldstein

(2013) wrote on fictional communities, or Silvera (1989) combined identities into a semi-fictive character,

I too use fiction to mask the women and men that contributed to this research. In doing so, however, I did

not fictionalize the geographical location or setting through which much of the field data were collected.

The digital alteration of each identifiable individual (in addition to the composite character) will further

                                                                                                                         20 To review the Observatório da Prostituição 2014 World Cup Report, please see: http://www.sxpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/observatory_prostitution_world0cupreport_compressed_pdf1.pdf

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conceal identities. Because women involved in this line of work are embedded within a broader system

that is so often volatile and difficult to control, I felt compelled to write stories and share visual material

in a manner that (arguably) could be construed to dehumanize life circumstance. I am sincere in the

assertion that this was never the case. And to borrow from Foucault: “Who ever thought he [sic] was

writing anything but fiction?” (Foucault & Trombdori, 1991, 33). The composite character approach was

meant to best balance the need to protect anonymity while still telling stories that (to borrow from

Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) were “humanly situated, always filtered through human eyes and human

perceptions, and bearing both the limitations and the strengths of human feelings” (p. 964). The end result

is a (sociological) account of stories that are endless, and constant only in flux.

While this chapter is often procedural (read: monotonous) in the documentation of methodologies (related

to both collection and analysis), it is also an honest recounting of the critical self-assessment undertaken

in and outside the field. To detail data collection is to write in a successive, linear manner – and while I

understand that this is needed to consolidate stories in text, I also want to admit that this does not

necessarily reflect the process in field. Fieldwork, like social life itself, is annoyingly simultaneous,

multifaceted, and far from linear. As the oft-frustrated author of this text, such a realization deepened my

affinities for visual art and the pursuit of stories told via an alternative (nontextual) median, an often

overlooked yet important sister to language. If Hunter S. Thompson retyped (verbatim) the work of F.

Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) and Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms) to hone his craft, I

likewise found it beneficial to (re)read and return to equally impressive yet different modes of expression:

to feel the different ways in which a message can hit the heart and unsettle the mind. In writing, I have

tried to demonstrate the person that I was in the field – my motivation, my influences, and each decision

made or not – and the author that is here now. As I do this, I realize the extent to which this work is

fraught with deficiencies – some that I understand now, some that will be better understood later. One

obvious limitation stemmed from, first, my need to comply with the Brazilian Embassy (which stipulated

a 90-day maximum stay per trip for a Canadian with a tourist visa) and second, my desire to adhere to the

timeline of a doctorate degree. While this timeline is arguably arbitrary, the financial and professional

fallout is not. As a result, I made the decision to travel twice to Brazil, to “parachute” into/out of the field

and thereby jeopardize the “thick description” that is otherwise characteristic of the ethnographic

tradition. To that, I can only fall back on the intention of the research – that is, to examine the manner in

which women involved in sexual commerce experienced, managed, and monopolized their contexts

during the mega-event (which is also time sensitive) – and seek commiseration in other “micro”

ethnographies that are also not longitudinally oriented, but rather organized around a prefix time/event

(e.g., Giulianotti, 1995; MacNeill, 1996; Silk, 2001). For those involved in sexual commerce, it is

common to consider life as a sex worker as short. This has been illustrated across the literature but also

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evidenced in conversation. The time sensitive, transient nature of sex work is similar to the (sporting)

spectacle. Like those who have informed this work, I capitalized on the intersection of these two separate

social phenomena. In defense of a “good enough” ethnography (Scheper-Hughes, 1993, p. 28), I am also

aware that these stories (regardless of the time spent immersed in the field) are always already impartial

and incomplete. The realities, subjectivities, relationships used to build this document will forever be

cemented within it – creating one (now somewhat definitive) moment in the life of a person that is, like

the author, in a state of constant flux. I aligned these stories within research done on other host cities –

Vancouver (2010 Winter Olympics), Rio de Janeiro (2014 FIFA World Cup) and Toronto (2015

Pan/Parapan American Games) – as well as the political-economic and cultural histories of urbanization

(event-led or not) and labour (with respect to women of colour) in Rio de Janeiro, in order to understand

the decision to entrepreneurialize and (re)source the body (similar to upper- or middle-class citizens

entrepreneurializing housing via Airbnb) to whittle revenue from the tourist market. In the end, I hope to

create a “discursive space” whereby alternative stories can be told; stories that neither victimize nor

romanticize, but as Fanon (1967) stated at the start of this chapter, force us to recognize the “Other” on

whom “human worth and reality depend” and to whom “the meaning of life is condensed” (p. 216). These

stories are intended to trouble the moralistic debate regarding prostitution – not to defend one side over

another but to demonstrate the manner in which this abstract and distant dispute is played out on/in the

bodies of real people (not a mere transmitter or marker of disease) in the spaces of their everyday lives.

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Photo 5. Inside a brothel/bar in Copacabana Beach

Newspaper used to cover the cracked mirror. Photo taken on June 22, 2014 by Amanda De Lisio

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Prescript: Rosa Pereira

Rosa is a 30-year-old teacher and graduate student from a middle-class suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Like

most Carioca (Rio de Janeiro local) women involved in sexual commerce, Rosa does not reflect either

dominant/extreme racial classification (black or white) but is quick to refer to herself as mulatta (mixed

origin, tanned skin) so as to easily shift racial categories in response to clientele. Her hair colour also

varies with the sun and client preference from light to dark brown. Her mother was an English teacher and

often took care of children in her neighbourhood after school. The door to her home, like that of her

family fridge, was rarely ever closed for long. Her father – a carpenter and artist – also loved to be at

home, and worked as much as he could from there. Rosa returned to live in her childhood home with her

mother, father, and younger brother after she left her husband. She first married in a private ceremony in

August 2013. Despite her zest for parties, the day went without much notice. Most of the people in her

life were made aware via Facebook, and the bulk of the celebration remained online. The entire

relationship was short-lived – an impassioned, affectionate start that faded to a volatile end. She met her

ex-husband through a mutual friend, and fell fast for his sweet disposition, musical talent, and work ethic.

On paper, he was much more suited to the future she had once envisioned – he was a modest man with

“honest” employment, unlike her former bandido (bandit) love, but soon he turned violent. As a sex

worker at a high-end terma (sauna) in the South Zone, she has continued to be well received and revered.

Her involvement in sex work was materially and ideologically motived. First, she sought work at the

terma to obtain the financial security and mobility not afforded to a public school teacher – work at the

terma allowed her to continue her studies, indulge in high(er) class luxuries (to vacation often and

purchase expensive clothes, makeup, etc.) and save for the future. Second, she wanted to understand the

manner in which men (at least those she had dated) divorced or disassociated sex from love. As a

profissional do sexo (sex professional) she thought she could best develop this trait in (quasi) acceptance

of her future romantic fate. Aside from much of the conversation shared now, Rosa also taught me about

the common reliance on therapy (as a form of self-care) for the women involved in affective-emotional

labour. Similar to a professional athlete with a physiotherapist or massage therapist, she (and most of the

women she knew in sex work) visited her psychologist pseudo-religiously.

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Chapter 4: Rosa Pereira, Making Love/Lovemaking for a Living

“‘Sincerity’ is detrimental to one’s job, until the rules of salesmanship and business

become a ‘genuine’ aspect of oneself.” (C. Wright Mills, 1951, p. 183)

Postindustrial capitalist societies, with their onslaught of commodities, threaten affect and pacify a

disillusioned and alienated people. This is the circumstance from which women (less so men, particularly

within the developing world) entrepreneurialize the commodification of love, affection, and corporeality.

Not entirely unlike those who bid for and stage an internationally recognized sport mega-event, this quasi-

illegal derivative of the entertainment sector is pursued in an unapologetically strategic, profit-seeking

manner. Women torn between the productive potential of sexual commerce, the profitability of the most

readily (if not only) available resource material (the body), and the societal stigma associated with this

form of visibility navigate exclusion with each look, touch, and utterance. What are the broader social

processes that have created the condition in which sex is a possible, feasible, even desirable form of

labour for women to consider? What has caused the rise (if not mere continuance) in demand from men,

most often in the form of clientele, so normalized in the sale of sexualized bodies, so assured in this form

of servitude? How do these realities converge with the sport mega-event, another form of male-dominated

consumption, another instance of corporeally dependent labour? And what could this possibly teach us

about the “general prostitution of the labourer” (Marx, 1932[1844], p. v) in contemporary (mega-event

host) societies? For me, these curiosities continue to haunt the expansive cartographies of the (sport)

mega-event.

The emphasis of this first analysis chapter is to empirically illustrate the immediate, most intimate relation

between women (the worker) and men (the clientele) in the context of event cities. I focus on the use of

fantasies in subject formation, and tend specifically to the sex worker as the privileged nexus to examine

the considerable conflict between regressive realities (the alienating or destructive force of this form of

labour) and progressive fantasies (the simultaneous injection of liberation, oeuvre, or participation

envisioned in relation to sex whether work or otherwise) in the constitution of masculine/feminine

subjectivities. Much like the ethnographic work of Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (2011) on hostesses in Tokyo,

Japan, the construction of gendered identities is intricately connected to the commercialization of sex,

evident in the need for the worker to manufacture the client as “male” breadwinner and object of sexual

desire. At the heart of Parreñas's work is the understanding that gender is constructed relationally, and

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thus the cultivation of hegemonic masculinities (as an example) is understood in relation to the

hyperfeminine performance of women (Parreñas, 2011). In this work, I attend to the fact that this relation

is premised on performance, propagated on fiction. The stories shared herein reveal the extent to which

fantasies are written on and enacted through “real” bodies. Despite the hyperfeminine façade, women

master strategies that are stereotypically “masculine” (i.e., sexually advanced and adventurous,

emotionally dissonant, and profit-driven). I purposefully start the discussion with this mess of subject

formation (identities entangled in illusion and the performance that fantasies can occasion) to redirect our

attention from the popular (mis)estimation of both women and men involved in sexual commerce – and

disturb the constructed distance between the enlightened, rational subject and the irrational, deviant

subject.

The composite character – a personification of a confluence of multiplicities encountered in the field –

will be referenced throughout the chapter as Rosa Pereira. Rosa is a fictional character based on stories

shared from women involved in sexual commerce, women who were keen to participate in this research.

With Rosa, it is crucial to remember that all stories flutter between some exaggerated form of truth and

fiction – reality and simulation. She is meant to illustrate that both can be true of the world at the same

time: that the world is never as it may appear and exactly as it may seem, if one is intent on looking and

careful to look close enough. The performance demanded in a sexual exchange (whether commercialized

or not) can be both authentic and fictitious and can even switch in an instant, as boundaries, intended to

divide, are encountered as more porous than sealed. Whereas women are typically thought to be

objectified, dismissed, even exploited in sexual labour, Rosa troubles this infinitely more complex social

relation between the worker, “her” body and the pining clientele – imbued with love and affection, felt

even as fiction.

4.1 Imitated Intimacies

Postmodernism, the term that describes a plurality of incoherent sensibilities and a multiplicity of

contradictory tendencies is a difficult idea to nail down. The initial theorists of the term (Charles Jencks

[1986], Jean-Francois Lyotard [1979], Fredric Jameson [1991] and Ihab Hassan [1987]) each examined a

distinct cultural phenomenon (specifically, the transformation to the material landscape, distrust of the

metanarrative, the emergence of late capitalism, and the waning of affect) to be positioned in opposition

to modernism (utopianism, linear progress, grand narrative, Reason, to name a select few). It is beyond

the scope of this dissertation to debate the applicability of postmodernism as a theoretical concept.

Instead, I refer to postmodernism as a “structure of feeling” (to follow the work of Williams & Orrom,

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1954; Williams, 1977) and use the derivative concept of “metamodernism” as a heuristic to reconcile the

criticism leveled at the ideological naivety of modernism and the cynical insecurities of postmodernism.

Defined throughout the work of Raymond Williams, a structure of feeling is “a particular quality of social

experience and relationship, historically, distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of

a generation or of a period” (1977, p. 131). It is not a philosophy, a system of thought, closed with

boundaries. It is also not a movement, as it does not necessitate any one kind of politic or system of

belief. It is not an aesthetic; it does not dictate a sensory-emotional value nor offer a vision of utopia.

Unlike the notion of hegemony introduced and described in the work of Antonio Gramsci (1971) as either

“common sense” or the dominant way of thinking, “structure of feeling” is meant to signal the inner

dynamic that once unthinkable cultural sensibilities can inhabit. Evident in Williams's use of the term

"feeling" (rather than "thought"), is that the concept referred to something not yet (or quite) articulated but

inferred from the gap between official discourse and popular sentiment.21 Similar to the relation between

absence and presence that Pronger (2002) has described elsewhere,

Absence lies before presence, in anticipation. Just as absence lies in the foreground of

presence, so too presence lies in the anticipation of absence. The absential anticipation of

presence is the reception that absence gives presence. . . . Absence is the gift that makes

presence possible. . . . Absence, here, is not therefore a lack; it is the inherent positive,

productive, puissant generosity of moving. Absence is the gift that opens the event of our

being/becoming. (81-82)

The “structure of feeling” is the “anticipatory illumination” (Muñoz, 2009) offered in absence. It is a

structure of feeling, a mood, or a cultural logic. Metamodernism (as a “structure of feeling”) signifies the

current departure from the postmodern feeling or mood of ending. In this text, it is used as a heuristic

device to account for the “cultural dominant” (Jameson, 1991) of this specific stage in the development of

modernity. It is an attempt to balance modern optimism (encompassing utopianism, progress, Reason) and

postmodern pessimism (encompassing nihilism, sarcasm, and the distrust of singular truth or grand

narrative) within the current cultural horizon (Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2010, 2014, 2015). Adapted

from tendencies described in contemporary literature, music, and art, and detailed in the writing of

Timotheus Vermeulen (2013), Robin van der Akker (2013), and Luke Turner (2011), metamodernism has

allowed me to better conceptualize modern enthusiasm or optimism (sensation, affect) with postmodern

doubt (maquillage, performance):                                                                                                                          21 This ideological gap is one that I will revisit in the discussion of subject formation and defiance. For me, subject formation is not constituted from the internalization of ideologies (maintained in repetition, as Butler has so often stated) but rather as the outcome to failed interpellation – the “gap” to which the individual subject is forced to conform (see also Althusser, 1968 and Žižek, 1989, 108-109). Defiance is thus defined later as an act done onto this very gap (the failure of interpellation) in a concentrated effort to realize a world not-yet-here.

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New generations of artists increasingly abandon the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction,

parataxis, and pastiche in favour of aesth-ethical notions of reconstruction, myth, and

metaxis. These trends and tendencies can no longer be explained in terms of the

postmodern. They express a (often guarded) hopefulness and (at times feigned) sincerity

that hint at another structure of feeling, intimating another discourse. History, it seems, is

moving rapidly beyond its all too hastily proclaimed end. (Vermeulen & van der Akker,

2010, p. 2)22

In line with metamodernism, I have been cautious to nestle postmodern histories of ironic fiction with

humanist stories of affectual interaction in the everyday. This oscillation between immanence and

transcendence can better account for the stories from women who more than survive the nihilism of

postmodernism within the crisis-ridden moment. To be attentive to our current structure of feeling is to

better understand the interpretation of realities, the everyday processes of subject formation, offered in

these stories. For Rosa, fantasies inhabited the “lust of the flesh” so that emotion could be disconnected

from the sex she had at work. As she said, “As a sex worker, you need to control emotion, and still

disconnect from sex” (Rosa, personal communication, July 24, 2014). At the same time, she is committed

to the “real corporeality” of her performance – the connection made in flesh – needed to facilitate the

illusion of a “mutual” desire. The theatrical nature of her work has allowed her to remain disconnected,

shielded from the love made, never to fall fool to the fiction. Intertwined with a complete stranger, she is

reliant upon her own corporeal existence to fashion a particular affect for the client while remaining

deliberately distant and removed from the act. In optimistic pursuit of subtle defiance, this excerpt will

illustrate the manner in which fantasies infiltrate and (re)create an otherwise overwhelming sense of

nihilism in the everyday:

You have to be – or prostitution will teach you to be – at ease with seduction, to play that

game, and not be ashamed. Because women seem to intuitively display a certain level of

shame. Men approach women and women maintain distance or play hard to get – maybe

just at first, maybe longer. In the terma [brothel], you approach men, you initiate. I’ve

learned to use my body as an instrument, a working tool – not just an object to be adorned

or observed but as something that is active, creative, productive, not just reproductive. At

the same time, I said I disconnect. Remember I said I was motivated to do this work

because of future research, the money, and more of an existential issue, to learn to

disconnect sex from love. I think it is good to disconnect a little with sex. I first observed

                                                                                                                         22 Vermeulen and van den Akker (2015) define metaxis [or metaxy] as an “oscillation between the poles of existence, an attempt to unify a double-bind, an impossible possibility” (p. 65).

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this with the bandido [bandit] I dated, and it applies to prostitution.23 To become

desensitized, detached from the social meaning of sex like a bandido is with violence.

With sex, the bandido dated me and other women at the same time. It was clear to him:

One was his wife, a partner, meant to occupy an emotional space and the other, the

whore, the women from the street, needed for sex. So, the classic binomial saint versus

whore. This fascinated me. As a sex worker, you need to control emotion, and still

disconnect from sex. Manage the feeling of disgust, the feeling of shame [being naked in

front of stranger], even the pain too. I find it interesting that women, supposedly

exploited in sex work, control so much – create the illusion, the performance, and the act

of “mutual” desire for the client. To think a sex worker has no agency or that she is

trapped in some kind of web of sexism is to read the profession in an extremely shallow

manner. I am not alienated. I am desensitized. Emotionally from the act, but also from

mainstream morality and the shame I was taught to feel over my body, my femininity,

and my sexuality so undeniably entwined with the two. But when I have sex with

someone, it is so much more than all this. I give myself to the moment. I open to the

energy. It is intense – somehow religious or at least, my religion. This is how I love,

forgive, and feel grateful. I can hardly know the client but still accept him, without

judgment. To say, “You are welcome here. I trust you, inside of me.” I am not a religious

person but sometimes I think about the spirit of the universe or whatever God people say.

I think an orgasm is the closest thing to the spirit of the universe. The relief, the look, it is

so innately human, so pure. So above all else, I am an artist, and everything I do is done

to orchestrate that moment. Prostitution is art. Everything is performed. I am a

performance artist, acting, onstage. When I work, I can be whomever I want. My name is

whatever I want. So I am the actress but also, the director. And at the same time, I

produce everything: The makeup, costume, script, everything! Instead of charging

everyone $10 to enjoy the show, I do a private one, with a happy ending! (Rosa, personal

communication, July 24, 2014)

In the above excerpt, prostitution is redefined as an art and the worker as an artist. In her creative element,

she is desensitized from the “mainstream morality” of the traditional heteronormative sexual encounter in

search of a more fulfilling, neither (re)productive nor obligatory form of human (pleasurable) exchange.

Visible only as a symbol of social contagion in the dominant order, this is the work of a woman who has

infused defiance with love, used fantasies to sustain a “mutual” romance. For Rosa, this simulated love is

                                                                                                                         23 Rosa dated a well-known traficante [drug dealer] from Comando Vermelho, a major drug cartel in Brazil, after she left her abusive husband.

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more “religious” and “pure” than the failed love at home. The crux of her performance is premised on her

understanding of the illusion necessitated in love, the mythologies used to sustain love. The illusion of

love is not, however, exclusive to commercialized love/sex, the connection Rosa has manufactured for her

client. It is reminiscent of all love, irrespective of social standing, profession, etc. It is her profession that

has only heightened her awareness of the simulated “realities” we live in the everyday.

4.2 The Phantasmagorical Impasse, Survival in the Everyday24

While not specifically dealing with sex work, Lauren Berlant elaborates on the role of fantasies in

everyday love and survival. The work of Berlant on “cruel optimism” illustrates the everyday “drama of

adjustment” and the fantasies that somehow sustain the vision of the “good” life despite inevitable and

unavoidable misery (2011, p. 2). Anchored in the work of Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, Georg Lukács,

Fredric Jameson, and Frantz Fanon, Berlant applies a Marxian approach to the theorization of affect, and

in doing so accentuates the careful incursion of fantasies (e.g., in relation to property, labour, and

pleasure) across capitalist processes of value extraction and exploitation. Reminiscent of Berlant’s notion

of “cruel optimism,” Rosa illustrates the manner in which those involved in this research more than

survive the impasse of everyday life. Fantasies of the “good” life, to echo Berlant, move us through the

everyday (to “manage the feeling of disgust, the feeling of shame,” as Rosa described it). For those living

a life not quite “good” enough, fantasies occasion a more pleasurable attachment to life, or fleeting

“relief” (as Rosa stated) from the mundane, seldom dramatic impasse of the everyday. These fantasies

also allow us to overcome alienation, or the incessant failure of a love not reflected in the hegemonic form

of human attachment to become “desensitized, detached from the social meaning of sex . . . to love,

forgive, and feel grateful” (as we learn from Rosa). At work, fantasies of the “good” life (“good” wife)

converge with fantasies of the “good” slut to direct the affective-libidinal performance enacted in

consensual sex with a stranger. As an extension to “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011), fantasies allow Rosa

to bend familiar binaries otherwise undone (beyond repair) in postmodernism. The total demise of these

binaries, I argue, would only further cement the self under siege, condemned to live in a state of political

paralysis. In the contemporary moment, (metamodern) “cruel optimism” can offer an avenue to

(re)imagine collapsed binaries between impersonal/personal, structure/agency, public/private. Similar to

                                                                                                                         24 The term “phantasmagorical” (fantastical-phantom) is used to reference the “phantasmagoria” [dies phantasmagorische Form] from which Marx & Engels (1990 [1867]) believed all commerce stemmed, and which led to the question of fetishism, the mystical character of the commodity form and the residual product of labour (see also Derrida, 1994, pp. 157-160).

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the artwork and literature deemed metamodern, these women use the tropes of mysticism, estrangement,

and alienation to enact ironic possibilities for survival in the everyday.

The following excerpt is taken from a conversation with Rosa. It is included now to demonstrate the fluid

flow of co-constructed identities and the inaccuracies of generalized or assumed subjectivities. This

conversation was the first time we ever sat down alone. Seated across the table from her, I was nervous

but tried to mimic her cool. She had a way of being-in-the-world that I knew from watching her at work:

sweet and sincere but with a look that could cut like a sword.

4.3 Affexting: Metamodernist Sexting and the Question of Love

While we sat in the corner booth of a bookstore turned café, I spun my spoon against the

neatly polished table, wishing I had just one more cookie sitting on the saucer of my

coffee cup – so tiny that thing, yet so packed with sweetness. I looked across the table.

Rosa sat quietly, texting in English. I can see her screen, I am reading it now, and I know

I should stop. "Miss u" she wrote. Glancing back to the spoon, "Who are you talking to?"

fell from exhale. “Smooth, idiot,” I thought to myself.

“A client I met yesterday, from Dubai. I fell in love with him. He came into the terma,

terrified. The ladies were flirting with him, and he just kept tightening his robe. I started

to laugh, and he invited me to go with him. When we got into the room, he turned off all

the lights and took off three pairs of underwear. Three! (Laughing.) Shorts, then boxers,

then briefs. Brazilian men are usually nude underneath the robe! And that was it. Now we

chat through WhatsApp. He told me he loved me too.”

“And it’s love, actual love?” I ask, in an unexpected confrontational tone.

“You don't pretend?” Rosa said with an extended pause, as though purposefully waiting

for the spoon to stop before she continued. “You never pretend in your life? Pretend to

like someone . . . Or be someone you're not? Pretend to laugh at something you never

thought was funny, or at least not worthy of a laugh? And do you know, for sure, when

the pretending is over? Do you ever think: It pleases me to please them? So, what could

be lost? Yeah, I am in 'love' with him. I think he is cute, this guy from Dubai, in an

awkward yet endearing kind of way. And I play that up. Why not? Maybe it is actual

love. Whatever that is . . . Maybe this is real . . . Or the start of something more. . . . Do

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you ever really know? Right now, it feels good, and it is certainly less abusive than the

'love' I had with my ex[husband].” We sat in silence for a moment. I wanted her to

continue, and she did: “People believe I expose myself to violence in this work, but the

danger doesn’t come from clients; I was beaten by my own husband. Clients aren’t the

problem. It’s the husband, father, brother, uncle, sometimes even sister or mother . . .

Most women only fear life in the face of a public servant. Unbelievable! When the client

is violent, we can deal with it. I can hit a client, and call security. There is a CCTV

system overlooking the entrance/exit and all throughout the terma. So if there is violence,

we are prepared. There is a planned response. Really, I think the women fear

contamination, some kind of disease, and the men fear falling in love. (Rosa, personal

communication, June 18, 2014)

This excerpt from our conversation that day is illustrative of the everyday self under siege and the grasp

for (re)assurance – to feel love(d) – that is certainly not unique to women (and men) involved in sexual

commerce. If we were really postmodern, we would not discuss the self. There would be no “self” to

fragment, split, and rapidly (re)produce to infinity in the everyday. To draw a line between real and

simulation is now a practical, everyday situation for Rosa, much like ourselves, not restricted to the realm

of philosophical debate. At work, her affective-libidinal performance is reliant upon a spectrum of

possible fantasies that reinforce the phantasmagorical nature of love, attraction, and lust. The “real

corporeality” of the sexual act is never not heavily mediated through fantasy. In the same breath, Rosa is

well aware of the malice “real” love can (and so often does) occasion. Similar to the oscillating tension

that has come to characterize metamodernism, Rosa is acutely attuned to the complexities created in

advanced capitalist societies. Her life is lived as a delicate and continual balance between the public and

private realm – the real and the simulation of the real. As a relation of cruel optimism, sex work afforded

Rosa an outlet to live a life that might not otherwise be realized (e.g., “A client I met yesterday, from

Dubai. I fell in love with him. . . . So, what could be lost? Yeah, I am in 'love' with him. I think he is cute,

this guy from Dubai, in an awkward yet endearing kind of way. And I play that up. Why not? Maybe it is

actual love”). On the crowded metro, headed home, it felt like rehearsal had ended. We were too tired, too

cold, to manage an impression for one another as we were hurled underground. Little was said but I

remember the sound of our laughter. I remember her smile, the unreserved radiance of it – salvation from

the cold of the cabin, created in the excesses of central air. This was the ecstasy of communication, the

vertigo of sensorial overload.25 For a moment, anxieties vanished, and I thought, maybe, this is all that is

sold.

                                                                                                                         25 Ecstasy is defined in the work of Baudrillard as “the quality proper to any body that spins until all sense is lost, and then shines forth in its pure and empty form” (Baudrillard & Pettman, 2008 [1983], p. 28). Whereas vertigo (the

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The manufacturing of love disrupted, and arguably destroyed, the “real” love Rosa once associated with

home. Beyond that, there is also the violence she (and women like her) endured at the hand of the State, a

circumstance that is alluded to in this chapter but thoroughly detailed in the next. From the above excerpt,

we learn that at home Rosa was subjected to the abuse of someone she was committed to love. Someone

she hoped would (forever) love her back. The threat of subordination and violence most often associated

with her line of work occurred in actuality at home. At work, violence is more easily managed, even

mitigated. With Sara Ahmed, we are told that hate is bred from love. Violence (the materialization of

hate) is an act of love occasioned against the other “imagined as a threat to the object of love” (2004, p.

117). The seduction of her performance, the orgasm so supreme that it diluted fantasies of her husband

from a distance. The exchange of love (even if performed and manufactured) between Rosa and her

clientele threatened love at home. She casually spoke of this violence, and the vehement reception her

work received at home, despite the luxuries it allowed her and her then-husband to afford. Her status as

“whore” legitimized the abuse endured at the hand of her “real” love. This is the material efficiency of

ideology and the fantasies that sustain it. The husband (violent, sadistic, full of hatred and fear) redirected

his love. His imagined “whore” threatened fantasies of his ideal “wife” as discursive subject,

romanticized life partner, but also material, fleshy property (not person) to which ownership is granted in

matrimony. Hate, like the discussion of love in this document, is economic too. It is manufactured and

used to rationalize the division of national, ethnic, religious subjectivities, and the treatment such

categories have occasioned. Hate and love are diffused within the Bataillean “accursed share” and

circulate within/among/between human interactions to mark difference. The conflation between fantasies

of love at home and those manufactured at work fueled much of the violence Rosa experienced in her

personal/private (“real”) life. The manipulation of possible realities (her knack for seduction or her ability

to construct a simulation du jour) honed at work, transferred into the home, in strategies needed for self-

defense. As she so eloquently stated:

Learning how to manage clients, pain, all the emotions at work, taught me how to deal

with my abusive husband at home. He was sadistic, loved to mistreat me, loved to see me

suffer. He was a musician, so romantic, right? Who doesn’t love a guy with a guitar? But

he loved to mistreat me. Whatever I wanted, he did the opposite. So when he was angry, I

just learned to apologize. Begged for him to stop, to love me, and he would kick me to

the street. . . . Great, better to be on the street than beaten at home. He knew I was a call

girl, at first he was even impressed by it. . . . Thought it was daring, seductive. In time

though, the jealousy overrode everything else. Every fight reverted back to my work. “I

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         “vertigo of seduction”) is cold, cool, a metaphorical central air, as it “pushes toward a dizzying over-multiplication of formal qualities, and therefore to a form of ecstasy” (ibid.).

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was a whore.” “I should stop wear revealing clothes,” it made me too obvious. One time

he pinned me down, hit me so hard. I remember him shouting: “Pray that I let you out of

here. Pray!” I was so scared I peed myself. No one could rescue me. I was at home. No

private security, no one to call for help. Just the two of us, my husband and me. . . And I

kept screaming, and he just kept saying, “You find it nice to be a whore, I have never met

anyone that thought it was nice to be a whore!” I managed the violence at home,

manipulated the situation, and played to his game, because of what I learned at work.

(Rosa, personal communication, June 18, 2014)

Could it be that a life too rich with irrational, unreasonable lust needed a reminder of the tragic fullness,

the “eternal suffering,” of the world? The violence at home resurrected the myth of rational utility that

binds the productive, (hetero)normative world. So committed was her husband to these ideologies – to the

realization of the “good” life – that there was no hesitation in his violence, no anxieties shown as he

whittled his wife into this “ego-ideal” (Freud, 1957 [1914], p. 94). His greatest failure was the mere

refusal to admit to his delusion, and recognize the utter impossibility of his fantasies. There is one fable

(relevant now) that the women share with one another to manage such optimism of fantasies, despite the

shared pessimism of experience: the myth of the found father.

“I had to run upstairs yesterday because there was an acquaintance of mine in the brothel,

I told my friend and she said: 'Girl, you don’t even know! When my friend worked here,

a guy choose her and when she got to the room, it was her father!' Women share these

stories, create these possibilities, and it is possible. Wherever I work, I hear stories about

a father or uncle, without exception.” (Rosa, personal communication, June 22, 2014)

The women interviewed all shared the similar tale of an unsuspecting father that

accidently found (even chose) his (working) daughter for a programa [date] in a terma

[brothel-bar]. Although the same version was never told twice, it involved the same

familiar cast and crew. First, a friend often removed by one degree of separation (a friend

of a friend). Second, her unfaithful, promiscuous father or uncle, and third, some kind of

mask or costume cloaked over the woman so as to not make her identifiable, yet still

familiar. This tale could be known as the reverse-Freudian sexual yearning for a daughter

who is positioned as a younger, more attractive, maybe even virginal female. But before

she can become known as an object of his utmost desire (maybe the most grotesque

imaginable sexual attraction – that between father and daughter), the father must be

known to break the traditional domestic bond between husband and wife. The bond that

the patriarchal family must rest, not to mention the social relation perpetuated in her quest

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for that “one true” love, her knight in shining armor. As a well-known myth that subverts

the “perfect” patriarchal family, it is used to assert the fabrication of celebrated (familial)

subjectivities (e.g., faithful husband, doting father). The significance of this fable is not to

signal the embarrassment of a colleague (even as the fear does loom) but rather offer a

tale into the obvious disjuncture between “real” love, that which has sustained familial

relations, and that made known in work. (Field note, June 24, 2014)

Rosa’s reference to the tale made me wonder: with all the possible and predictable violence and

destruction associated with this form of work, why was this tale, the one that collided familial identities –

innocent daughter as purveyor of sexual desire – most feared? And for the father, it was a clash as well –

an urban legend more popularized than the violent eviction, theft, and malicious demonstration of (state-

led) violence on more than 300 women less than a month into the research (discussed later in this work).

No one seemed as versed in those stories nor as concerned. It was this fictitious story about the mythical

yet probable father that was most feared. It was symbolic of the moment in which well-known identities

such as the patriarchal family man (whether a decent father or not) and his (supposed) innate, masculine

desire to display his sexual prowess collide. “Monogamy is not realistic,” I am told. So does it come as a

shock that a father, husband, family man should wander into a brothel? With all the men “serviced,” it

would seem statistically probable, if not inevitable, that a father might catch his cherished child in the

midst of a shift. Quite frankly, though, the mere embarrassment is of little concern to me. As a

(heterosexual female) sex worker, the moment in which Rosa hypothetically encounters her father in the

brothel is the moment in which she must come face to face with a more painful myth – that is, the true

impossibility of “perfect” love sustained in an imperfect world. At the same time, this is also the site of a

potential revolution within the everyday, a conscious awakening to a myth that has informed the gender

hierarchies of the heteronormative-private realm, a relationality sanctioned in the home but also palpable

(phantom-like) in the common or public sphere. Undervalued yet still acting in service to the home, Rosa

is aware of the porous boundaries between truth and fiction, between her imagined and authentic familial

union. The urban legend of the father found in a brothel is a disruption of the private, intimate kinship

imagined in her quest for “real” love. The identities performed at work enter into direct conflict with the

identities performed at home, as if there were ever such a distinction. The construction of identities that

are relational, dependent upon the notion of father, mother, and daughter/child within the household, are

in contradiction with the realities (and associated identities) known in her work. To place faith in this

myth is to live in a perpetual dilemma – between the innocence of a “true” (monogamous) love and a

world known for infidelity.

The inwardness of a human relation (the intimate) has to attend to some level of outwardness (the public).

As a social relation, intimacies both absorb and resist ideologies expressed within the hegemonic public

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sphere; they are the public personalized. Intimacies are so-often defined in relation to institutional

apparatuses, framed as beautiful and sustainable over a long duration, generational even (i.e., in relation

to “real” love, legitimized in marriage). People consent to trust their desire for a life nestled within a

socially constructed and institutionalized “intimate” with faith that such romance will stifle or manage the

inconvenient realities of “sexuality, money, expectation, and exhaustion, producing, at the extreme, moral

dramas of estrangement and betrayal, along with terrible spectacles of neglect and violence even where

desire, perhaps, endures” (Berlant & Warner, 1998, p. 281). As Rosa said, “My dream is to get married,

and leave this life forever! Well, maybe not forever, I think I have a bit of an addiction” (Personal

communication, July 7, 2014). The intensities of a divisive private (affective, domestic, and feminine) and

public (instrumental, industrial, and masculine) realm are useful dichotomies to think through and against

identities and subjectivities but are most often encountered as referent, not exactly real. As Rosa stated: “I

don’t prioritize sexuality. I can have sex with men, women, whatever. People choose attraction but all of

this, “I’m gay, I’m transsexual, travesti, whatever . . .” Doesn’t matter. Who cares?! Respect each other as

people and understand sexuality as one, minor aspect of existence” (Rosa, personal communication, July

9, 2014). In relation to the identities I embraced in the field, there was a certain level of oscillation

between well-known and conventional categories (i.e., gender, sexuality, race and class), dependent on

circumstance. In this text, I accentuate the feminine role of the worker because, despite biological sex, in

heterosexual sex-related industries, or at least in the case of this research, the worker most often had a

more feminine aesthetic. Likewise, the client was more masculine. And that is still not to suggest that

biological men serve as the sole clientele. Indeed, women also seek the kinship of a sex worker. If I

embraced a more masculine demeanor, I tended to be treated more as a prospective client than rival.

Identities are thus seen to oscillate in a manner similar to the fluid processes of (human) attachment,

which is somewhat obvious – i.e., identities constructed in relation to another, if reconfigured, would

likewise reconfigure that relation. This is the instability of individual, private life that is masked in

trajectories of the collective, public good.

4.4 Closeted Identities, Fabricated Realities

The important facet underpinning this discussion of the sex worker as “a specific expression of the

general prostitution of the labourer” (Marx, 1932 [1844]) is the use of fantasies in the construction of

intimate yet manufactured social attachment – a simulation of a relation that has come to outrun the real.

If Fordism cemented consumption within the (re)production of capital, post-Fordism added

communication to the cycle of capitalist production, to privilege the consumption of information. This is

the basis of “immaterial labour” as defined in the work of Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) and further

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expanded upon in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (1999, 2000, 2005, 2011, 2012). This

work is not without reference to the sale of personality in corporate capitalism as outlined in White

Collar: The American Middle Classes (C. Wright Mills, 1951, quoted at the outset of this chapter), which

Arlie Hochschild would later term “emotion labour” in her book The Managed Heart (1983). In a broad

sense, immaterial labour (encompassing both emotional and affective labour) is used to refer to work

done in the creation of an intangible, invisible product – service, affect, knowledge or communication.

Hochschild focuses on the emotional management of the employee (in her case, the flight attendant) to

create a more enjoyable customer experience. In her work, it is in the commercial interest of a corporation

to resource or commoditize emotion in pursuit of profit. Fordism capitalism: “As enlightened

management realizes, a separation of display and feeling is hard to keep up over long periods. A principle

of emotive dissonance, analogous to the principle of cognitive dissonance, is at work. Maintaining a

difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 90). But

this research as well as other work done with women involved in sex-related industries (see also Parreñas,

2011) has countered this belief in emotive dissonance with the claim that (sex) work does not necessarily

lead to a sense of estrangement or alienation (feeling vs. feigning emotion). Rather it is the lack of

autonomy or customer satisfaction (i.e., if emotion is not reciprocated) that can cause a worker to feel

alienated. Furthermore, it is life outside of work that, for Rosa, has furthered her sense of alienation. At

work she relished the chance to offer a client a “good time” (Parreñas, 2011, p. 136) as it too occasioned

“relief” for her. For Rosa, the immaterial commodities manufactured in (consensual) sexual commerce are

a more pleasurable, less violent form of simulated love – they have outrun the “real” love lost at home.

Like Hochschild (1983), Lazzarato (1996) and Hardt and Negri (1999, 2000, 2005, 2011, 2012) define

immaterial labour as the main economic driver from which affective labour (the creation and

manipulation of affect) is derived. The work done in the realm of information and communication

technologies is another form of labour encapsulated as “immaterial labour” as well as creative and

intellectual labour. Far beyond the computerization of labour (the management of data and information),

affective labour is dependent upon the creation of an emotive product: “This labor is immaterial, even if it

is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being,

satisfaction, excitement, or passion” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 292-293). Affective labour (to borrow from

Hardt & Negri) is believed to create a social network, sense of community, and biopower (the power to

recreate, refashion, and reimagine the social “common” itself), as cooperation and social interaction are

immanent to all immaterial labour processes. The use of the term “affective labour” is somewhat different

from the “emotional labour” defined in the work of Hochschild. To Hochschild, emotion, similar to mood

or sensation, is the “thing” within a person as some kind of “raw” material that is needed to be managed

and manipulated in order to create a particular affect in another. Hochschild focuses on the work done on

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the individual in the creation of a particular emotion or affect in the client. Hardt and Negri discuss the

insertion of affect into the circulation of capital – the exchange of affect imbued within the current market

– rather than the manner in which an individual must harness emotion (via surface or deep acting) as a

productive member in corporate capitalism. Hardt and Negri (2011, p. 139) argue that the production of

the “common form of wealth” such as information, affect, and social attachment/relationality is

expropriated in capitalism in the generation of surplus value. Like Hochschild, Hardt and Negri believe

that the alienation associated with immaterial labour is different from industrial labour, but unlike the

more pessimistic Hochschild, Hardt and Negri claim that affective labour can lead to future liberation in

the devotion to social cooperation – cooperation that could be used to overthrow the exploitation inherent

in capitalist expansion. As Rosa stated in relation to the kinship inherent in this form of work: “Listen,

most of the [men] are quite sincere, and some even become close friends. I believe this is real friendship,

and I think a lot of the women become addicted to that” (Personal communication, July 14, 2014). This

should be noted but not idealized or romanticized. Brazil is a nation with immense disparities of wealth,

littered with histories of social discrimination based on skin colour and oppressive machismo.

Nevertheless, sexual commerce does afford a form of human (inter)action in which an individual (male,

female, whatever) is revealed, made visible, to the other in a semi-uncalibrated moment – one that is

irrefutably laden with potentiality.

In addition to the obvious similarities between sexual commerce and other affective-emotional or

performative labour, it cannot be denied that women involved in sex work use the body to commoditize

sex, a fact that is incompatible with the celebrated image of “good” woman/wife/mother (Carrier-Moisan,

2015; Parreñas, 2011). To reconcile these inconsistencies, carefully erected boundaries delimit identities

crafted for work and those promoted outside. In a sense, women “closet” (to borrow from the gay and

lesbian liberation movement) their “spoiled identity” (Goffman, 1963) to avoid the risk associated with

unnecessary exposure (e.g., public shaming or worse, the criminalizing of families living on the income

earned as a prostitute). Few women disclose their status as “sex worker” to those most loved, even the

clientele. It is assumed but often unsaid, like the wealth of the rich.26 Beneficial on one hand, the practice

of “closeting” is not without negative consequence. The “closeted” sex worker is forced to live in semi-

isolation with no visible or collective status, the basis from which the women are made most vulnerable.

Less inclined to openly or publicly challenge the dominant, oppressive system, women manoeuvre

between identities and rely upon more ambivalent, subtle, and nuanced activities of microresistance

                                                                                                                         26 From this, one can easily imagine the ridiculousness of requesting that a woman sign a consent form, even with a pseudonym, that will publically assert her involvement in sexual commerce, and document (in a rather permanent manner) her identity as a sex worker. It is comparable to me requesting research participation from a student scantily dressed on-campus – as we would be naïve to think that sex work was not a lucrative option for university/college youth in (increasingly more) crippling debt.

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(discussed later in Chapter 6) in order to carve the space needed to simply live life in the midst of a

complex web of power and domination. The dilemma for women involved in sex work – or the dilemma

that continued to concern me over the course of this research – has been the (im)possibility of systemic

revolt within the everyday entrepreneurialism of sexual commerce. Informal economies allow those

involved to advance their current economic state but as they do so, business must also replicate the

dominant, profit-seeking, capitalistic strategies (appropriated in sport-event-led urbanism) rather than

(re)produce new strategies catering to passion, pleasure, and conviction in the absence of commercial

interest, profit, and advancement. The revolutionary potential of fantasies in the everyday will build the

basis for the discussion offered in Chapter 6, the final analysis chapter.

4.5 Economies of Love, and the Accursed Share

Rather than a mere distortion of “authentic” intimacies, the commodities created in the name of love

could be regarded as an expression of the “accursed share” defined throughout the work of Georges

Bataille (1897-1962) as the excessive, irrecoverable, surpluses that, if not disbursed in a lavish and

luxurious fashion, in the absence of rational advancement or progress, will be directed at more destructive

and ruinous activities such as warfare. With a Marxian bent on consumption like Baudrillard, Bataille, the

neo-Marx, wrote the following in relation to the notion of expenditure [la notion de dépense] (1985

[1933], p. 118):

Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and conservation, and

consumption must be divided into two distinctive parts. The first, reducible part is

represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the

continuation of individuals’ productive activity in a given society; it is therefore a

question simply of the fundamental condition of productive activity. The second part is

represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the

construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity

(i.e., deflected from genital finality) – all these represent activities, which at least in

primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves. Now it is necessary to reserve

the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not

for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of

production.

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Baudrillard and Bataille, in their critical assessments of capitalist expansion, extract from Marxian

theories of production to construct theories of consumption. With Bataille, profitless expenditure is

necessitated in the avoidance of catastrophic destruction. According to his theory of consumption, the

“accursed share” must be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain (e.g., in nonprocreative sexuality,

spectacle, or sumptuous architecture) or it will become destined to outrageous and catastrophic

outpouring (e.g., in the contemporary moment, most often in war). To echo his work, I use the creative

impulse of sport and sex to think against the destructive expenditure witnessed in war. The use of sport in

this respect is similar to consensual sex in that it can occasion a form of relationality that is reparative in

nature – a reparation that is committed to the creative potentialities of the encounter even in destruction

(e.g., an affair will open one to new, otherwise unknowable potentialities or another relational existence,

even if it is the utter destruction of another). Both the spectacle of sport and consensual sex with a

stranger hold affect in creative-optimistic tension rather than the destructive expenditure known in war.

Rosa articulated the manner in which she will “give herself to the moment” and become “open to the

energy” of an intimate sexual encounter, beyond the utility of sex for reproduction or the expression of an

obligation/commitment to a lover. This is energy directed into the not-yet-here or unknown love of a

stranger. Economies of love are certainly more favourable than economies of hate. Yet if hate is merely

love redirected, destruction is the redirection of creative potentialities into narrowly defined “productive”

consumption. On the one hand, for the client or spectator, this is “unproductive” expenditure (a lavish

expense) but on the other, for those who entrepreneurialize the body, it is “productive” expenditure. The

waste of one is the fuel of another. It is this lavish use of the accursed share that is needed to perpetuate

processes of production and consumption inherent to capitalist expansion. This is the cruelty in the

optimism sustained in the hope of a world more relationally fulfilling, the recognition that even intimacies

(whether imitated or not) are bound to rational-economic production. Human passion and desire can be

economically obtained. In line with Bataille, if we agree that labour has forever drained the intimate

(privileging production in lieu of passion and pleasure) as a “specific expression of the general

prostitution of the labourer” (Marx, 1932 [1844], p. 133), economies of the flesh have further assumed the

labourer and client/spectator as a mere thing in possession of use value, subjugated to fantasy, and needed

for exchange. As Mills (1951) noted in the citation included at the start of this chapter: “‘Sincerity’ is

detrimental to one’s job, until the rules of salesmanship and business become a ‘genuine’ aspect of

oneself” (p. 183). It is the irreparable collapse between “genuine” sincerity and economic survival that

will continue to make affective-performative economies flourish, as people seek to relinquish intimacies

lost in the pursuit of profit. If there is a “waning of affect” (Jameson, 1991), it is an authentic affect,

commercialized now in economies of heightened fiction – economies of pure simulation.

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In the next chapter I will unpack fantasies in the construction and maintenance of State power. Similar to

the violence Rosa endured at home, the violence suffered at the hand of the State is a violence occasioned

in the failure of interpellation. The sex worker does not meet the ideal futurity guaranteed by State

authorities or in the ideologies it has so adamantly sought to sustain (in both law and violence). As such,

the sex worker is expelled from the popular imaginary, made visible only as the unsolicited target of

“expulsion” strategies (Sassen, 2014) and condemned to live a life in the shadows. This violence, the

violence inflicted on those not reflected in fantasies of futurity, has also sanctioned a stage from which

State authorities can flex their sovereign muscle to the masses. This is the political theatre that is used to

propagate the pursuit of one future-ideal that will (at the least) exclude and (at a maximum) abolish all

that is understood as a threat.

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Figure 6. Calm in Copa(cabana) amid Brazilian defeat to Germany

Germany would beat the undefeated Brazil 7-1 that evening. Photo taken on July 8, 2014 by Amanda De Lisio

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Prescript: Isabel Costa

Unlike Rosa, Isabel came from a rather marginalized childhood. As a 25-year-old, lower-class preta

(black) woman, she is the embodiment of ongoing legacies of colonialism in Brazil. She was raised in

Complexo do Alemão (German Complex), a favela in the northernmost outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. At the

age of 16, she left home and her abusive alcoholic father to be with her then lover at the time, a well-

known and outfitted drug lord in the favela. Not uniquely among most young women in her situation,

Isabel had her first child as a teenager. Soon after the birth, her boyfriend was jailed for the brutal murder

of a local journalist. Left alone, Isabel made the calculated decision to pursue sex work in the South Zone

of Rio de Janeiro at the age of 18. At the same time, she reconnected with her mother who – with her

older sister and brother – helped care for her child. No one in her family was aware of her employment,

and to avoid potential embarrassment, she moved her work across Guanabara Bay to Niterói after a short

stint in Belo Horizonte in the state of Minais Gerais. Outside of Rio de Janeiro, she was less fearful of an

accidental encounter with a loved one (boyfriend, brother, uncle, or estranged father). She could also earn

enough money to cover rent, utilities, and food for her family, move her mother from the favela into a

middle-class suburb, and send her child to private school. Eventually, she bought an apartment at the

Caixa large enough for her and three other women to use in sexual commerce. The women offered Isabel

companionship and protection at work but also paid rent, the private security fee, and the monthly

“tolerance” fee to the Civil Police Precinct less than a kilometre down the road. To do so, a portion of

each programa was allocated to the “house” (i.e., Isabel). Unlike the financial structure in other sex

businesses in Brazil, the women were charged based on clientele (not a standard shift fee or fee to rent the

room), which she and the other women democratically decided and considered to be fair. The closure of

the Caixa in Niterói forced Isabel into less secure, less autonomous, and more exploitative sex businesses.

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Chapter 5: Isabel Costa,

Athletico-Military-Industrial-Complex or the Magic of the State

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live

is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in

keeping with this insight. (Benjamin, 1996 [1921], p. 257)

Being an Olympic City means forever building a fair, integrated, and developed Rio. A

dream that both the municipality and its citizens, the Cariocas, are helping to turn into

reality. (Strategic Plan by the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Government, 2013-2016, p. 227)

Today, Rio’s government knows exactly where the city will be in 20 years, and each

action of project that is put to practice is given priority according to its impacts on the

fulfillment of future goals. Seeking results became City Hall’s guiding principle, and it is

reflected in each and every one of its officials as they constantly pursue focus, discipline,

and pragmatism. (Eduardo Paes, Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, 2012)

The globally recognized sport mega-event has been widely criticized as a military-industrial complex

trade show – an undeniable appendage to the business of war increasingly needed to “softly” showcase

the latest in athleticism and ammunition to the (watching) world (Manley & Silk, 2013; Prouse, 2013;

Sugden, 2012). In order to understand state-led violence that is directed at local informal economies, the

sport mega-event must first be “imagined” as both a target of “foreign” terrorism (see Atkinson & Young,

2012) and a catalyst for urban reform. These imaginaries, popularly associated with the event, rationalize

the exorbitant effort (and cost) needed to militarize and police host cities; yet there is evidence that these

globally determined security strategies prioritize and protect the mobilization of global capital, not the

local populace (see, e.g., Bennett & Haggerty, 2014; Cornelissen, 2011; Gaffney, 2010; Giulianotti, 2010;

Kidd, 2016; Schimmel, 2012). To write on the violent intersection between the militarization of host cities

and communities rendered “degenerate” would add to the existent literature that is already well versed in

the violence sport-related development can occasion (see Gaffney, 2010, 2013; Gruneau & Horne, 2015).

But I do this not with the intention to sensationalize stories so often advertised in media coverage,

especially those generated about the “developing” world; I recount these realities to make visible the

women barred from fantasies of urban reform, barred from our collective vision of the future. For this

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reason, these stories are needed in Physical Cultural Studies. Second, I aim to recount the oft-conflicted

relation between the women I worked with and the local law enforcement that I repeatedly stumbled upon

in data collection – a palpable love-hate relationship, bred from the dual role of policemen as regular

clientele and inflictor of distress. This relation is epitomized in the State-led eviction of women from a

historical site of sex work in Niterói, a municipality of the Greater Rio de Janeiro Area. I should note that

the use of State (rather than state) is deliberate. I make it into a proper noun to convey a sense of

embodiment, and emphasize the role of the State as a substantial actor in urban reform.

The Niterói case is the empirical basis on which the discussion in this chapter is built. The data will

unfold in the form of a narrative. Rhetorically, the difference between the last discussion and the

emphasis in this discussion is slight yet significant. It is the difference between a hand that caresses the

face and one gripped around the neck. One is an intimate impasse or reparation to the optimism that has

made the everyday mundane and even the horrific tolerable; the other, a salute to the end, a gesture to

death, with great intention. Contained within the intimacies of the last section are a multitude of

possibilities. This narrative will now describe one plausible outcome. With a hand tensed around the neck,

the role of fantasies (in State formation, and the monopoly on violence needed to maintain power) will

continue to anchor the discussion. Now, the focus will shift to fantasies of urban reform, needed to

legitimize (deviant) development strategies. As Puar (2005) wrote, “Opening up to the fantastical wonders

of futurity is the most powerful of political and critical strategies, whether it be through assemblage or to

something as yet unknown, perhaps even forever unknowable” (137). The fantasies of futurity or the

vision of “peacetime sobriety,” as Scheper-Hughes (1992, p. 219) wrote, are an escape from the everyday

“nervosa” of the modern “state of emergency” but are also – and this is the moment in which future

optimism is made into everyday cruelties – inculcated within the same system that has monopolized and

“legitimated” violence. Everyday violence is made tolerable for the imagined “better” life; the life that

could be lived in newly modernized “global” cities.

It has been argued that event-led urbanism creates a “carceral archipelago” (Foucault, 1977) that is reliant

upon (emergency) incarceration strategies punitively deployed and delicately embedded within urban

(re)design (Coaffee, 2015). A multiplicity of strategies, it is argued – such as the heightened reliance upon

surveillance technologies, punitive policing, and spatial cleansing – is needed to govern and control

modern, advanced industrial societies. The sophistication of these strategies, evidenced in Niterói, has

made complexity a condition of design, so blame cannot be assigned. As Sassen (2014) suggested, the

more complex the operation, the more difficult it is to pinpoint responsibility, the harder it is for anyone

to feel responsible or take responsibility. In reality, however, the outcome of this supposed sophistication

is, paradoxically, a form of brutality that belies sophistication. The women robbed, raped, and evicted

from the Caixa would scoff at the idea that everyday police “business” would ever be deemed

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“sophisticated” (Sassen, 2014). As this narrative will illustrate, the brute aggression and force

administered at the hand of local law enforcement is experienced in the “real” as far from sophisticated

exceptionalism. It is the same old primitive accumulation Marx (1990 [1867]) would have suggested, but

with a more advanced design. Impossible to attribute blame or worse, expect a crucible of shame. Crucial

to what I am calling a “disciplinary wave of urbanism” is the dependence on spatial strategies of control

where the urban space is targeted instead of individual bodies, even if a face (whether that of a religious

extremist, young black male from the favela, or disease-infested sex worker) is needed to illustrate and

legitimize the dramatic thrust of securitization that communities are forced to survive.

In direct opposition to the appearance of the State as an authoritarian, militarized regime is the

humanitarian agenda advertised in state-funded, nongovernmental agencies as the new “face” of local law

enforcement. Violence with a “designer smile” is representative of a global network of security or “rescue

industry” (Agustin, 2007), which Amar (2013) so eloquently summarised as “engage[d] in morally

charged, heavily armed humanitarian campaigns that target the criminalizing perversions of globalization

as they capture local spaces and populations” (p. 36). To document processes of the “carceral

archipelago” in conjunction with the sport mega-event is thus to raise yet another important geographical

consideration – that is, the extent to which these globally constituted approaches to securitization intersect

with, and become filtered through, different host communities to, ultimately, impinge upon local bodies.

The ethnographic work conducted with (and around) the women of the Caixa, specifically my ongoing

relationship with Isabel (pseudonym used in this denunciation of State action), is one case illuminative of

the complexities of mega-event and government design, as well as the brutalities of implementation that

are inextricably tied to the athletico-military industrial complex and everyday “magic of the state”

(Taussig, 1997) – both serve as a heuristic to better understand the material consequence for women

hijacked by the performative “real” of political parties in power during mega-event planning and

execution.

5.1 Miseries at the Caixa

I mean, everyone was afraid. You have a building of roughly 200 people working, then

30 police cruisers suddenly show up in the middle of what was otherwise a fairly quiet

afternoon, 100 police officers start forcing themselves into the building, onto women,

forcing us out into the street. They [women] were grabbing whatever they could to drape

over themselves, to hide their identity. They were scared of being raped, robbed, and

arrested. They were thinking about their families, the embarrassment. People are not

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checking the time! You need to understand the situation. It is an illegal invasion of a

building. It was complete pandemonium. They raped, beat, stole, interdicted their homes,

and labeled it a “crime scene” but nothing was found, nothing! They [women] were

terrified. They know women, forced into a maximum-security prison, and made to drink

toilet water. I mean this is a long history of stigma and abuse. Police abuse their

authority; do whatever they want. This is sexual exploitation! There is no consent. What

would consent look like here? You have police holding massive guns, press cameras

shining in your face. You do anything not to be humiliated. So this is not client or “pimp”

violence, it is not work-related in the popular sense, it is state-related: Violence,

exploitation, endured as a result of illegal state action. (Active member of Davida and the

Observatory to an American journalist at Public Legislature, June 4, 2014)

The women of the Caixa have long maintained a collegial relation with the 76th civil police precinct,

located a mere 400 metres from the single largest zone of sexual commerce in Niterói since it materialized

in the aftermath of the second dictatorship (1964-1985).27 Several officers served as “regular” clientele,

while the precinct received a monthly stipend from the women. But this collegiality started to change with

the induction of a new chief of police in March 2014. On April 1, 2014, the civil police raided the

residential apartment building/hub for commercial sex in downtown Niterói known as the Caixa. Eleven

women were arrested and two (accused of sexually exploiting one another) were taken to Bangu

Penitentiary Complex, a maximum-security prison in Rio de Janeiro. On April 16, 2014, more than 200

women protested this illegal arrest in downtown Niterói – and this protest was the focus of heated

conversation as I rode back over the Rio-Niterói Bridge (which crosses Guanabara Bay) in a skeleton of a

car with an Italian-Brazilian journalist, a trans activist/sex worker, and the member of Davida cited above.

We had all attended a public debate at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Niterói on sex

work. It was held outside, on a pavilion, and as we huddled on a cold concrete floor, the audience watched

a window shatter from a rock hurled into the air. Like a bolt, the perpetrator vanished and the debate

continued unscathed – most of the audience seemed unfazed – “terror as usual,” as Taussig (1989)

observed of everyday life in South America. Less than a month before the World Cup, on May 23, 2014, I

headed back to Niterói, this time to the Caixa, the proverbial ground zero for the most recent rendition of

sex work rebellion. Amaral Peixoto Avenue, the avenue of both the Caixa and 76th Precinct, was blocked

by heavily armed men in military armor (see Appendix 9 for a visual of local law enforcement in

                                                                                                                         27 Located at 327 Ernani do Amaral Peixoto Avenue, the building is officially named the Nossa Senhora da Conceição [Our Lady of Conception] but is more popularly referred to as Prédio da Caixa [Building of the Cashier], Prédio das Putas [Building of the Whores], or the Caixa because it is located next to the government-owned bank, Caixa Econômica Federal.

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uniform). The entire four-lane Haussmanesque boulevard had been converted into a scene from any

Hollywood or television crime drama – like Law & Order without law or order.

From the discussion at the precinct, we soon learned Police Chief Glaucio Paz from the 76th Precinct

organized the raid, which was authorized by Judge Rose Marly of the First Criminal Code of Niterói [1ª

Vara Criminal de Niterói]. The eviction was rationalized on the basis of alleged child sexual exploitation

and illicit drug use. Furthermore, Judge Marly also maintained that a “Building Condition Assessment”

conducted on the Caixa documented structural instabilities, which “threatened” those inside. So the raid

was scheduled, after lunch on an otherwise beautiful afternoon. Approximately 100 police officers from

across the State of Rio de Janeiro arrived at the 11-storey, 376-apartment building and entered the first

four stories. From the street, anonymous women, blanketed head to toe, were thrown into police buses,

screaming, crying, and humiliated. Police buses transferred women to Precinct 76, less than a half

kilometre down the road. At the station women maintained that authorities were violent with them, and

aside from the obvious vandalism committed, confiscated whatever cash and alcohol was found.

With the women now at the station, law enforcement returned to mark the area with crime scene tape.

This final piece of theatrical flair would bar women from entrance. In such chaos and disorder, the media

was welcomed to roam. The vandalism made it harder for the women to claim that each apartment (of the

85 women) was once a home. At the station, one male officer boasted that violence was needed as the

women were too “nervoso” [nervous, hysterical]. Seated in the entrance of Precinct 76, I overheard the

comments and much of the casual conversation between the men involved in the eviction. One member of

Davida clarified much of the conversation as she waited next to me. Aside from her own abuse (cited

below), Isabel saw an officer accost a woman on the bus. She explained, “I saw it, and I heard him

celebrate after. He said something like, ‘I hit her. She needed it,’ and no one seemed to care” (Isabel,

personal communication, June 5, 2014). As another witness at the precinct described: “Even with Luan

[Attorney from the Human Rights Commission of the Brazilian Bar Association] there in his fancy suit

and OAB [Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil (OAB-RJ) or Brazilian Bar Association] badge, the police

could not give a fuck” (Laura, personal communication, July 3, 2014). Bodies were violated and seized

without concern, rooms looted and ruined without remorse, and the mood at the station was not one of

shame, silenced, or censored amid female fear – it was void amid conceit.

Now under 24-hour police surveillance, the women were denied access to the Caixa. The federal

prosecutor maintained that the structural integrity of the entire 11-storey building demanded evacuation.

With the lock to each apartment door now broken, the more “respectable” tenants were allowed access to

the Caixa, and took liberties with the now vacant stories – free now to rummage through whatever

remnants of the women remained: “The door to every [apartment] room has been broken down, people

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have rummaged through all our stuff, thrown garbage into the hallway, and made it look like hell so the

press can say, ‘That building is a mess.’ Yes, it could use some paint. It should be renovated, sure,

whatever, but it is not at risk of falling down! If it was, why not evacuate every floor?! All eleven, not our

bottom four” (Isabel, personal communication, June 3, 2014). No children (under the legal age of consent,

18) were found on-site but the media reported that a small amount of marijuana was found, as a local

newspaper article reported: “[Polícia] foram apreendidos no local computadores, preservativos,

medicamentos para disfunção erétil, DVDs piratas, cadernos de anotações, dinheiro, munições e

fragmentos de drogas (guimba de cigarros de maconha) / [Police] seized on-site computers, condoms,

erectile dysfunction drugs, pirated DVDs, notebooks, money, ammunition and drugs fragments

(marijuana cigarette butts)” (A Tribuna, July 31, 2014). Such evidence was used to detain all working

women at the Caixa who either independently rented or owned an apartment or shared a room. At the end

of the eviction, each apartment, now vacant, appeared as though a bandido had ransacked it (see

Appendix 10). More protests erupted in the street while the nongovernmental agencies allied with the

women (Davida, ABIA, Observatório da Prostituição) worked to schedule a public hearing at the Rio de

Janeiro State Legislature. It would be a chance for the women to denounce the obvious illegalities of the

raid and affirm their desire to return to work and their homes.

5.2 Miseries at the ALERF

On June 4, 2014, State Deputy Marcelo Freixo, the president of the Comissão de Defesa Direitos

Humanos e Cidadania [Commission for Human Rights] and State Deputy Inês Pandeló, the president of

the Comissão de Defesa dos Direitos da Mulher [Commission for Defense of Women] at the Rio de

Janeiro State Legislative Assembly [Assembleia Legislativa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, ALERJ]

chaired the Public Legislative Assembly. Those invited to address the audience included: Isabel;

Indianara Siqueira, a renowned sex worker/activist and congressional assistant of Federal Deputy Jean

Wyllys, whom the women called to the Caixa at the time of the eviction; Colonel Chaves, commander of

the 12th Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (PMERJ) or BOPE, which is a special police unit of

the military police of Rio de Janeiro State (PMERJ) that assisted the civil police in the eviction;

Margarida Prado de Mendonça (Comissão de Direitos Humanos [Commission for Human Rights], OAB-

RJ); the state public defender on the case, Clara Prazeres Bragança [Defensora Pública do Estado Rio de

Janeiro]; and Gustavo Proença from the OAB-RJ, who was notified of the eviction and arrived at the

Caixa with Luan Cordeiro to aid the women. The audience at the public assembly consisted of allies and

media as well as legal and legislative authorities. Despite the request for participation, no representative

from the civil police or Precinct 76 was in attendance, nor was the federal judge who ordered the eviction.

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However, email communication between Police Chief Glaucio Paz and Judge Marly documented her

instruction to Chief Paz to do “whatever was necessary” to have the women removed and forever barred

from the Caixa (Gustavo Proença & Luan Cordeiro, personal communication, February 3, 2015). The

public assembly was also held with a fraction of the Caixa women in attendance, and only one (Isabel)

willing to testify against the State. We later learned that private security (employed by the ALERJ to

oversee the Assembly) warned the women to “be careful” as there would be “punishment” for testimony.

This information was shared with a member of Davida (Laura Murray) to be later communicated to me

and confirmed by several women (see Murray, 2015). With one woman to represent the otherwise

faceless, anonymous crowd, there would be no “official” voice to condemn the crime. As Isabel recalled

of the event:

On May 23, the day of the mega-operation, it was around 2pm when I started to hear

them [police], breaking down every door in the hallway. When I looked out the window

to Amaral Peixoto Avenue, the entire street was blocked. I was desperate. By the time I

walked from the bedroom to the living room, they had already entered the apartment.

Kicking down the door as if they were entering a favela. Only men, not one female

officer. No one identified themselves, or provided an explanation. They ransacked

everything – searched me, my wallet, purse, closet, dresser, and took whatever money

they found. When I questioned them, I got my hair pulled and face slapped. Two men

returned to collect whoever was left for the last bus to the precinct. That’s when I was

raped by one officer, and forced to perform oral sex on another. No condom. I was the

last one to leave the Caixa. At the precinct, women were questioned, without a lawyer,

but no one was arrested – not one minor, not one illicit drug was found – but the building

is still closed. I had an apartment, autonomously, and made rent. It has been over a week

now, and the place is such a mess. (Recorded audio, Public Legislature, June 4, 2014)

State Deputy Inês Pandeló interjected to reference a document she had received from the Observatório da

Prostituição that contained photo evidence of the damage done to each apartment, to which she said: “In

this document, there are photos of what Isabel just described. The place is broken, with ‘Crime scene’

tape strapped from one end of the hallway to the next.” She continued, “We actually ask: ‘What crime?’

And that is one of the questions that we have to ask, since prostitution is an occupation recognized by the

Ministry of Work in the Brazilian Classification of Occupations, under the number 5198, since 2002”

(Recorded audio, Public Legislature, June 4, 2014). Indianara Siqueira followed with her own questions

for the Public Assembly to consider:

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What crime necessitated the use of crime scene tape, which has barred women from

access? . . . Why close only four stories? . . . If each women was handed a “legal”

warrant, what did this warrant detail? Why were these handwritten? . . . What is the legal

justification for violence and vandalism, if the women agreed to open their door and leave

with the police? Even if they did not! . . . Why did the DEAM refuse to register any of

these occurrences? . . . Why was their right to a lawyer denied, and press permitted?

. . . What is the legal motive and justification for the use of heavy artillery? . . . Why the

excess of policemen? These women were unarmed. (Recorded audio, Public Legislature,

June 4, 2014)

Colonel Chaves addressed the assembly next to defend the involvement of the BOPE to secure the

entrance of the Caixa. It should be reiterated that the BOPE is a special unit of the military police of Rio

de Janeiro State that has generated much notoriety from its violent incursions into the favela – often with

the intent to disarm and dismantle the local drug faction. Also known as the “Death Squad,” the BOPE

has some of the most powerful and expensive police artillery in Brazil. Colonel Chaves was told that the

eviction would be a “routine” operation but not informed of the actual crime. He stated to the assembly

that the Civil Police had a “formal document of interdiction” but was not asked to elaborate on the content

of this document nor disclose from whom it was received (Recorded audio, Public Legislature, June 4,

2014). Public Defender Clara Prazeres Bragança argued the illegalities of police action, the abuse of State

power and the “real” motive for the crime:

Be honest, there was no legal motive. Since prostitution is an occupation recognized by

the Ministry of Labour and Employment in the Brazilian Classification of Occupations,

under number 5198, since 2002 . . . And nothing criminal was found . . . There was no

legal motive . . . And if it is a matter of structural condition, why not evacuate the entire

Caixa? . . . If it is a matter of sanitation, it is much worse somewhere else! This is a clear

abuse of State power. We want a State that will protect us, not pose a threat. Because the

life I choose is not the life for someone else, and we should respect choice. Respect the

Caixa, the people it housed, irrespective of their job (Recorded audio, Public Legislature,

June 4, 2014)

Likewise, Margarida Prado de Mendonça and Gustavo Proença condemned local law enforcement for the

illegal detention of and forced confession from the women at the station. Margarida Prado de Mendonça

first asserted: “This case is another instance of the repeated abuse of police power. . . . Either the State has

completely lost control of their staff or there is an expressed determination to violate human rights”

(Recorded audio, Public Legislature, June 4, 2014). Gustavo Proença further commented that at the

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precinct the police denied women access to legal counsel in an attempt to elicit a false confession.

“Legally,” Proença explained, “everything was a fraud. We were there, waiting to offer our legal counsel

to the women, but were denied access. And yet, nothing was found. It was an arrest made without

evidence, which is unconstitutional . . . Some women claim assault, some rape. We see the vandalism.

And I want to mention, emphasize, that yesterday there was a condominium meeting [for the Caixa] held

at the police station. At Precinct 76, the weirdest thing! Everything is weird. The Civil Police does not

have the jurisdiction to close a brothel. The absurdities are unimaginable” (Gustavo Proença, recorded

audio, Public Legislature, June 4, 2014). In his own investigation, Marcelo Freixo found no evidence of a

structural assessment ordered and conducted on the Caixa from the Civil Defense [Defesa Civil]. Freixo

also questioned the circumstances under which such a report would occasion a partial evacuation:

We did some research, and I want to add: There was never any survey on the site made

by the civil police. This means that the notion that there are structural problems … but

there is no record. So there is no documentation of any structural problem. There is only

one report of inadequate fire insurance. And that can never be the reason for the removal

of any person by law. Can never be! So, it was a purely disastrous and illegal procedure

that violated a large amount of fundamental rights. (Recorded audio, Public Legislature,

June 4, 2014)

Near the end of the Public Assembly, Freixo also condemned the Delegacia Especial de Atendimento à

Mulher (DEAM) [Special Commission for Assistance to Women], which declined to register or

investigate a single complaint made against the police related to the eviction. Isabel confirmed: “At

DEAM, these testimonies have been denied. DEAM refused to interfere with the civil police. I went three

times, the last time was Saturday” (Isabel, personal communication, June 3, 2014). Nevertheless, with no

immediate solution, the women were left without a home or safe venue to work. The State continued to

summon the imagined future of tomorrow as one advertisement, littered throughout the port area, read:

“Um Novo Centro, Em Niterói, Eu Acredito” [A new centre in Niterói, believe it!]” (see Appendix 11) to

which Freixo and Proença both remarked:

It is certainly not a coincidence that this happened now. Downtown Niterói is going

through a period of massive reform, with large real estate interest. It is nothing new for

Brazil or unique to the twenty-first century that the first to be removed are those

unwanted in a supposedly “modern” centre. The prostitute is the first on the list to be

barred from the “modern” city. (Marcelo Freixo, recorded audio, Public Legislature, June

4, 2014)

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Let me explain it to you. The new Federal Court Building is planned for construction,

next to the Caixa. So the Ministério Público da União (Public Prosecutor's Office) was

interested in ending prostitution in the area. The police department has always received

bribes for letting this site of prostitution exist – by the way, many policemen are clients –

but the Chief of Police was given an order to remove the brothel. And this prompted o dia

estupro [the rape day]. (Gustavo Proença, personal communication, June 4, 2015)

To the State, the Caixa served as a red light to imaginaries of a “modernized” downtown core – a blight or

disease on the otherwise “designer Porto” of tomorrow, which mirrored the event-led (re)development in

the neighboring port of Rio de Janeiro. With land speculation in the area on the rise, and the future

neighbour of the Caixa slated to be the new office of the Secretary of Justice, imaginaries of futurity,

linked to urban renewal and the future possibilities for the land, were more valuable to the State than the

women themselves.

5.3 Miseries in the Name of Amanhã [Tomorrow]

Independently of considering it is dirty, that shouldn’t matter. That’s arguable. The

police, by law, had no legal justification. People who pay their own rent, can do whatever

they want inside their apartment. They own their bodies. Niterói was an abuse of

authority, in function of an image that they want to pass to the world… They want to pass

an image. All major reform passed to “sanitize,” to “clean house.” In the past, it was to

appeal to public health or morality, some type of society that is under control. I

understand every city must assume an identity; fashion a face and personality for the

urban. So we are told to pollute here, not over there. Prostitute here, not there. Over there,

pleasure is rigid, regulated, compliant to rule – and the landscape is a reflection of all this.

So prostitution will never not exist, it is just a question of where (Indianara, personal

communication, June 18, 2014)

The “predatory formation,” which Sassen (2014) has defined as “a mix of elites and systemic capacities

with finance as a key enabler” (13), instituted in Rio de Janeiro and mirrored in Niterói, illustrates the

continuance of a kind of “state of exception” (Agamben, 2005) known to characterize event-led

construction (Sánchez & Broudehoux, 2013; Coaffee, 2015; Gaffney, 2013; Gray & Porter, 2015).

Incorporated land, more lucrative than the communities housed on it, has continued to demand strategies

that realize development imaginaries with an all too familiar outcome: the brute and violent removal of

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anything or anyone thought to thwart the mobilization of capital (see Blomley, 2004; Fainstein, 2001;

Perlman 2010; Smith & Williams, 2013). The underlying logic of this predatory formation has continued

to position corporate interest and foreign investment above “anything or anybody, whether a law or a

civic effort” (Sassen, 2014, 213). It is “routine,” as Colonel Chaves (BOPE) declared to the public

assembly; no name nor crime was needed for the violence to be authorized. Event-led urbanism in Rio de

Janeiro mirrored strategies of expulsion observed in other host cities in the reliance on the private sector

to establish public-private entities that do not necessitate democratic debate nor budgetary transparency,

and in the simultaneous erasure of local communities that obstruct fantasies of tomorrow created in the

aid of “global” trade.

The revitalization of downtown Niterói was not the only spatial reorganization that occurred in the

manner described above. The Porto Maravilha [Marvelous Port] project across Guanabara Bay was

similar in design (sleek, modernized architecture set back against a pristine landscape), financial model (a

private-public partnership and the sale of Certificates of Additional Construction Potential [CEPAC]) and

expectation (a tourist hub for amanhã [tomorrow] and attractor of foreign investment). Projecto Porto

Maravilha commenced in 2009. Municipal Law 101/2009 created the “Concerted Urban Operation for the

Area of Special Urban Interest of the Port Region of Rio de Janeiro” and established the Port Urban

Development Company (CDURP), which the municipal government used to entice foreign investment, to

coordinate (re)development strategies. From the website, the purpose of CDURP is to “promote local

restructuring, through the expansion and redevelopment of public spaces in the region, aimed at

improving the quality of life of current and future residents, as well as the environmental and

socioeconomic sustainability of the area” (Porto Maravilha, 2014 [http://www.portomaravilha.com.br];

see also Ricardo, 2014; Allis et al., 2014). CDURP contracted a private consortium, the Concessionária

Porto Novo, consisting of the largest engineering and construction companies in Brazil (Carioca

Christiani-Nielsen Engenharia, Construora Norberto Odebrecht S.A., and OAS Ltd.) to oversee

(re)development and construction. This private consortium signed a 15-year contract with the CDURP in

which it agreed to evacuate the land, renovate and rebuild existent urban infrastructure, and deliver basic

amenities (e.g., lighting, drainage, and garbage collection) in the area (Porto Maravilha, 2011; Sánchez &

Broudehoux, 2013). This essentially established a 5-million-square-metre privatized urban enclave within

the downtown core (Freeman, 2012). The recent rendition of exceptionalism (Boykoff, 2014; Gaffney,

2015; Broudehoux & Sánchez, 2016) needed to realize the future vision for Porto Maravilha is most

evident in:

1. The urgent restructuring of both federal and municipal Law (with Complementary Law No. 101,

also known as the “Transparency Law” needed to protect all future access to budgetary

information, and Municipal Law 5230/2010, used to guarantee businesses a payment exemption

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from urban territorial tax, property transfer tax, reduced service taxes, and the pardoning of debt);

and

2. The reliance on CEPACs to finance development, an important instrument of gentrification, sold

to businesses eager to build beyond that which is permissible by law (in this case, a height limit of

four stories) (Comitê Popular da Copa e Olimpíadas, 2015, p. 174).

In June 2011, the FGTS (Fundo de Garantia do Tempo de Serviço), a government-directed worker

pension fund controlled by the Caixa Econômica Federal, spent R3.5 billion at a municipal auction to

purchase 6.4 million CEPACs at R545 each. All profits from the sales of CEPACs were to be used to

finance the private consortium. In addition to the R3.5 billion debt, the FGTS has also committed to

finance the R8 billion needed to construct infrastructure (Freeman, 2012; Porto Maravilha, 2011). This is

indicative of the estimated future real estate value for the area, which is ironic given that the FGTS, a

worker pension fund, was created with the intent to subsidize social welfare. Jorgensen (2011) has

estimated that a square metre of residential or office space will need to sell for at least R10,000

(approximately US$2800) in order for a developer to turn a profit. Sánchez and Broudehoux (2013) have

remarked that Porto Maravilha will then house some of the most expensive real estate in Rio de Janeiro, a

metropolis with rental properties that already far exceed most global cities in market value.

The establishment of a public-private partnership for the construction and management of urban

infrastructure was demonstrated in Projecto Porto Maravilha, the revitalization of the Maracanã football

stadium, as well as the newly erected Olympic Park. The Olympic Park, it should be stated, was also built

on a low-income neighbourhood (Vila Autódromo), which similarly demanded the forced removal of

approximately 550 families. The local protest movement (Comitê Popular da Copa e Olimpíadas) has

been particularly attentive to these predatory and violent event-led strategies, which reclaim and revitalize

inhabited land. Comitê Popular da Copa e Olimpíadas meticulously documents each case of forced

removal and has publically attacked Projecto Porto Maravilha for the removal of some 935 families. That

said, this well-known voice of dissent was less emphatic on the violent removal of women from the

Caixa, and remained relatively silent on the issue with the exception of one reference made in their latest

100-page report:

It is worth highlighting the emblematic case involving the brutal removal of women by

the Civil Police, from the apartments where they worked as prostitutes, self-managed, in

the centre of the city of Niterói, an area until recently enclosed by a Consortial Urban

Operation (OUC). Although this happened in a neighbour city, this case reflects so-called

cleansing actions in metropolitan cities, which received unprecedented investments

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through public-private partnerships made possible by hosting the World Cup and the

Olympics in the capital city (2015, p. 126).

Speculation-driven finance combined with an impulse for hyperprofit heightened the struggle between

membership and democratic participation within the urban sphere (Gray & Porter, 2015), from the

neoliberal DIY to the FIFA-preferred, Do-Whatever-Necessary (DWN), or, as the Strategic Plan

celebrated: “Nenhum esforço foi poupado [No effort must be spared]” (2013-2016, p. 17). This form of

development has continued to unapologetically expel marginalized people from the imagined future of the

modern state, which ironically has created the demand for alternative survival economies that are

constituted within, but not formally invited to be a part of, the dominant political-economic system. The

informal market does not contribute to the gross domestic product (GDP) or any other traditional financial

index used to rank global cities, often needed to attract foreign investment (see also Daniels, 2004; Davis,

2004; Sassen, 2014). As written in the Strategic Plan, “In the economic field our objective is to be a city

acknowledged as a global benchmark for attracting businesses, with a low unemployment level, and

steady growth in the average income of its workers” (2013-2016, p. 12). The treatment of those in the

informal sector (those who would not otherwise be included in the calculation of “average” income) is

thus akin to an economic form of “ethnic” and “spatial” cleansing – in which men and women involved in

the informal sector are erased from everyday urban life, collective fantasies of the future, and official data

used to brand the State (e.g., “average” income, national census data, GDP).

Foucault (1977) described the shift in governance from one of direct violence to a more insidious or

indirectly disciplinary form. Imagine his stories of medieval torture set against the backdrop of a present-

day, hypervigilant surveillance regime. Now picture Brazil and the complicity of the nation state with

FIFA and the IOC. As a host nation, it has managed to wrangle the best of both. The Niterói case is a tale

of blatant collusion, a State mired in conflict between foreign investment and the obvious realities of

uneven development. On the one hand, Brazil (under the spotlight of international FIFA fandom)

aggressively worked to deliver a more modernized police state, strategically designing a new “face” for

local law enforcement – the Unidade de Policia Pacificadora [Unit of Police Pacification or UPP],

indicative of the humanitarian security regime Amar (2013) has described in Brazil. On the other hand,

old and familiar stories of police barbarism (violent arrests, interrogations and incarcerations followed by

the use of extortion, disappearance, torture, rape, mutilation, murder) have been said to increase in Brazil

in the realization of event-led imaginaries (Comitê Popular da Copa e Olimpíadas, 2015; see also

MEPCT/RJ, 2014, p. 44). As Maria do Rosário Nunes, the Brazilian Minister of Human Rights, declared:

“We continue with a police model we inherited from the dictatorship – and the manual with which the

police are trained and the way they deal with people in [FIFA] demonstrations on the streets are remnants

of that regime” (Globo, 2013). The stories of police brutality have been rationalized in complex strategies

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of expulsion. These are stories that, even if lived, seem hard to believe. But the “militarized

humanitarianism” (Bernstein, 2010) of the most recent rendition of the global security apparatus is

attentive to the subversive underside.28 The state monopoly on violence (as Weber asserted in “Politics as

a Vocation” in 1919) is dressed in FIFA-sponsored, militaristic armor with a “legitimatized” pistol aimed

at those in tattered clothes.

5.4 Miseries in the Everyday

Isabel’s denunciation of state violence came with dire consequences. She filed a complaint before

authorities at the 76th Precinct on June 18, 2014, stating that she was suspicious of a certain Officer

“Lopes” whom she believed had followed her since the State Assembly. On June 21, she was kidnapped

in Niterói. She was forced into a car with four men, where she was beaten, cut with a knife, and shown a

photograph of her son on his way to school. Before being thrown out into the street, she was threatened

that if she did not remain silent there would be further consequences. She was also warned never to return

to Niterói. Suspicious of police involvement in the attack, she still reported the incident to the 76th

Precinct on June 28. The case was recorded as a misdemeanor, ensuring that no investigation would

ensue. But her accusation led to the arrest of six men involved in a (supposedly) larger prostitution

network, two of whom were former policemen. It should be noted that the women never testified or stated

their affiliation with these men; Isabel also remained adamant that none of them were connected to the

Caixa and that none of the women worked against their will. Nevertheless, the defense team rationalized

their removal from the case because the women “refused to break with their pimp” (Gustavo Proença &

Luan Cordeiro, personal communication, February 3, 2015). This was intended for court evidence should

the trial ever advance in the court of law. If it was the case that militia or some “pimp” organization was

affiliated with the crime, it is plausible that the women would be terrified of these men and would refuse

to offer testimony that would corroborate a crime of sexual exploitation. However, that would still not

validate police action nor vindicate the absence of Police Chief Paz or Judge Marly at the legislative

Assembly. The official narrative that followed from the federal court authorized the Rio de Janeiro Office

of the State Prosecutor to do whatever was needed to clear the site, and to enlist the 76th Precinct to

conduct the clearance. The incarceration of unknown men – for a crime without evidence or fair trial – is

illustrative of another level of state mystification or everyday “magic of the state” (Taussig, 1997),

another element in the theatre of political power. As the women maintain that there was no such “pimp”

                                                                                                                         28 Similar to Bernstein (2010), I use the term “military humanitarianism” to refer to state-sanctioned strategies of securitization that extend beyond the realm of explicit military intervention.

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involved: “Women now are too smart to have a pimp. The biggest bullies are not pimps. That’s a myth,

unless you count the government who profits from our taxes. Our biggest bullies are the police. The men

that once in uniform, charge us extra for protection in the street, and as clientele, most commonly exploit

us in bed” (Isabel, personal communication, July 14, 2014).

In reference to the theatrical nature of the State, “Foucault put it best when talking about sovereignty:

power doesn’t exist beyond the techniques involved in its theatricalization” (Preciado, 2013, p. 371). The

circulation of (State) power requires the theatre of performativity; “everything depends on the way power

is managed: making another person believe that he has the power, even if, in reality, the person has it only

because you’ve conceded it to him” (Preciado, 2013, pp. 370-371). The women who remained silent on

the eviction were eventually able to return to work, somewhere else in Rio de Janeiro. The biopolitical

fiction that sex should never be sold (sex work as bioterrorism) was sustained (albeit diffused) in the

theatrics of State power. In the field, I often came across or learned about women from the Caixa who had

migrated to the more touristic area of South Zone (Copacabana, Ipanema, Lapa) to benefit from the World

Cup crowd. In an ironic twist South Zone also had a free condom program orchestrated on behalf of the

UNAIDS “Protect the Goal” campaign. It was almost as if the forced closure of the Caixa intentionally

shifted women closer to the FIFA bachelor bash across the bay.

There were more women working [in Vila Mimosa] at the beginning of the month. But

they disappeared. They all went to Copa(cabana). There is a lot of business in

Copacabana. There are more gringos, more people, and a lot of prostitutes, including a lot

who came from Vila, Centro, and the Caixa looking for work but there wasn’t a big

explosion in terms of the number of programas. There were a lot more women, a lot of

competition. (Ruby, personal communication, July 15, 2014)

Isabel, however, unable to return home (fearful for her children and her mother) or remain in Niterói, took

the recommendation of her public defense attorney to seek shelter at the Lei Maria da Penha [Maria da

Penha Law] that was a shelter for victims of domestic violence (but not violence committed on behalf of

the state). Isabel failed to meet the criteria for entrance but she was offered a room on request of her legal

counsel. She refused the bed as she felt the State would further silence and control her because she had

accepted their “care” while her mother and children (still dependent upon her income) were left to fend

for themselves. An active member of Davida offered to contact the Rio de Janeiro State Anti-Trafficking

Committee, a subcommittee of the Special Secretariat of Policies for Women within the Rio de Janeiro

State Secretariat of Social Assistance and Human Rights (SEASDH), with which he was affiliated. In

conversation with Isabel, it was suggested that she could be “assisted” if she denied her past employment

as an autonomous sex worker and discontinued her activism against the State (Isabel, personal

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communication, July 12, 2014). Under the “care” of the subcommittee, she would need to be named a

“victim” of human sexual trafficking. Further to that, she would also have to declare herself a

noncustodial (unfit) mother in order for her mother to receive the Bolsa Família (R70, plus R35 per child

enrolled in school per month) and be eligible for the Minha Casa, Minha Vida [My House, My Life]

federal housing program. This would amount to approximately US$50/month for Isabel, her mother and

two children. As for future employment, Isabel was told she could transition into minimum wage labour

(R724/month) but this would mark a significant reduction from her R6,000-8,000/month income at the

time of the Caixa raid (see also Murray, 2015). Justiça Global, a nongovernmental organization and

partner of Davida, recommended the third “formal” resolution. Concurrently, Frontline Defenders, an

internationally recognized activist organization also intervened and offered aid. Their tagline for one

campaign, “Some stories of hope and justice may seem like fiction,” resonated with me as I wrestled to

narrate this situation into a coherent scholarly story that would make sense to would-be allies in the

immediate and transnational context. Justiça Global and Frontline Defenders advised Isabel to meet with

the Secretariat for Human Rights of the Presidency of the Republic (SDH/PR) in Brasília, which had

Programa de Proteção aos Defensores de Direitos Humanos (PPDDH), an activist-related protection

program which used a police escort service, and PROVITA, a witness protection program (established in

Law No. 9807/1999) that would force her to live in an isolated area, far removed from her former life and

family. On July 18, 2014, Isabel and a member of Davida traveled to Brasília to report that she was under

death threats due to her denunciation of the police brutality that occurred at the Caixa on May 23, 2014.

The team assessed her case and determined that her denunciation of state violence deemed her ineligible

for either federal program. Not surprisingly, the same police she denounced refused to be responsible for

her care. Additionally, because she declined the third offer of silence and denied the request to

incriminate militia (rather than local law enforcement) on (false) criminal activities at the Caixa, she was

once again deemed unfit for aid. The federal secretariat – even though obligated by law (Federal

Constitution, Article 144) – failed to offer her protection or recommend alternative action. The Davida

member (Laura Murray) who had travelled with Isabel continued to question the offer of police

protection, but the committee did failed to respond (Murray, 2015). The failure of the State to intervene

and protect Isabel left her mired in an impossible situation. Unable to return home or work in fear that she

would be found, punished, and abused, and without her residential card, clean clothes, or the cash she had

saved, she relied on various charities to cover the cost of basic necessities for her children and mother.

The Observatório da Prostituição continued to direct media attention to the eviction and the denunciation

of State violence that continued to threaten her life. The fact that international media had descended upon

World Cup host cities, so keen for stories, worked in our favour. Isabel met with people from all over the

world (e.g., Vice, Die Zeit, Amnesty International) with warranted coverage but little favourable outcome.

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The heightened profile of the case now posed a greater risk. Those who maintained a close relation with

Isabel were also deemed a threat to the State. Dr. Thaddeus Blanchette collected emergency contact

information from me, and insisted that I (as well as other OdP-affiliated allies) remain in consistent

contact with him (Thaddeus Blanchette, personal communication, June 27, 2014). For whatever reason,

Isabel felt safe with me and because of that, we started to spend more time together. It could have been

that I was an international student, and the threat of intergovernmental agencies intimidated local militia

and law enforcement, as one researcher recalled of an encounter with local police: “Police are scared of

people from other countries because when things happen to foreigners, the embassies get involved. It

becomes a very big international deal so, I think they heard my accent and were happy to let me go”

(Laura Murray, personal communication, July 3, 2014). Thaddeus also remarked: “Remember that

American student raped with her French boyfriend in a kombi van late one night in Copacabana? Those

men were repeatedly reported to the DEAM with no serious investigation launched until an international

student was involved. That story caught fire everywhere, every major media outlet published it, and

finally those men were busted” (personal communication, June 27, 2014). Whatever it was, I never

hesitated to be there for her nor would I ever refuse a credit card for whatever new clothes, toiletries, or

food she needed. Genuinely, I thought that was the best use of the bursaries I received. Of course, I

wanted her to like me, for me, but somehow I thought that was a bit naïve. Our relation was, after all,

founded on need (with me, there was this research and with her, financial aid). Even still, I never seemed

far from gut-laughter with her and that was all I ever missed of home. We often loitered on a crowded

patio or hectic praça [plaza] with a sweet treat – she hated alcohol, rarely drank coffee, but loved

chocolate. Visible to the world, it was “normal” to feel free from harm, as though our imaginaries of the

“public” shielded us from the actual madness of the State. We spent much of our time in wealthier

communities, amidst the façade of affluence that is the South Zone. The glitz and glamour of Copacabana,

Ipanema (also known as “Millionaire Beach”), and Leblon (referred to as “Billionaire Beach”) seemed far

removed from the chaos she lived. We often talked about her childhood, her entrance into sex work, and

her activist fantasies for the future. Before this incident in Niterói, she wanted to form a collective with

the women at the Caixa. While there are a number of agencies she can access (such as Davida and the

Observatório da Prostituição, to which I was affiliated), she wanted to form a collective that is by and for

the heterosexual female sex worker. As she said: “I am grateful for all our allies. Most people are

generous with time, money, intellect but never their bodies. People advocate for us but that does not make

them one of us. So it is difficult to relate, and even harder for us to trust them” (personal communication,

July 9, 2014). With a solid collective at the Caixa, it would have been easier for the women to orchestrate

action now – to better leverage the memories of State repression in order to better organize a strategic

response. As it stood, the women remained divided, scattered across the Greater Rio de Janeiro area and

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therefore easier to defeat. Tossed from one Airbnb to the next, offered a room or couch to crash with

families unfamiliar with her case, it seemed as though there was no future, no relief, or time to dream.

From June 21 until the moment I flew home, the situation with Isabel remained nerve-wracking, a virtual

white-knuckle ride – heart in chest, braced for the worst, fantasies are visceral. Before I headed to Galeão,

Isabel was ambushed in Lapa. The felon is still unknown. After a tumultuous year and a half, the situation

has somewhat settled – or arrived at a new impasse, more manageable for Isabel. Accustomed to the sex

work income and the luxuries it can afford (e.g., private school tuition for her children), she returned to

work outside of Rio de Janeiro. Whenever possible, she also returned home to visit her mother and

children. While she does admit that there is more exploitation (less autonomy) in her new place of

employment, it has allowed her to reclaim some of the life that she and her family once had:

For me, exploitation is like in [location removed]. They treat you like you’re on a coffee

plantation, they work you until you’re finished. Work like crazy, with no security. It’s not

safe. Someone could pull a knife on you, and you’d have nowhere to turn . . . And the

price of our daily payment is absurd! R200. Then to rent the hotel room, another R200

per day. You can do 30 programas, and still not earn enough to make the daily payment.

And if you don’t pay [for the room or daily fee], they will tell everyone. Make you dirty!

You rent the room, you should be able to do whatever you want. It’s absurd, that daily

fee. That is exploitation. Here though, it’s not like that, sometimes it’s slow but clients

eventually come, and you pay a percentage from each programa. (Isabel, personal

communication, June 27, 2014)

She has also remained dedicated to her activism, and she has never faltered in seeking opportunities that

would allow her to better facilitate and assist the existent yet somewhat fractured sex worker movement in

Brazil. To do so, she has immersed herself within the network of sex worker agencies and allies in Rio de

Janeiro. Renowned throughout Brazil, the work of these agencies is also heralded at an international level.

Davida, built on the activism of the late Gabriela Leite, is often cited as a leader in the global movement,

and has been a staunch supporter of Isabel and her emergence as an activist. In the ashes of the Caixa, a

new network of allies arose that renewed the optimism and opportunities needed to (re)imagine broader

reform. With the aid of the Observatório da Prostituição, Frontline, Fundação Urgente

(http://www.vidaurgente.org.br/site/), and Justiça Global, Isabel travelled to Ecuador to represent Brazil at

an assembly for sex work in Latin America. In February 2015, she was invited to meet with the American

consul responsible for the U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report. In March 2015,

she presented with federal deputy Jean Wyllys to the Câmara dos Deputados [Federal House of

Representatives] at the Comissão de Direitos Humanos e Minorias do Congresso Nacional [Commission

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on Human Rights and Minorities of the National Congress]. It was at this time that she also decided to

end her use of a pseudonym and disguise in popular press to reveal the sole face behind the State

denunciation – a decision that should be particularly commended. I cite the above not to romanticize her

activism but to document the effort needed to attract attention to the case, and present Isabel as a known

(not invisible) member of urban life.

5.5 The Not-So-Exceptional State

Before I met Isabel, I understood the Foucauldian wariness of the State as a social formation that

legalized and legitimized violence – a critique I first realized in the work of Max Weber (1919) and

Walter Benjamin (1921) – that “no longer touched the body” (Foucault, 1995 [1975], p. 11) but

intervened from a distance within a modernized “carceral archipelago” (Foucault, 1977, p. 176). Violated

bodies, exchanged for self-disciplinary surveillance technologies that incriminate and insinuate

themselves on bodies, especially on marginalized bodies. Foucault argued that it was in the more

advanced industrial societies that the institution of “legitimate” violence acted in a covert manner so as to

summon the slow disappearance of spectacularized torture and pain. The everyday structural violence

materially inflicted on bodies that live in the shadow of the sport mega-event, bodies that live in hunger,

humiliation, social exclusion, and stigma, is illustrative of the fact that violence is disciplinary but never

untangled from the bodies of some people. The insidiousness of state-led violence will continue to

demand that such realities of the sport mega-event be documented within otherwise celebrated and

(re)awarded cities. The spectacular theatre, the performance of extreme force and violence witnessed in

Niterói on May 23 2014 served as a testament to the historical rule – not exception – that the modern state

is a state under siege (Benjamin, 1921; Taussig, 1989, 2012):

If someone has a machine gun pointed at your face, screaming at you to do something,

what are you going to do? Even with Luan there in his fancy suit and Bar Association

pin, the police could not give a fuck. They acted as though they were completely above

the law and honestly, they were. Everything was illegal. When you act in such a blatantly

illegal way, you think you are untouchable. We are talking about people who think they

are untouchable. All policemen (not one women) in heavily armed, bulletproof armor. All

with their own big gun. Yet none of these women have a criminal record. No one had a

gun of their own. The sad part is, this is a reflection of our police today: utter illegality.

The violence, the forced testimonies, the handwritten warrant . . . It is all a reflection of

larger forces. The militarization of police, following policies used during the

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Dictatorship, the increasing value of land and urban clean-up activities. These are the

broader forces at play. (Laura, personal communication, July 3, 2014)

Far too often discussed as a “state of exception” (Agamben, 2005), FIFA 2014 underscored the

routinization of police violence so normalized in global cities. The eviction of (anonymous) women from

their well-known site of sexual commerce is not a moment of exceptionalism in urban reform, but rather

“terror as usual” as Taussig (1989) has succinctly articulated. It would only be an exception if state-

sanctioned terror were directed at the more “respectable” families who resided in the stories above, and

who remain shielded from state action. It is terrorizing for anyone to witness people treated as trash, in

need of social erasure before the arrival of our imagined collective future. To be so fearful or suspicious

of local law enforcement (instead of feeling relieved or secure) was at first unusual for me. At first, I was

astounded that both the civil police and DEAM refused to officially register or investigate a single

complaint of abuse (sexual and otherwise) filed in relation to the eviction. Yet I came to realize through

my fieldwork and constant interaction with these women that it was usual for them, and soon it became

usual for me. So this is not an exceptional tale amidst cities keen to realize future imaginaries at the

expense of those deemed not quite “good” enough.

Moreover, the Niterói eviction is not meant to illuminate stories of event-related state corruption unique

to the “developing” world (see Gaffney, 2010, 2013; Gruneau & Horne, 2015). Instead, it is intended to

demonstrate the manner in which these realities have come to characterize global cities in search of

“growth-inducing resource material” (see Molotch, 1976) and the everyday structural violence

perpetuated in event-led strategies of (urban) development (Comitê Popular da Copa e Olimpíadas, 2015;

Sassen, 2014). Violence is naturalized and routinized as part of the everyday, and dramatically enacted

through the theatre of political power and policing. The same assemblage (legal, education, and medical

expertise, for example) used to defend dominant political-economic ideologies of development for FIFA

families is also needed to legitimize this development narrative in FIFA propaganda and celebration. The

“softer” strategies of social control (e.g., Complementary Law No. 101, the “Transparency Law”

discussed above) are coordinated with “harder” strategies of state-legitimatized violence, which defend

the State and the imagined future. With the Gramscian “optimism of will, pessimism of intellect” (1994

[1936], p. 18), I continue to imagine a “peacetime sobriety” (Scheper-Hughes, 1992, p. 219) for the

women, and for everyday life in Brazil. I believe it is possible, even if I doubt it will ever be real.

In the next chapter, I share the story of a woman who is aware of her exclusion from the popular

imaginaries of urban reform. Her existence in the urban realm is that of a ghost (or shadow host). Like

Isabel, she has recognized that her right to the city has been conditionally afforded by the discretionary

power of the State. However, this awareness is also her refuge from a State under siege. From political

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corruption, to exorbitant debt and environmental and social degradation, the debt-free Gabriela has

committed to an ethic of silent rebuttal. She is the proverbial ATM for her family (immediate and

extended) and has funded the motorcab service in a nearby favela. In her avoidance of debt, her future is

not one of indentured servitude, unlike that of the precarious State.

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 Figure 7. Inside a brothel/bar in Vila Mimosa

Post-Copa interview and photoshoot. Photo taken on February 24, 2015 by Amanda De Lisio

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Prescript: Gabriela Gómez

Gabriela left her childhood home at the age of 12 to escape her aggressive mother and sexually suggestive

stepfather. She fled her middle-class home and hitched a ride with a truck driver to São Paulo. There she

sporadically lived with an older woman whom she met through a mutual friend while on the street. The

woman offered little else but a roof over her head. Even with this stable option though, she preferred life

on the street. She met men and women with similar stories and made a “family” of her own. At fourteen,

she started to charge for sex – anywhere from R100-200 per hour to R500 for two – and “specialized”

(her word) in older men. She is adamant that she was never sexually exploited as a child and that she was

more coercive and abusive to the men that paid her for sex. As the money got better she dabbled in drug

(ab)use. As she told me, “I was a drug addict. I needed more and more. I liked the habit, the routine. I

needed more so I would work more; made money, just so I could get high. It was a cycle. It offered

structure to my otherwise chaotic life. And it made me feel dependent on something, vulnerable, which I

liked” (Personal communication with Gabriela, July 30, 2014). Although Gabriela is not reflective of all

women involved in sexual commerce, her drug addiction followed her back to Rio de Janeiro and into her

adult life. As a sex worker in Copacabana, Gabriela made enough money to afford her own tiny

apartment, attend school, and travel the world. She graduated with a psychology degree from a small

private institution, Estácio, in Rio de Janeiro and later traveled to New York City to undertake additional

classes at The Arts Students League of New York. She was romantically involved with a well-known

artist at the time, with whom she lived despite a shared drug dependence that seemed to fuel their

destructive relationship. Back in Rio de Janeiro, whenever I met with Gabriela, I could be assured that

there would be a gringo on her arm — and that dinner or lunch would most likely be covered. Now

relatively sober since 2013, she is diligent about her biweekly AA meeting, which I often attended with

her. She has found and married the “love of her life” and obtained “legitimate” work as a civil servant.

While her current life is a rather stark contrast to her past, she has never quit da vida (a colloquial

expression for “the life” of those involved in informal sexual economies).

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Chapter 6: Gabriela Gómez,

The (Un)Making of the Indebted (Wo)Man

“Any last words?” . . . “Yes, laugh a lot, and never stop dreaming.” (Gabriela, personal

Communication, March 15, 2015)

Utopia is not prescriptive; it renders potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a

horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema. It is productive to think about utopia as flux, a

temporal disorganization, as a moment when the here and the now is transcended by a

then and a there that could be and indeed, should be. (Muñoz, 2009)

The future asserted in relation to Niterói was one consistent with the dominant logic of neoliberal urban

(re)development. The imaginaries propagated in the discussion of urban reform failed to include those

who wrestle for recognition in the everyday or to whom mere survival is often an exhausting feat. These

were the imaginaries of the hypermodern communities of Porto Maravilha and the newly erected Barra da

Tijuca (home of the 2016 Olympic Village), with permission needed to enter the gated, privatized,

privileged life. The women who were involved in this research were not envisioned in popular

imaginaries of the “new” downtown Niterói – and in fact, State action successfully conveyed the message

that these women disrupted the attainment of this “future” urban life. Nevertheless, if there is in fact a

“right to the city” that these women sought to whittle from the silent resistance of their chosen labour, it is

a theoretical right – not yet a material one. That is, it is the right to imagine a future that has encompassed

within it their own desire(s) for tomorrow or at the very least, a future that has them (their desire, their

optimism) represented within it. This chapter will now address these popular imaginaries for the future,

not to discredit the importance of the past or present but to acknowledge the use of these future

imaginaries in the everyday. I argued in the first analysis chapter that – using the notion of “cruel

optimism” introduced in the work of Berlant (2011) – imaginaries allow women to compartmentalize and

survive the mundane (even dramatic) everyday. In the second analysis chapter, I documented the manner

in which the State is subordinate to imaginaries of the future, used to legitimate violence of the here and

now. In this chapter, I want to demonstrate the manner in which women manage oppression and stigma

by leaving the future as an open possibility – a theoretical space in which all that is merely imaginable

(the “maybe one day attainable”) is free to roam. To do so, I draw from the participants’ view of sex work

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as a broader, cultural critique-in-action29 to connect contemporary queer theories related to fantasy,

futurity, and optimism (Ahmed, 2004; 2014; Berlant, 2011; Muñoz, 2009) and literature more aligned

with the political economy and (urban) reform (Berardi, 2012; Lazzarato, 2012, 2015; Harvey, 2010,

2012). In the process, I “queer” the dominant conceptualization of the State as that which has the

monopoly on “legitimate” force (Weber, 1919) to that which is dependent upon debt (and thus indebted)

in everyday operation. I use the women’s refusal to participate within the “formal” system and relatedly,

the refusal to obtain formal debt, as a concrete demonstration of resistance that is more about everyday

survival than a revolutionary uprising.

Earlier in this text, I referred to the role of fantasies in subject formation. Now I discuss fantasies in the

construction of an alternative future, i.e., the use of fantasies in urban defiance, whether momentous or

merely incremental. Even subtle, sporadic defiance is difficult to undo from imaginaries of broader

overhaul. This is the fidelity to optimism, the fidelity to potentialities on the horizon that alternative

economies can illuminate – this is the view to potentiality that is needed in the everyday. Written in

response to the recent work of Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (2012) and

Governing by Debt (2015), in which he examines the relation of debt and subject formation in late

capitalism, I build on his understanding of labour as no longer dominated by the physical force of power

but by the abstract force of finance through debt. I juxtapose his work with contemporary queer theory to

better understand the role of fantasies (particularly those linked to futurity) in everyday commerce and

relationality. For Park (1967 [1925]), Lefebvre (1996), and Harvey (2008), the right to the city was not

necessarily a literal right to physical property or space; it was the right to insert/assert imaginaries for/of

the future. Those involved in economies of the flesh, such as sex work, are never truly or even partially

envisioned in fantasies associated with the construction of global cities (such as the imaginaries rendered

in architectural illustration, advertisements, and other mass-marketed commercial material), and in fact

are situated as a red light that signals decadence and decay, a direct barrier to the realization of fantasies

of the “good” life. Nonetheless, even if erased from popular imaginaries of futurity, even if the

consequence for such existence should occasion some of the most theatrical performances of state-led

violence staged on national soil, sexual commerce has continued to flourish in the shadow of collective

fantasies. In a world in which discourses of neoliberalism reinforce the freedom envisioned in free trade

and a free market, the interrogation of this liberal utopian vision offered in the work of Marx (and the

neo-Marxist theorists who have followed) is needed to demonstrate the imperfection of a “perfect” market

state – the fallacy of fantasies that envision an equal distribution of wealth without poverty – to reveal the

                                                                                                                         29 I use the term “critique-in-action” to refer to some of the more documented political activism, framed as a political critique in action. The work of women and men involved in sexual commerce is not often characterized as defiant (deviant, but not defiant) and I want to make clear the subtle, sporadic defiance so often witnessed in the field – a defiance that is seldom recognized in mega-event opposition or popularized in the press.

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realities of actually existing capitalism and the anticipatory-absence needed to enact a future not-quite-

here.

6.1 Marx, Value, and Revolution

To Marx, the value inherent in commodities has forever been immaterial but also objective. The money

form, according to Marx, has permitted the otherwise immaterial value to crystalize in exchange. Value is

the objectification of processes of labour, which created the commodity. It is specifically defined in the

work of Marx as the “socially necessary labour-time” (1867, p. 29). Since “value” is immaterial, it cannot

be measured. It must be determined via a relation between commodities. Marx has used the analogy of

gravity and stone – that is, finding value in an isolated commodity is like finding gravity in a stone. The

value of one commodity is relative to that of other commodities, existent in relation to one another and

expressed/materialized (within capitalism) in money form. This material relation is expressed in “price” –

the monetary representation of power. Hidden within such exchange is the relation between the consumer

and producer/labourer. As the objectification of labour processes, commodities conceal the condition in

which production has occurred. As Gabriela stated: “Why would I sell you a purse, a shirt? I don’t believe

you need it! Plus, I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know who made it or the material, and under

what kind of condition. So, it is not for me to sell” (Personal communication, July 9, 2014). Likewise,

David Harvey (2010) has used the analogy of purchasing lettuce at the supermarket. The lettuce, like the

rest of the commodities in the store, is mute. It does not disclose the conditions under which it was

harvested, that is, whether the labourer was miserable, content, indentured, and so on. And to be frank,

Marx is not invested in any such moral implication of production realities. He is more invested in the

extent to which the market system and money form mask all social relation in commodity exchange. This

veil or disguise is referred to as “fetishism” (1867, p. 165). It is not a mere illusion, which could be

dismantled if one were so inclined, but rather the utter failure to admit the disconnect between the

immateriality of value (socially necessary labour time) and the representation of value in money form

(Harvey, 2010, p. 42). This is the basis of his attack on freedom as a mere fetishistic illusion. Under

capitalism, Marx argued, we surrender to the abstract, disciplinary force of the market, which an

individual cannot control but which will nevertheless regulate us (e.g., I can toil over this dissertation, as

the pinnacle objectification of all the processes stacked into this degree, but if it cannot be exchanged, it

has no value – and worse, I am left without the money needed to accumulate the commodities necessary

to live). “The process of production,” Marx wrote, “has mastery over man [sic]” (1867, pp.173-175); or as

Gabriela articulated, “You sell your body, your movement, your intelligence, and emotion to someone

else” (personal communication, July 9, 2014). So via the introduction of fetishism, Marx illustrated the

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extent to which value is able to dictate a norm and henceforth foreclose revolutionary possibilities in the

blind pursuit of fetishistic fantasies – the task, for him, is to question the optimism afforded in the

commodity ideal. While I reference many of Gabriela’s words in the text above, I wanted to include the

full narrative now:

I can do anything. Before this I was in film production. I am a fast learner. I can paint,

make a sculpture, design clothes, make furniture, and sell anything, whatever. And with a

client, I provide a service. It is not just sex. It is so much more. It is a relation, a human

relation. Some people want attention. Some people want company, to talk. I choose to

sell this service because it is the only thing I can trust. Why would I sell you a purse, a

shirt? I don’t believe you need it! Plus, I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know

who made it or the material, and under what kind of condition. So, it is not for me to sell.

With the work I do now, I sell what I know, and I decide: Where, when, with whom.

Believe me, I am not saying this to complain about the people who do that either. Maybe

at some point in my life, I will do it for a day or two . . . It is just not how I want to spend

every day. You have to understand, for the most part, I create a sense of normalcy. Sure,

some people want to experiment, but for the most part, it is about normal sex –

intercourse, with a partner of the opposite sex. Vaginal, oral, and on the rare occasion,

anal. Some men ask for more than one girl. And only very rarely does anyone have

fantasies of domination and submission, or penetration. The body is used, certainly.

Sometimes it’s enjoyable; sometimes it’s not. There is an instrumentality to the body that

women do not necessarily learn. Men learn how to use their bodies as an instrument.

Women learn beauty techniques, but not to use their bodies as a working tool. But bodies

are used in all sorts of professions. And accidents happen everywhere, in every

profession. If you work in a factory, a machine can cut off your hand. Instead of touching

a penis, you touch a machine, almost the same. You sell your body, your movement, your

intelligence, and emotion to someone else. Of course I can feel dirty, but I bet you feel

dirty too. I think, better to fuck a guy for an hour than be fucked by some soul-sucking

company for a decade, pretending to be so superior, so moral. (Personal communication,

July 9, 2014)

Marx attempted to establish a science that could expose the fetishism of capitalist exchange. He believed

that societies should be made conscious of the fetishized nature of commodities to reveal the objective

realities masked in surface appearance (see Marx, 1990 [1867], 164-165; 176-177). For Marx, the liberal

utopian order needed to be debunked as the mere replication of fetishism – a fetishism that will convert

the social relation between people into a material relation between people and a social relation between

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commodities. In the same vein, Gabriela disparaged women encountered at work who “pretend to be

professional but suffer. They want to be considered a part of society but struggle to get the money to buy

the clothes, the house, whatever. All to fit in and be accepted; feel included. Like most people, trying to

get that purse, phone, car or whatever we think we need.” This is the material relation between people

predicated on commodities, to which she later added: “We are like a bunch of zombies! Walking, talking

but asleep, or without consciousness! When I walk, I look everyone in the eye, especially at work. I want

to shake people up, wake them up!” (Gabriela, personal communication, July 9, 2014). Building on Marx

to discuss the current moment, David Harvey (2010) suggests that objective realities could be unveiled in

phenomena such as the “fair trade” movement. Aside from this more practical incursion into the general

economy, Harvey also echoes Marx in his call for more critical theories, which work to uncover the

structure of capitalism and suggest alternative possibilities for the future. I see a similar thrust in

Gabriela’s account of sex (work) with a stranger: “It is not just sex. It is so much more. It is a relation, a

human relation. Some people want attention. Some people want company, to talk. I choose to sell this

service because it is the only thing I can trust” (personal communication, July 9, 2014). If the fetish was

about illusion for Marx, Gabriela has not identified with the standard notion. Through her work, she has

remained committed to demystification. This demystification is her avenue to explore radically different

social and material relationalities, outside the traditional life/progress narrative of “straight” time. Harvey,

like Marx, does not merely dispel the myth of a “perfect” market or “invisible hand” which Adam Smith

(1776) made so notorious, but rather contests the very liberal utopian vision that sustained faith in such

mythologies, despite skepticism in the everyday. To do so, both contend that if realized, such a utopia

would not be beneficial to all. In fact, it would make the capitalist class exorbitantly wealthier while

(relatively) impoverishing the rest.

6.2 Fantasies of Futurity: Reproductive Futurism or the Search

for Another Possible Life

Queerness is a future-bound phenomenon, a “not-yet-here” or “horizon” that is critically, pragmatically

entangled with the present and past. Against the “reproductive futurism” reinforced in “straight time,”

scorned in the work of Edelman (2004) and his testament to resist “enslavement to the future in the name

of having a life” (30), José Esteban Muñoz straddles the current “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1977) to

rethink that which has obstructed hope and optimism for the future in the everyday – to see the

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potentiality within a particular moment in time.30 As he wrote in his book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and

There of Queer Futurity (2009): “Indeed, to live inside straight time and ask for, desire, and imagine

another time and space is to represent and perform a desire that is both utopian and queer” (p. 26). Similar

to Berlant (2011), Muñoz is sympathetic to optimism even if cruel, and celebrated the “anticipatory

illumination” that can open a window to the future in the everyday. With Rosa, Isabel, and Gabriela, we

see “a sign of an actually existing queer reality, a kernel of political possibility within a stultifying

heterosexual present” (2009, p. 49). There is a tactical need for fantasies (related to futurism) in everyday

work and survival, a phenomenon not exclusive to sex (work) alone. With Rosa, we understand sex work

as reliant on a spectrum of possible fantasies in affective-libidinal performance, but also fantasies serve as

a defense mechanism for everyday drama, exhaustion, even malaise. Fantasies of love are held in

suspense, never allow her to “fall” for the illusion that is her solace/relief in everyday trauma. The “real”

love at home with her husband was tumultuous at best, and as violent as some of the most sensationalized

violence imagined for her line of work. Rosa wrestled with the tension to be “normal” (stable, “settled,”

and married to the “one”) and her recognition that this “normal” life was founded on illusion. Likewise

with Isabel; even her dire situation was “not an end but an opening or horizon” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 91),

which allowed her to insist on a world not “dictated by the spatial/temporal coordinates of straight time”

(ibid., p. 31). There was endurance to her enthusiasm – her fantasies, multifaceted and malleable,

remained open to optimism and the potentialities laden in an otherwise insurmountable moment. In her

effort to be recognized (made visible in law) as an independent, entrepreneurial woman, she troubled the

term “victim” in the traditional sex-slave sense to reveal the illusion on which state-sanctioned violence is

founded.

With Gabriela, I want to make known the defiance inherent in her fantasies; fantasies of women not

reflected or celebrated in the conventional “good” life. These are the stories of women forced to act as the

shadow host to FIFA parties, inextricably entangled within mega-event commerce yet on the fringe of

gente [people] and comunidades [communities] celebrated in event rhetoric. These fantasies of defiance

shift between a desire to negotiate with the dominant social order and the desire to extricate herself from

it. As she stated:

Any country hosting an event like this, involving other countries, people leaving one

place for another, the truth is yes, this kind of thing can happen. Women can be

                                                                                                                         30 “Straight time” is a concept introduced in the work of Judith Halberstam on queer temporality and the relation to spatiality (see Halberstam, 2005, pp. 1-21) in which heteronormativity is positioned as not just biased against sexual choice but to the dominant temporal and spatial organization of the world (i.e., the conventional progression through school-marriage-career-mortgage-children-death). In contrast to straight time, “queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 1).

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trafficked, exploited, and so on. Many of us have dreams about leaving Brazil and

making more money in a foreign land. . . . Yes of course we do. But it is important for us

not to be deluded enough to think [an event like FIFA] is going to change our life, or

deliver some príncipe encantado [enchanted prince]. (Gabriela, personal communication,

July 1)

There is a balance for Gabriela between fantasies of the “good” life (the salvation found from a white

knight) and the potentialities of a life lived in direct perversion of dominant ideologies – ideologies that

have never celebrated or included the sex worker as a middle- to lower-class woman, most often of

colour. Either extreme (to fully embrace and realize the “good” life or live in a state of perma-perversion

to dominant ideologies) is unrealistic, but somewhere between the two is a livable life. In another

interview she further illuminated this dance between polarities, as she attested: “Why would I care about a

society that has never cared about me? Why work to be included in such a place that has never openly

accepted me for me?” (Gabriela, personal communication, July 24, 2014). This interview was conducted

late one night at a desk in a deserted office. Her husband waited at the door. Monday through Friday, she

is a contract employee with the federal government. Her husband is aware of her title as both civil servant

and sex professional. In fact, he is a former (sexual) client. She has been made visible (welcomed as

dignified gente) as a civil servant and wife, and used this status to assert her defiance against the dominant

social order. Albeit detrimental to the “good” life in which she “Fazendo TU-DO, e ganhando POU-CO!

[Does EVERTHING, and makes NOTHING]” (Gabriela, personal communication, July 24, 2014), her

role as a sex worker is a crucial site in which her defiance and desire can coexist [“convivência”].

Gabriela articulated the life circumstance that led to her involvement in sexual commerce. Rejected from

dominant culture, she chose sex work to create a life more livable:

They can say that the body is being commercialized but the body has always been

commercialized, even before capitalism. Actually, capitalism now values women in

production, not reproduction! Productive, earning a salary, not selling sex! But listen,

between us, most people would not sell something so stigmatized if they had other

[economic] options. Before, I thought, I would never be a whore. But I struggled to find a

way in this society – a society that knows exactly what’s best for me, and tells me all the

time. So I decided to formulate my own opinion on prostitution – isn’t that lovely, to eat,

to live, I had to prostitute myself. And when I when I finally did, I realized my own

opinion on prostitution. Up until then, I only had the opinions of others. Society’s

opinions – the macho, sexist, patriarchal, transphobic, cishetero, normative culture that

excludes homosexuals, gays, lesbians, transvestites, and of course, by extension,

prostitutes. I thought to myself, “Geez only sex pays, I used to do it for free, why not

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charge?” The real problem with prostitution is that they want to control the sex that

women (not men) have . . . Sex must be practiced primarily for reproduction or love, you

see . . . For their purpose; not our pleasure . . . But I like sex for pleasure! And if I feel

attracted to a certain person and we start to have sex, there’s no guarantee I’m going to

experience 100% pleasure but the advantage to being a whore is that even if I don’t

orgasm, I still get paid! (Laughter) And this money brings me great pleasure! (More

laughter) (Gabriela, personal communication, May 22, 2014)

The reference to her past is intended to propel us into the present moment (and imagine that which is

potentially beyond) to better understand survival in the everyday. The pleasure from sex work is both a

queer opening to conventional ideologies and at the same time a reinforcement of normative patterns of

attachment. Consensual sex (work) with an anonymous stranger is a moment of renewed sense of the

social, “relief” from the dominant social order and human (inter)relation. As we understood with Rosa,

and now with Gabriela, her work allowed her to become desensitized “emotionally from the act, but also

from mainstream morality, and the shame I was taught to feel over my body, my femininity, and my

sexuality so undeniably entwined with the two” (Rosa, personal communication, July 24, 2014). If we

follow Muñoz (2009) and detach queerness from sexual identity, we are forced to (re)think the notion of

“queer” as a horizon for strange temporalities, imaginative tendencies, and unconventional economies of

exchange. In doing so, we better understand the comment Foucault made in his interview “Friendship as a

Way of Life” that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex”

(1996 [1975], p. 310). I would add “sex work” as another sexual behaviour (once) constructed as deviant

that has threatened a certain “way of life” and the more bureaucratic form of human attachment. For

Gabriela, sex work (complete with the life [da vida] it can sustain) is an avenue to the Other – to be made

visible and experience a form of relationality that would otherwise be reduced to a signature in

bureaucratic exchange.

The only difference between informal labour and formal labour here is paper. In the

formal sector, people are signing, signing, stamping, signing . . . In the informal world, a

contract is guaranteed in word, face-to-face conversation. I look people directly in the

eyes, and make a promise. I think this is so much better. Better than signing, signing,

signing and later be sued, sued, sued (Laughter). In Brazil, this bureaucracy is our

number one assassino [assassin]. (Gabriela, personal communication, July 12, 2014)

The intimacies expressed in alternative economies of the flesh do not characterize the more celebrated

form of sex sold (and bartered) in conventional marriage or the relationality typically performed in the

boardroom. This queer form of attachment, nonetheless established in commerce, is a deviation from the

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conventional customer/client relation but also from the normative affectual-emotional tendencies on

which the “good” life is built. This is a (manufactured) love that can dissolve sureties in “absolute or

unconditional hospitality” to the other (Derrida, 2000, p. 25) and establish human contact realized in

flesh, not paper.

The performance of love with or for another is anchored to fantasies needed in everyday survival but also

to the pursuit of revolution – defiance without trauma or guarantee. To speak of love and defiance in this

manner is to recognize the shadow intimacies within (and constitutive of) the dominant social order.

Shadow intimacies pursue relationality based on difference. Indeed, this was the coexistence [or

convivência] of difference (class, race, gender identities) most often celebrated in sexual commerce that

threatened the more naturalized performance of sex and love in heteronormative late capitalism. This

emphasis on relationality is reflective of the broader role of the sex worker in our contemporary moment –

a moment in which “immaterial labour” (Lazzarato, 1996) has become the dominant mode of production

and consumption, and to which sex and affect are undeniably tied. In this metamodern moment, there is

less emphasis on the consumption of material commodities and more on the affect or sensation

commodities create. From being into having (as per Marx), to having into appearing (as per Debord and

Baudrillard) to now, appearing into affecting:

I am kind of a scientist of seduction. People love to be seduced. Seduced by spontaneity –

act unusual, different, something not on the program. Especially with Europeans or Brits.

This kind of culture, you know, the “well-educated” culture. They think, overthink, lose

spontaneity. Spontaneity is not something you think. You feel it. Like, if I am with a

client and a waitress asks: “What do you want to drink?” And I say, “Human blood!” I

love to see the reaction, you know? I love living like that, surprising people. (Gabriela,

personal communication, June 20, 2014)

To Gabriela, the lure of an anonymous encounter (through sex or conversation) is the spontaneity – a

moment in which dominant ideologies can be held at a distance, resourced in her case to manufacture

affect. This is one obvious link between sex work and the sport mega-event, both economies that

admittedly cater to affect and aim to maintain the “globally” erect phallus.31 As described by Brian

                                                                                                                         31 As Brian Pronger (1999) wrote, the “territorial” nature of competitive sport (e.g., boxing, football, soccer, hockey) invokes a rape aesthetic in which a team, idealized as the “ever-expanding” phallus, intends to penetrate the “territorial anus” of the opposition. In relation to the global (sport) spectacle, Pronger then concluded: “Competitive sport is frequently constructed as a public festival: the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the Commonwealth Games, the Olympic Games. The competitive sports festival offers the world an opportunity to enjoy the mean libidinal economy in which destruction (pouvoir) is given the value of creation (puissance). It is, as Nietzsche would say, a festival of cruelty” (p. 387). Within the realm of patriarchal-homophobic-competitive sport, pouvoir (the selective concretization of potential/puissance) will channel puissance to be inviolable, sovereign. While I concur with

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Pronger (1999): “The aura of competitive sport, the sporting arena, the erotic power it confers on the

bodies of athletes, then, is aphrodisiac to sexual commerce outside the arena” (p. 374) (see Appendix 16).

Flesh, desire, and finance converge within an (outlawed) circumstance to produce a form of relationality

that does not conform to corporate America. This is the emotionally agile and corporeally dependent work

of an individual involved in sex-related industries, like that of a professional athlete – to use bodies as a

resource in the creation of affective-libidinal sensation. The reference to fantasies, ideologies,

relationalities is not to distract from the material referent, bodies or people in motion (see also Fusco,

2006; 2008). Of course bodies remain crucial; as the chief tool of defiance for the global masses of

dispossessed men, women, and children, fantasies become written onto and enacted through the flesh.

This is a condition of her work that Gabriela does not overlook, as the following extensive excerpt

demonstrates:

In the dressing room, we talk a lot. I learn about make-up, perfume, lotion – Xylocaina,

Lidocaína, Lidial, the best anesthetic cream to use for anal sex – and we also talk about

strategies, sex, and the clientele. A friend told me the other day that she was with a client

that wouldn’t leave . . . He just kept her there. Legs opened, playing with her pussy.

Watching it open and close, one contraction after the next. She panicked a bit because he

had a tight hold on her, and refused to let her move. She realized though that it was just

the panic that he wanted so she “panicked” and eventually, he finished. I remember a

two-hour programa with one repulsive creature. He wanted to hug, kiss my mouth, and

flirt. But he was so drunk. To manage him, I would tolerate whatever I could for as long

as I could – imagine one thing then the next. He went down on me, stung me with his

beard. I would take it to the limit – imagine something else. He moved to kiss my mouth,

my neck and again, it would sting and I would take it for as long as I could. We moved

from one thing to the next to control the discomfort, and minimize disgust. Another call

girl taught me to perform oral sex without a condom, she said: “The first thing is, it can’t

stink. The second, it can’t have any acorns. Otherwise, lick the body of the penis and

avoid the glans.” You have to concentrate on the male clitoris, on the belly of the penis,

right beneath the glans. That’s the most sensitive part. So lick the body of the penis and if

he wants me to suck on the tip, I throw my hair over the area, and run my wet finger over

the head of his cock. He thinks it’s my tongue! Another thing, we still work on our

period. We have to pay a fine if we don’t show. I was taught to stuff a bunch of cotton

deep inside my pussy to absorb the blood. I hated removing it after but a friend told me to

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Pronger’s account of pouvoir/puissance in mainstream-competitive sport, his theorization is not an exact fit for the sexual commerce observed outside the arena – a relation further described in the conclusion.

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use the showerhead. Stick it in, let it soak it all up, and it will fall out, naturally. And we

help each other a lot with the clientele too. One time I was talking to a guy that just threw

out his dick and started masturbating in the middle of the terma. A girl came over and put

her face between us and kissed his mouth. In the terma there is a rule: If a girl is talking

to a client, no other girl should intervene. I dropped my mouth to protest, and she winked

at me. I stood in shock while she grabbed his robe and said: “Let’s go upstairs, right now,

and take her with us.” When I got to the room, she laid out an arsenal of sex toys. And we

used everyone on him. But he kept losing his erection so we did something that I learned

from a male sex worker friend. We go to the same gym, and he told me once, “Look, it

doesn’t matter how good you are. When there is an audience, it is easy to lose an

erection. So put the condom on and tie the end, tightly, near the bottom of the cock. That

way, the blood is restricted.” Instead of a condom, we used a fur cock ring. He screamed

a bit from the pain but we just kept slapping him. We both fucked him, and he came

while we pissed on his face [pause] but supposedly I am the oppressed one. (Gabriela,

personal communication, June 20, 2014)

The material efficiencies of fantasies are inescapable for Gabriela in the everyday. There is a constant

exchange between fantasies and the flesh. There is the fantasy of fellatio, the fantasy that she is not

menstrual – even the fantasy that he has achieved full erection, without aid. Her constant turn to fantasies

at work, her reliance on illusion, has enacted a certain (once unthinkable, unattainable) form of human

contact. Bodies are manoeuvreed to realize the phantasmagorical of the commodity form.32 In her

enactment of fantasies, there is also subtle defiance – not to harm the individual but to rewrite the

ideologies that encrypt the self. There is also a perversion of medical knowledge/expertise (e.g.,

“Xylocaina, Lidocaína, Lidial, the best anesthetic cream” or “it can’t stink . . . it can’t have any acorns”)

that is symbolic of her everyday incursion into the dominant social order. Such is the work of a hostess in

an allegedly “global” metropolis, to create an illusion of love so radically unattainable in “real life” that it

can rewrite the “good” life script.33 So intense the orgasm that it too has legacies; whether experienced or

imagined it has perverted our worldview.

                                                                                                                         32 As I alluded to earlier, the use of the term “phantasmagorical” is done to reference the fantastical-phantom nature of the commodity form, as described in the work of Marx (1990 [1867]). 33 Whereas Baudrillard feared that the simulacrum would eclipse the real referent, Deleuze saw the simulacrum as a partial concretization of potential in a form that served a particular political or ideological end. With respect to sport, Pronger (1999) argued that this “end” was one of territorial domination. Hegemonic power is predicated on consensus that will construct some level of material reality in the consciousness of people.

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6.3 The “Other” World: Lovemaking as “Divine Violence”

Walter Benjamin (in his oft-cited essay "Critique of Violence") sought to undo the false link between

violence and the law. Following the work of Nietzsche, who wrote: “When the consciousness of the latent

presence of violence in a legal institution disappears, the institution falls into decay” (1921: 288),

Benjamin problematized the mythical fate-like origin of modern law and the corresponding violence

inflicted in the name of “law-making” or “law-preserving” for the benefit of a select few – as we observe

in the case of Niterói. Benjamin wrote that the State monopoly on violence is established in “law-making”

violence (also referred to as “power-making” and/or “boundary-making” violence). Violence utilized by

the State to preserve power is “law-preserving” violence. The state use of both/either is the manner in

which law is instituted and preserved. The third form of violence introduced in the work of Benjamin is

“law-destroying” violence or “divine” violence in which justice is used against legal/mythical (State-

legitimated) violence. As Benjamin (1921) wrote:

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets

boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt

and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if

the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood. (p. 297)

To the extent that legality is harnessed to protect the State, divine violence will act to preserve the

sacredness of the human – to preserve our freedom and choice (outside or irrespective of that dictated in

law) and realize a world through language, sociality, and observation. This was the work of Isabel in her

denunciation of the State, a denunciation that threatened her life for the sake of all the Caixa women –

those to whom State violence is never an exception. Although seldom as dramatic, the work of most

women involved in sexual commerce (or at least those involved in this research and reflected in stories

heard from Gabriela) enacts divine violence in the everyday. Divine violence is exhibited in the refusal of

Gabriela to contribute to the dominant social order that has most often received her in violence – only

ever recognized her in acts of exclusion. Her refusal (manifested in her lack of formal debt and her

involvement in the informal sector) is the violence undertaken by a sovereign individual, a strike at

power, in defiance of the law but in favour of justice – to rewrite the sovereignty of the self against the

coercive violence of law and strike at the role of the State in the conventional household:

I lived with my mom. And my mom had three other kids, my sister who was 20-

something lived there with three more children, and my Mom’s boyfriend, and my aunt.

And it was all on my shoulders. I supported everyone with the money I made as a

prostitute. I was an ATM, actually, which I liked. Women are mostly taught to be

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registered whores in the context of a “loving” family. Brazilian families, and families all

over the world teach women that they have to dedicate themselves to one man and one

man alone. And at the end of the night you have to want to have sex with him. It's your

obligation, your duty. Clearly this is not sexual exploitation, this is not rape! (Laughter)

You are married. (Gabriela, personal communication, May 22, 2014)

Valerie Solanas in SCUM Manifesto (1968) similarly questioned the need for government, laws, and

political association in a society consisting of "rational beings capable of empathizing with each other,

complete and having no natural reason to compete" (p. 6). Indeed the work of Mike Davis (2007), Ashwin

Desai (2015), Arundhati Roy (2011; 2012), Saskia Sassen (2000; 2005; 2009; 2014) and Loïc Wacquant

(2008) – to name a select yet inspirational few – offers evidence of the repeated, "legitimized" violence

committed on behalf of the State. These theories discursively constructed marginalized men and women

as the “victim” of State violence, whereas the defiance of Gabriela is a subtle yet direct undermining of

State authorities and the societies of (presumed) control. In a nation that has seen more urban rallies than

the rest of the world combined (Anderson, 2016), Gabriela is different but not an exception. Her silent

rebellion is indicative of a much larger and undocumented wave of urban reform that is uninterested in the

more vocal protest movement that has made Rio de Janeiro the international moniker for rebel cities. The

contrast is admittedly ridiculous but I relate the defiance of Gabriela to the freedom I have known in the

absence of a bike helmet, seat belt, or the oblivion of intoxication. It is a strike at the sovereign self, a

desire to become shattered. I see this also in the description Pronger (2002) offers in reference to exercise

or that exact moment of bliss which he and the Dasein Swim Club searched for in the pool or ran for in

the ravine near his house. I would characterize such activities as subtle acts of “divine violence”

(Benjamin, 1921) done in search of justice or relief.

Aside from the economic benefit, Rosa too chose to become involved in sex work in an effort to learn to

disconnect from the act, to develop the emotional distance most men in her life displayed in relation to

sexual intimacies/infidelities, similar to the bandidos’ treatment of violence. For the women, distance or

disconnect – not dissonance – is better to describe the strategies used to exceed fantasies constructed in

the real. Indeed this is the rationale Rosa offered. The work persona of a sex worker (often distinguished

by the use of a “fighter” name and costume, similar to the “game face” of an athlete) is a character

through which women gain a sense of control, evident in the refusal to partake in particular activities

(e.g., refraining from kissing a client on the mouth, which is a more coveted expression of love). Defiance

is asserted at work in the refusal to attend to certain men or perform a particular request. This defiance is

palpable in the confidence Gabriela (much like Rosa and Isabel) is so often known to exude. It is this

same defiance that is an additive to performance, a tactical theatric that she can use to instill a sense of

“exceptionalism” in a particular client (e.g., seductively suggesting she will only ever kiss a select few).

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Defiance is also (re)asserted in the performance of a more dominant or submissive sexual partner. As

O’Connell Davidson (1996) wrote: “The prostitute’s skill and art lies in her ability to completely conceal

all genuine feelings, beliefs, desires, preferences and personality (in short, her self) and appear as nothing

more than a living embodiment of the client’s fantasies” (p. 190 [emphasis added]). Boundaries are

erected for the sex worker in order to protect her own fantasies of human attachment, maintain a crucial

distance from the simulated real, and lessen the miseries of love failed elsewhere.

At the conclusion of his argument Benjamin, in response to his question of “whether there are no other

than violent means for regulating conflicting human interests” (1921, p. 287), answered that nonviolent

resolution to conflict is indeed possible via “relationships among private persons” in which “there is a

sphere of human agreement that is non-violent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the

proper sphere of ‘understanding’, language” (p. 289). For Benjamin, with language we are free to debate,

discuss, and articulate imaginaries for the future. This sphere of shared human agreement is distinct from

the theatrics of State power – a power otherwise reliant upon violence and the Potemkin village it has

erected to survive. Yet the commitment to this sphere of “understanding” accessed via language is rarely

found. In the case of Isabel, we observe the direct attack on language in the attempt to silence the public

denunciation of State-sanctioned violence. Nevertheless, this emphasis on nonviolent resolution is (often)

evident in the verbal agreement between the worker and clientele, like the written contract between the

State and FIFA/IOC. Both indeed imply a particular future (and the related course of action) but for the

State this is a future it cannot afford.

6.4 Debt Refusal as Everyday Defiance

As a tool for neoliberal urban (re)development, the sport mega-event (in this case, the 2014 FIFA World

Cup) is founded upon the logic of debt. The test event for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic

Games, the 2007 Pan/Parapan American Games, was billed at $250 million yet cost the public $1.15

billion, according to the Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU), the Brazilian audit office. Formal debt, as

an apparatus of power, has the ability to dictate certain possibilities for the future – the most pressing

illustration of this is the ability of debt to demand restitution. Debt is a promise to the future. It will

(re)define our relationship to time. As Maurizio Lazzarato wrote in his 2012 book, The Making of the

Indebted Man,

By training the governed to “promise” (to honour their debt), capitalism exercises

“control over the future,” since debt obligations allow one to foresee, calculate, measure,

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and establish equivalences between current and future behaviour. The effects of the

power of debt on subjectivity (guilt and responsibility) allow capitalism to bridge the gap

between present and future. (p. 46)

Debt is able to control the production of subjectivities in the present, but also to (re)configure those

imagined for the future. The burden of debt will haunt imaginaries for the future – the future of each

individual but also the State. The State, indebted to private enterprise, has a vested interest in equally

plummeting its citizenry into similar debt-dependence but it cannot enforce this (as easily) upon those

within the informal sector. As Lazzarato (2012) wrote:

Fewer than twenty years after the “decisive victory over communism” and just fifteen

years since “the end of history,” capitalism has reached an historical dead end. Since

2007, it has survived solely through injections of astronomical sums of public money. Yet

despite this, it is on its last legs. At best, it reproduces itself, but only by frantically doing

away with what remains of the social gains of the last two centuries. Since the “sovereign

debt crises,” it has made a comic spectacle of how it functions. The “rational” economic

norms which the “markets,” ratings agencies, and experts have imposed on State

governments in order for them to recover from the public debt crisis are the same as those

that caused both the private and public debt crises. (pp. 168-169)

The argument offered in the recent work of Lazzarato is a mere embellishment or extension of the

argument initially proposed in the work of Marx at the outset of capitalist advancement, included here:

[T]he faction of the bourgeoisie that ruled and legislated through the Chambers had a

direct interest in the indebtedness of the state. The state deficit was really the main object

of its speculation and the chief source of its enrichment. At the end of each year a new

deficit. After the lapse of four or five years a new loan. And every new loan offered new

opportunities to the finance aristocracy for defrauding the state, which was kept

artificially on the verge of bankruptcy – it had to negotiate with the bankers under the

most unfavourable conditions. Each new loan gave a further opportunity, that of

plundering the public which invested its capital in state bonds by means of stock-

exchange manipulations, into the secrets of which the government and the majority in the

Chambers were initiated. (Marx, 1969 [1848], p. 15)

To “queer” the dominant conceptualization of the State as that which has the monopoly on “legitimate”

violence (as Weber [1919] and later Benjamin [1921] argued), Lazzarato (building on Marx) allowed me

to rethink the State as dependent upon debt (and thus indebted or precarious) in everyday operation. Amid

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stories of political corruption, Zika, the worst recession since 1930, and a pending presidential

impeachment, the nation is under siege. With the recent vote for her impeachment (April 18, 2016 [Lower

House]; May 12, 2016 [Senate]), though President Dilma stated that she is fearful that the publicity

surrounding her impeachment will discourage foreign investment in the somewhat near future, a risk that

is worrisome in the middle of recession, there is no mention of the failed democracy that has plagued

optimism and hope across the nation.34 Mourning the democracy never realized yet imagined for so long,

Lincoln Secco, a professor of history at the University of São Paulo adds: “It’s putting a very large bullet

in Brazilian democracy” (New York Times, April 17, 2016, http://nyti.ms/1STJda8). Both the vote to

impeach Dilma and the recession in Brazil are indicative of political and economic crises of a precarious

nation-state. At the whim of an abstract force, the State has no recourse other than primitive violence and

accumulation, like that observed in Niterói. The stories of corruption reveal the democracy once imagined

and envisioned for Brazil as myth. To such an extent, the recent debate concerning the impeachment of

President Dilma amid stories of political corruption (e.g., involving the State-controlled oil company

Petrobras) is the symbolic death of collective fantasies sustained for tomorrow – and the melancholy of a

State under siege.

For the women involved in sexual commerce, the refusal to participate in the formal system and the

refusal to obtain formal debt is a concrete demonstration of resistance that is more about everyday

survival than dramatic revolutionary uprising. As Gabriela stated:

The thing is, with the skill set I have I am not going to get paid much in any career [in

Brazil]. You really have to work, really extort yourself to make any money. And then

avoid taxes to accumulate money. I don’t want to do that. I do informal jobs, and I don’t

have a credit card. When I have cash, I pay my phone bill, my school bill, etc. I pay with

cash, at the bank. I have a bank account for savings. I don’t like to pay taxes but

obviously, I do based on whatever salary I make that year. I’m informal. Sometimes I

work, sometimes I don’t. Sex, I can offer anywhere, anytime, with whoever I decide.

Nobody is going to force me to do something I don’t want to do. (Personal

communication, July 9, 2014)

With Gabriela, there is a refusal to accumulate debt; she lives within her most immediate income. This

refusal to partake in the “formal” market is also a suspension of the identities associated with it and a

                                                                                                                         34 For information regarding the Brazilian Lower House vote to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, see http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/18/dilma-rousseff-congress-impeach-brazilian-president

For information regarding the Brazilian Senate vote, see http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/12/dilma-rousseff-brazil-president-impeached-senate-vote

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simultaneous opening to new possibilities. Debt is otherwise an appropriation of present labour time in

exchange for the future – the future of each individual but also society as a whole. It is a promise to the

norm and a commitment to institutional power. This was the criticism of Deleuze, in his account of the

shift between disciplinary societies to contemporary societies of control: “A man is no longer a man

confined but a man in debt” (1995, p. 181). With Guattari, he argued that debt, rather than the rule of law,

holds the despotic machine together (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 216). Debt is able to control the

production of subjectivities in the present but also (re)configure those imagined for the future. The debt

economy will demand that a subject be accountable to oneself in the future – to make and sustain a

promise for the future. In relation to the State, the 2014 FIFA World Cup cost an estimated R25.6 billion,

or US$11.63 billion (Rapoza, 2014). In 2014, this represented roughly 61% of the entire federal education

budget (R44.2 billion) (ibid.). At the same time Petrobras estimated that $18.8 billion would be needed to

subsidize fuel for the nation, and the electric sector relied on a government-engineered $5.4 billion loan.

Such realities failed to halt the future budgetary inflation awarded to FIFA/IOC from exceeding prior

projections (see also Barbassa, 2015, p. 257). Not even the beloved futebol [football] was unscathed, as

the protest movement harnessed the 2013 Confederation Cup and 2014 FIFA World Cup to mobilize civil

unrest (Butler & Aicher, 2015). With consumer credit and household debt at a record high, the Bank of

Brazil increased interest rates to further squeeze the new middle class (de Carvalho, 2016). Within the

sphere of the unregulated, nontaxable, informal market, however, formal debt (that is, the debt that is

owed to a financial institution) is less of a concern or currency for the future. To the women and men of

sexual commerce, so often positioned as a threat to heteronormative-monogamous culture, the past and

future is not for them to publically assert. Within the present, however, there is room for fantasies to

roam, and occasionally be enacted and realized. As Gabriela added: “In this capitalist society, you are not

occupied, you are preoccupied. This preoccupation is a delimitation of power. But as a whore, I am not

preoccupied, I am occupied. I know from here, inside me, my value. And then I decide, what it will be

worth to you” (Gabriela, personal communication, June 18, 2014). It is this conscious refusal to sustain

the dominant progress narrative – and the tentacle-like attachment to wealth, knowledge, and future – that

is needed to open alternative possibilities and their associated fantasies and desires. As Berardi (2012)

wrote, building on the work of Lazzarato: “Modern culture has equated economic expansion with futurity,

so that for the economist it is impossible to think the future independently of economic growth” (p. 70).

The ultimate theft of debt is the theft of a future revolution. Debt is more than an economic crisis; it is a

crisis of the imagination to which an active refusal will (in the case of Gabriela) serve optimism for

tomorrow.

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6.5 Economies of the Flesh

In this contemporary moment, “economies of the flesh” (Collins, 2002) allow me to reimagine and

reconfigure the notions of relationality and sociality such that defiance can be asserted as a constitutive

component of intimacies performed in private yet also reflected in the common or mobilized in collective

action.35 The sex worker is the embodiment of a world now characterized by a lack of distinction between

“work” (public) and “life” (private) – a world now reliant upon the distribution of a product that is

immaterial (e.g., the ability to generate a social connection or relation). From sexual exploitation to

transgression, sex work has quite the ideological terrain to travel. It is the Foucauldian tussle with the

dominant social order (in everyday handling of police brutality, clientele, and the constant legitimation of

the profession to authorities), coupled with the erratic interjection of a Lacanian No! to the big Other

(visible in the rejection of normative religion/faith, consumer culture, and normative female submission)

that make sexual commerce so difficult to define as an oppositional culture – but that might be precisely

the point!36 As Mari Ruti wrote, “It encourages us to give up what is most precious to us – most important

for our self-definition” and “quite simply, that we cease to care about what the big Other wants – that we

reject the legitimacy of the Other’s desire so as to create space for the truth of our own” (2014, pp. 312-

313). It is the interruption offered in the (sport) mega-event or anonymous sexual encounter that is needed

to (re)write the “good” life script – to stop performing in the way we have been conditioned. The

commitment to refusal or the act of subtle defiance in the everyday is an undeniable component of

collective action and the critical distance needed to sever ties with the dominant social order. Even if it is

true that this rupture alone does not formulate political uprising, it is certainly a necessary precondition of

such action. For the women involved in sexual commerce, sex alone will never destabilize the predatory

formation of corporate-political interest that hinges on finance as a main enabler. To quote Laurie Penny,

“The capitalist vision of female physical perfection is a shallow grave of frigid signs and brutal rules,

signifying only sterility and death. If we want to live, we need to remember the language of resistance

(2011, p. 64). Without this everyday agitation, sex (and human relations, more broadly) will forever be

coopted to reinforce socially constructed binaries.

                                                                                                                         35 Art historian Lisa Gail Collins (2002) used the term “economies of the flesh” in her study of black female artists’ engagement with historical narrative and the related representation of black female bodies in commerce and trade. In her essay, Collins described the representation of black female bodies as emblematic of the contraction between eroticization and asexual female form. It is the work, she asserted, of the artist and cultural historian to unearth entrenched legacies to welcome new possibilities for a more self-determined Black female form. Throughout my work, I have tried to illustrate the manner in which the sex worker (as an artist of seduction) can rewrite conventional stories of victimization to reveal her otherwise neglected agentic state. 36 The “big Other” is a Lacanian reference to symbolic order – i.e., that which is said to regulate social life, positioned in direct opposition to jouissance (see Žižek, 2006, pp. 8-12, 40-41).

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Chapter 7: Conclusion

Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to

unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to

music and warm bodies and contraceptives . . . and to the "good life," whatever it is and

wherever it happens to be. (H. S. Thompson, 1998, p. 101)

Habermas argued in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991) that the bourgeois idea of

the public sphere was contingent upon the emergence of a critical public discourse that articulated the

interest of civil societies, against the State. The establishment of a critical public discourse relied upon the

formation of semiformal, quasi-private institutional or collective spaces like the beauty parlor, barber

shop, or café – alternative media in which the tension between public interest and private life could be

realized, disseminated, and debated. In his work, one can trace the historical transience of “private”

intimacies within, among, and through “public” life. Intimacies reinforce but also (re)create the world

through close human interaction and attachment, and offer a crucial site in which the world can be

(re)imagined to enact another world most desired; a utopian vision realized, if even for a minute. Yet

significant to this work of Habermas is the argument that even the most intimate image of the world can

never really escape the lingering fantasies of the collective “good” life most often propagated or

celebrated in the public sphere – the most intimate, private world can never be uncoupled from the public

with which it must reside. The intimacies exchanged in sexual commerce – whether over a decade with

regular clientele or in a one-time encounter with a stranger – reflect broader cultural sensibilities but also

offer a moment in which these sensibilities can be rewritten. To welcome the other in their most

vulnerable, suspended state and offer relief – this is the work of a great host, and the potential associated

with any great event.

Situated within this (meta)modern time, the private and public spheres are even harder to dissociate. The

violence enacted on precarious public land has direct impact on our most intimate and private life. The

scenes of impoverished communities settled on precarious land do not seem to vanish with “progress” but

multiply. Environmental and social degradation continue apace as economic, scientific, and technological

advancement are heralded as salvation. In the name of finance, it is “rational” to remain idle as land is

pillaged, raped, and killed – “incorporated” beyond resuscitation. Even the Amazon rainforest (nearest to

Manaus, a 2014 FIFA host city) is now slated for entrepreneurial (re)development that is ecologically

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themed but laughably attainable (Kanai, 2014) – with stainless steel shipped across the Atlantic Ocean

from Portugal through Amazonian tributaries to construct the Arena da Amazônia (a 41,000-seat stadium)

for four World Cup matches. Three men died in the construction of a now-vacant stadium.37 As Sassen

(2014) wrote:

It used to be that being poor meant owning or working a plot of land that did not produce

much. Today the 2 billion people living in extreme poverty own nothing but their bodies.

The fact is that we have the capacity to feed everybody on the globe, but feeding the poor

is not the priority of the most powerful economic actors, so we have more hunger than

ever before, and hunger is now growing in rich countries as well, notably the United

States. (p. 149)

Through the logic of capitalism, land flush with “natural” wealth is made more lucrative than the men,

women, and children that have come to inhabit, cultivate, and sustain a life within. Never erased, these so-

called marginal communities may entrepreneurialize their bodies, their most valuable resource for

survival. This is a new twist to the former tendency of capitalist expansion, which depended upon an

industrious middle class to drive development – as illustrated by Henry Ford when he doubled the

minimum wage of his labour force to $5.00 per hour in 1914. The emphasis on domestic consumption

was a critical element in the earlier rendition of capitalism, which has since been refashioned for a more

globally connected, contemporary time. Now the emphasis is on so-called emergent economies in much

of Africa, Latin America, and central Asia. It is Sassen (2014) who has illustrated one crucial difference

between development in “developed” countries and in hose deemed “developing,” and that is debt. The

massive redevelopment strategies witnessed across the so-called developing world would not be feasible

now in developed countries due to existent debt. Too indebted in the Global North, in the undervalued

Global South capitalist expansion has found the necessities (and luxuries) needed to achieve development

in the most-finest (i.e., least democratic, primitive) form. This dissertation is, first, an extension of the

existent literature in urban studies because it remains focused on the site in which the broader political-

economic agenda influenced the labour opportunities mega-event host women seek in survival. Despite

the efforts of the State, local bodies, families, communities, and histories can never be erased. These

stories of everyday life, even if otherwise too subtle or silent to notice, offer evidence of the fact that

capitalist expansion does pervade and pervert the realities of those most shunted in the process. The logic

of development, as much as it may desire, cannot be contained or sequestered to a particular race, class, or

gender – dominant ideologies can be appropriated even in deprivation.

                                                                                                                         37 A total of eight men died in 2014 FIFA-related construction, whereas an estimated 1200 migrant men have died in the construction of 2022 World Cup facilities in Qatar. For further discussion on the role of FIFA in migrant worker abuse, see Erfani (2015).

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Second, before Weber noted the state of siege of the modern world, Marx (1990 [1867]) illuminated the

manner in which the then-current political-economic system was forever insecure due to constant crises of

abundance. Capitalism has afforded people with more than is needed; more than can be consumed.

Bataille (1991 [1949]) emphasized consumption, without return. Marx called for the redistribution of

wealth, combined with an added license for leisure. Critical of the early feminist movement for

perpetuating the miseries of labour in the insistence of equal access to work, women, he argued, should

demand the equal right of both men and women to leisure. Within the mega-event moment, to claim the

right to the city, the right to assert imaginaries of futurity into the political sphere, has continued to be

negligible at best, and heinous at worse, for those in the shadow of entrepreneurial (re)development

strategies (Boykoff, 2016; Gruneau, 2015; Gruneau & Horne, 2015). Nevertheless, event-linked

imaginaries, which hold the dominant structure at a distance, offer a moment to reconsider the uneven

development of some of the richest cities in the world. This dissertation is an incursion into the ebb and

flow of human desire in (urban) development that, for me, offered a venue to examine desire as a possible

break from the common “progress” narrative.

At first I thought the limit of capitalism could be marked in the exclusion of actual (not observed or

insinuated) intercourse from the market. Forever in search of new material to incorporate, parties in power

seemed fixated and determined to limit the commodification of the actual buceta (pussy) – the managed

buceta (unlike the managed heart in the work of Hochschild), the potentia gaudendi, the commodification

of feminine sexuality would come to mark the site in which capitalist expansion was refused. I realize

now that was rather naïve of me. To Preciado, the potentia gaudendi or “orgasmic force” that is the “(real

or virtual) strength of a body’s (total) excitation” (2013, p. 41) is neither male nor female (genderless),

human or animal, animal or inanimate. It is both the most abstract and the most material of all productive

forces. And it is extracted from techno-political management as soon as it is harnessed for profit. This

orgasmic force is the puissance Pronger (2002) described as “resource” and “lifegiving power” or the

“power [that] is essential to all beings (which, of course, includes human beings); it is the power of

coming to presence, the productive power of realization – in Deleuze’s definition of puissance, it would

be the capacity to exist, the capacity to affect and be affected” (p. 67). Puissance is thus the resource for

State control or the “governmentality [Foucault 1979; 1980b; 1988] of pouvoir” (Pronger, 2002, p. 67). If

it was once a dramatic limit to capitalist expansion – a firm No! to market invasion – these boundaries

have since been rewritten, and rewrite much of the future (relations between beings, technologies, nature,

time). Above I have illustrated the shift in postindustrial economies to a new-found reliance on immaterial

labour in cognitive, nonobjectified, or affective work. The pontification of an academic, the love

manufactured in sex work, and the muscular theatre of an athlete – all induce awe, excitation, and

frustration in labour. This is the labour dedicated to processes of subjectivization in which the

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(re)production of the subject is an inexhaustible supply of planetary ejaculation (sentiment, affect,

frustration, and awe) transformed and manufactured to turn a profit (as one might “turn a trick” in sex

work). This is the same “orgasmic” appeal (whether in relation to nationhood, masculinity, athleticism, or

whatever) that the sport mega-event has (from induction) sought to incite (Kidd, 2013).

The athlete, poked and prodded, injected with stanozolol, cortisone, or testosterone is rewarded for this

athletic feat. The sex worker waxed, moisturized, bronzed, injected with silicone, is less revered. Kim

Kardashian, arguably one of the most (in)famous celebrities of our time – thrust into fame by a “leaked”

sex tape – has used technologies to (re)imagine, (re)construct her physique to such a degree that neither

the camera nor scalpel has known any limit on her specimen. The Beaconsfield miner harnessed his

corporeality too, deep within the core of the Earth, to receive a letter from Dave Grohl, celebrated in the

album Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace (2007).38 Monetize carbon dioxide, water, and make entire

industries from the technologies needed to bioremediate the soil. It appears that people would rather be

led to Armageddon before acknowledging that sex is ever sold! But the limit of capitalist expansion – the

limit that marked the commodified, entrepreneurialized buceta – has diminished with the industrial,

“material” labour force. Not unique to sex work, people chose to use bodies as resources to suit different

and divergent fantasies that range from the personally pleasurable to the purely profitable. Like the men

that exploit the land through global corporatization, women who use their bodies are obedient to

capitalism. Photocopies of entrepreneurial cities create an entire entrepreneurial “global” citizenry in

pursuit of individual profit and pleasure. Finance is now the undeniable fuel to creative expression. Not

art for art’s sake. It is arrogant of me, in such a position of power, to want more but I do. I want sex and

love that defies articulation and the logic of the market. This work – as a semi-sensuous ethnography and

phantasmagorical sociology of the body – has shed light on shadow “economies of the flesh” that emerge

from and express current ideologies and thus should not be constructed as deviant. Future work on these

shadow activities so popularly opposed will seek to continue to trouble the broader pursuit of capitalist

expansion, and the limit to development that has yet to expose.

                                                                                                                         38 Foo Fighters, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, RCA Records, compact disc. Released 2007.

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Appendices

Appendix 1. The Caixa building, whose inhabitants were evicted on May 23, 2014. The first four floors were used for sexual commerce. The remaining floors served as residential apartments. Despite the eviction, women still walked the street immediately in front of the building, largely serving the working/middle class Brazilian men who worked in the area nearby.

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Appendix 2. Advertisement for the Niterói revitalization project: “A new centre in Niterói, believe it!” This revitalization project is directly across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro, which is also in the midst of drastic (re)development in preparation for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Appendix 3. Photograph from inside the ESPN 2014 FIFA World Cup studio. From this photo one has a clear view of the Museum of Imagery and Sound construction site, which is located directly between the two gentlemen on the left.

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Appendix 4. This photo is of a young boy making caipirinhas (alcoholic drink made with cachaça – a distilled spirit made from sugarcane juice – brown sugar, and lime) in the plaza next to the closed Balcony Bar. He worked nightly in the plaza during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

Appendix 5. This picture is intended to illustrate business in the plaza adjacent to the Balcony Bar on a fairly typical night during the 2014 FIFA World Cup (Photo credit: Matias Maxx/Vice).

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Appendix 6. Vila Mimosa, after pre–World Cup cleanup. The billboard on the right was erected the weekend before the 2014 opening game. Although it has a number of government agencies listed at the bottom, the billboard was paid for by AMOCAVIM (the Association of Condominium Residents and Friends of Vila Mimosa).

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Appendix 7. Interview Guide, Observatório da Prostituição

Questionário sobre efeitos da copa do mundo na prostituição Local (Place): Hora (Time): Número aproximado de mulheres e de clientela: 1. Nome de batalha (Work name) 2. Lugar onde mora, cidade e bairro (Place of residence, city and district) 3. Tempo que trabalha como garota de programa/prostituta? (How long have you been working as a

prostitute?) 4. Você trabalha por aqui normalmente? Sim/Não. Senão, onde normalmente trabalhava? (Do you work

here often? Yes/No. If not, where do you typically work?) 5. Você trabalha em outros lugares? Sim/Não. Onde? (Do you work anywhere else? Yes/No. If so,

where?) 6. Você veio para o Rio justamente para trabalhar na Copa? Sim/Não. (Did you come to Rio de Janeiro

just to work during the World Cup? Yes/No.) 7. A Copa foi boa para vc? Sim/Não. (Was the Cup good for you? Yes/No.) 8. Antes da Copa do Mundo, quantos programas por dia fazia por dia? (Before the World Cup, how many

programs per day did you typically do?) 9. Quantos programas por dia tem feito durante a Copa? (How many programs per day have you done

during the World Cup?) 10. Quanto você cobrava por programa antes da Copa? E durante? (How much do you charge per program

before the World Cup? And during?) 11. Aumentou o número de prostitutas trabalhando durante o evento nos lugares em que batalha?

Sim/Não. (Have the number of women working increased during the World Cup? Yes/No.) 12. Se aumentou, que tipos de profissionais do sexo (prostitutas, michês, etc.) apareceram para trabalhar

agora? (If it increased, what kinds of sex workers [prostitutes, travestis, minors, etc.] are here now?) 13. A policia tem aparecido aqui em seu local de trabalho? Sim/Não. (Have the police been here? Yes/No.) 14. Se sim, fazendo o que? (If yes, doing what?) 15. Você tem recebido visita de alguma instituição ou organização? Sim/Não. (Has any institution or

organization visited here? Yes/No.) 16. Se sim, você sabe o nome da organização e o motivo da visita? Sim, qual? Não? (If yes, do you know

the name of the organization and the reason for the visit? If yes, what? No?) 17. Mais alguma coisa que gostaria de falar sobre a Copa? (Anything else you would care to talk to me

about in relation to the World Cup?) 18. Obrigado!

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Appendix 8. Data Analysis

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Appendix 9. Taken outside Copacabana Palace, residence of the FIFA family during the month of the World Cup. National Guard was stationed outside the hotel in Darth Vaderesque gear for the duration of the tournament.

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Appendix 10. Vandalism at the Caixa, Post-Raid (May 24, 2014) Photo Credit: Laura Murray

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Appendix 11. Niterói (Re)Development Campaign: “A new centre in Niterói, believe it!” (May 24, 2014)

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Appendix 12. Satellite overview of Porto Maravilha Project, relative to Niterói

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Appendix 13. Ethical Protocol Approval

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Appendix 14. Informed Consent Documentation

LEVANTAMENTO SOBRE EFEITOS DA COPA DO MUNDO NA PROSTITUIÇÃO Informações para Participantes – Rio de Janeiro

Quem está realizando? O Levantamento sobre efeitos da Copa do Mundo na Prostituição está sendo realizado pelo Observatório da Prostituição em parceria com a Rede Brasileira de Prostitutas, Davida – Prostituição, Direitos Civis e Saúde, Associação Interdisciplinar de AIDS (ABIA), PAGU/UNICAMP, UFRJ-Macaé, UFF- Santo Antônio de Pádua. Who is doing the research? The Prostitution Observatory is an extension project of the Metropolitan Ethnographic Lab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, which worked in collaboration with national and international universities such as the State University of Campinas, the Fluminense Federal University, Columbia University in the city of New York and Williams College. The Observatory works in close partnership with the Brazilian Interdisciplinary Association of AIDS, the Brazilian Network of Prostitutes and Davida, an NGO acting in support of sex workers across Brazil which, in 2002, established sex work as an official occupation, recognized by the Ministry of Labor and, thereby entitling women and men involved in sex as work to social security and other work benefits. Que é o Observatório da Prostituição? O Observatório é um projeto de extensão do Laboratório de Etnografia Metropolitana-LeMetro/ Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais - Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (IFCS-UFRJ), que tem como objetivo fazer circular sentidos variados da prostituição e promover o pleno reconhecimento dos direitos das prostitutas à cidade e ao trabalho sexual. O Observatório fica no LeMetro/IFCS/UFRJ no Largo de São Francisco de Paula, nº 01, Sala 417, Centro, Rio de Janeiro, Cep: 20.051-071, tel (21) 2221-7539. What is the Prostitution Observatory? The Observatory is an extension project of the Laboratory of Ethnography Metropolitan (LeMetro), within the Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IFCS-UFRJ) and is dedicated to promoting the full recognition of prostitutes' rights to the city and work. The Observatory is located in LeMetro / IFCS / UFRJ in Largo de São Francisco de Paula, No. 01, Room 417, Centro, Rio de Janeiro, CEP: 20051-071. Qual é o objetivo do levantamento? O objetivo desse levantamento é monitorar as cidades- sedes da Copa do Mundo em relação aos efeitos que a Copa implique para a prostituição, os/as trabalhadores sexuais e suas redes. What is the purpose of this survey? The aim of this survey is to monitor the impact of the 2014 FIFA World Cup on prostitution, sex workers, and their networks within Brazilian host cities. Como será a minha participação? A sua participação neste levantamento é voluntária e consistirá em responder a um enquete de quinze perguntas. Estimamos que sua participação levará em torno de 15 minutos. Se você autorizar, a entrevista será gravada. As informações obtidas serão analisadas em conjunto com outras pessoas, não sendo divulgado a identificação de nenhum dos/as participantes. How do I participate? Participation in this survey is completely voluntary. If you do decide to participate, there are fifteen questions that will be asked. You do not have to answer every question. We estimate that the survey will take approximately 15 minutes. If you consent, the interview will be recorded. The information obtained will be analyzed together with other people but your identity will never be disclosed. Your participation in this survey will remain anonymous. Por que é importante que eu participe?

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Sua participação é importante para o aumento do conhecimento sobre os contextos nos quais os/as profissionais do sexo vivem e trabalham, podendo beneficiar outros/as profissionais do sexo e melhorar as políticas públicas destinadas aos/às mesmos/as nesse município. Why is it important that I participate? Your participation is important to increase knowledge about the contexts in which sex workers live and work and can benefit other sex workers by informing public policies, which target prostitution in Brazil. Quais são meus direitos como participante? O Observatório da Prostituição segue o Código de ética da Associação Brasileira de Antropologia (http://www.abant.org.br/?code=3.1). Você tem o direito de ser informadas sobre a natureza da pesquisa. Você também pode recusar-se de participar na pesquisa a qualquer momento, mesmo apos de começar a entrevista. Você tem o direito de ser mantido atualizado/a sobre os resultados parciais e finais do levantamento e, caso seja solicitado, daremos todas as informações que solicitar. What are my rights as a participant? The Prostitution Observatory follows the Code of Ethics of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology (http://www.abant.org.br/?code=3.1). You have the right to be informed of the nature of the research. You can also refuse to participate in the research at any time, even after starting the interview. You have the right to be kept updated on the partial and final results of the survey and if interested, can access the results by contacting the Observatory. Quem posso contatar se tenho perguntas ou dúvidas sobre a minha participação? Você pode contatar a Professora Soraya Silveira Simões, Coordenadora do Observatório da Prostituição e Presidenta da ONG Davida no (21) 2221-7539 (LeMetro/UFRJ) ou pelo e-mail observatoriodaprostituicao@gmail.com. Who can I contact if I have any questions or concerns about my participation? You can contact Professor Soraya Silveira Simões, the Observatory’s Coordinator and Chair of Davida on (21) 2221-7539 (LeMetro / UFRJ) or email observatoriodaprostituicao@gmail.com. Termo de Consentimento Estou devidamente informada a respeito do Levantamento sobre Efeitos da Copa do Mundo na Prostituição. Ficaram claros para mim quais são os objetivos do levantamento, como seria minha participação, por que é importante que eu participe e quais são meus direitos como participante, e que minha identidade não será divulgada. Ficou claro também que tenho garantia de acesso aos resultados e de esclarecer minhas dúvidas a qualquer tempo. Concordo voluntariamente em participar deste levantamento e poderei retirar o meu consentimento a qualquer momento, antes ou durante o mesmo, sem penalidade ou prejuízo. Consent By signing this form, I acknowledge that I fully understand the possible risks and benefits of this study. The objectives of this survey as well as my rights as a participant have been made clear. I understand that my involvement in this project is completely voluntary. I can withdraw my consent at any time before or during the study without penalty or prejudice. As a participant, I am also understand that no identifying information will be released or printed and that, I am entitled to inquire about the study and offer clarification, if needed. Assinatura da participante/Signature of participant Data/Date Nome do(a) pesquisador(a)/Name of the researcher Data/Date Contato Observatório da Prostituição/Contact for the Prostitution Observatory Professora Soraya Silveira Simões Coordenadora do Observatório da Prostituição (21) 2221-7539 LeMetro/UFRJ e-mail observatoriodaprostituicao@gmail.com www.observatoriodaprostituicao.wordpress.com

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Appendix 15: Pamphlet

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Appendix 16: Men congregate outside Balcony Bar after the France vs. Germany game (July 4, 2014)