Between Spain and Brazil: Sexual work, legal models and repressive practices - Paper presented at theRound-table on Prostitution, Criminalization and Control of the Female Body: A Century and a Half of Abolitionism, XIII World Congress of Women, 2017 (original) (raw)
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This article investigates and analyses the main characteristics and issues involving Western hegemonic feminisms, especially so-called 'radical feminism', on the topic of sex work and trafficking in persons/migration, to understand how these discussions have influenced the main conventions, regulations and legislation on this global subject. In particular, it enables understanding of how these regulations invisibilize and, sometimes, criminalize trans* and gender-diverse people in migratory contexts. The contributions to decolonial feminism and transfeminism made by decolonial trans writers are essential to analyse and critique some of the conceptions espoused by Western hegemonic and especially trans-exclusionary feminisms that have influenced the international anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution discourse today. These discourses often affect the voluntary migration of trans* and gender-diverse sex workers, mainly from the Global South, such as in the Brazilian case. This piece aims to bring a decolonial and Brazilian transfeminist critique to bear on the Western hegemonic discourse presented in many radical feminist debates, and in the leading international and national conventions and legislation on human trafficking, migration and sex work. The history of colonialism and slavery, the imposition of binary, white, heteropatriarchal and cissexist norms, and consequently the global economic model of capitalist hegemony, is essential to comprehend how these structural systems have generated enormous inequalities between and within several countries, as is the
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UMINHO, 2022
A presente dissertação tem como objetivo analisar juridicamente, e politicamente a atual política de prostituição no Brasil, e as tentativas de reformá-la. Partindo do pressuposto que a prostituição é uma ocupação legal, portanto difere da analogia feita pelo legislador com exploração sexual no atual Código Criminal. Para tanto, é feito uma análise a partir da construção dos movimentos sociais organizados por trabalhadoras sexuais acerca das suas conquistas políticas e a importância dentro do cenário brasileiro com o governo e apesar dele. No mesmo diapasão, uma análise acerca do capitulo do Código Criminal acerca da prostituição e tráfico de pessoas, demonstrando como a atual lei criminal é ultrapassada, e que ela deve ser evitada. Com a crescente demanda das associações de prostituição pela descriminalização, analisaremos as quatro políticas existentes sobre o tema e suas consequências para as trabalhadoras sexuais. E por fim, uma análise sobre como o estigma e pânico moral influenciaram as votações e pareceres dos projetos de lei envolvendo a temática da prostituição no Brasil, as quais ocorreram com forte influência do cenário do tráfico internacional. Importante destacar de imediato que se trata aqui da defesa da descriminalização da indústria do sexo em relação à prostituição de pessoas maiores de idade, capazes e consentidas com a atividade sexual, consideradas trabalhadores sexuais, e não, de maneira alguma, de crianças e adolescentes ou de pessoas que estão em qualquer tipo de violência ou abuso, sendo essas vítimas de exploração sexual, a qual deve ser enfrentada. Por fim, ressalto que o único caminho em consonância com os direitos humanos é o da descriminalização, e como exemplo nos espelhamos na descriminação ocorrida na Nova Zelândia
Ameryka Łacińska, 3 (117), 75-100, 2022
While sex and money may appear as subversive notions, attracting easily all the attention, it is also true that the issues raised in this article are, paradoxically, largely invisibilised. This invisibility seems to counterbalance the importance of the phenomena described in this work and justifies it in itself. Indeed, by coming back to the various mechanisms that lead to the immigration, voluntary or not, of Brazilian trans women and travestis to Europe, this article aims to emphasise the social and concrete realities suffered by these victims and related to their sexual exploitation. If, as we will see in our study, this particular migration is explained and driven by a strong desire to accomplish themselves more freely and decently in Europe and thus escape social realities such as discriminations and attacks that are part of their daily lives in Brazil, it is clear that when they arrive in Europe, these victims are confronted with a harsh reality, where their rights are violated and where a return to the past appears sometimes impossible. From a socio-anthropological and legal perspective, the objective of this work is to look at the characteristics of this sexual trafficking, which, as we shall see, can be identified as a form of modern slavery. We will, therefore, discuss the key notions and concepts related to this issue, before analysing the concrete manifestations of this form of modern slavery and attempting to explain it. Keywords: Modern-slavery, prostitution, human-trafficking, trans women, travestis.
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This research intends to investigate and analyze the main characteristics and issues involving the migration of Brazilian trans* and gender-diverse sex workers to Europe. To achieve my goals, I will bring the main discussions made by Western hegemonic feminism on the topic of sex work and trafficking in persons/migrants, to understand how these discussions influenced the main conventions, regulations, and legislation on this subject globally and on the European continent. It will also allow the understanding of how these regulations invisibilize and, sometimes, criminalize trans* and gender-diverse people in migratory contexts. The contributions of decolonial feminism and transfeminism made by decolonial and transfeminist theorists and transgender writers will be essential to analyze and critique some of the conceptions espoused by some Western hegemonic feminisms that have influenced the international anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution discourse today. These discourses often affect the voluntary migration of trans* and gender-diverse sex workers, mainly from the Global South, as is the case of Brazil.
The Sexual Trafficking of Women: Representations of Illegality and Victimisation*
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Human trafficking in general and the trafficking of women in particular have been attracting increasing interest from states, international bodies, non-governmental organisations, the media and academia. The greater visibility conferred on this phenomenon has translated, on a national and international level, into policies designed to combat and prevent it, whose efficiency is debateable. This is the result not only of a lack of understanding of the specific features of the trafficking of women, but also of the fact that other objectives underlying the construction of these policies hardly meet the subjective needs and expectations of trafficked women. This article discusses some of the issues both emerging and absent from the legal framework for the sexual trafficking of women, with reference to the empirical situation of sexual trafficking in Portugal as analysed in the study Tráfico de mulheres em Portugal para fins de exploração sexual.
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The aim of this article is to contrast prominent discourses on prostitution and human trafficking to the context of prostitution in Brazil and local feminist discourses on this matter, understanding their contradictions and limitations. I look at Brazilian transgender prostitutes’ experiences to address an agency-related question that underlies feminist theorizations of prostitution: can prostitution be freely chosen? Is it necessarily exploitative? My argument is that discourses on sex work, departing from sex trafficking debates, are heavily engaged in a heteronormative logic that might be unable to approach the complexity and ambiguity of experiences of transgender prostitutes and, therefore, cannot theorize their possibilities of agency. To do so, I will conduct a critique of the naturalization of gender norms that hinders an understanding of experiences that exceed the binary ‘prostitute versus victim.’ I argue how both an abolitionist as well as a legalising solution to the is...
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Brazil has made international headlines for the government’s inept and irresponsible response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, sex worker activists have once again taken on an essential role in responding to the pandemic amidst State absences and abuses. Drawing on the theoretical framework of necropolitics, we trace the gendered, sexualized, and racialized dimensions of how prostitution and work have been (un)governed in Brazil and how this has framed sex worker activists’ responses to COVID-19. As a group of scholars and sex worker activists based in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, we specifically explore the idea of sex workers as “essential workers”, but also of sex work as, essentially, work, demonstrating complicities, differences, and congruencies in how sex workers see what they do and who their allies in the context of the 21st century’s greatest health crisis to date.
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Anti-trafficking discourse is built upon and reproduces a series of either/or conceptual binaries (voluntary/forced, consensual/coerced, agent/victim) which obscure the unseen, structural factors that shape the fates of men, women, and children under the economic, social, and political relations of global capitalism, as well as their experience as workers in given countries, sectors, and workplaces. Some sex worker rights activists and scholars have contested its application to prostitution by emphasising that ‘not all sex workers are trafficked’. However, this position also privileges the question of whether an individual voluntarily chose or was coerced by a third party into a given form of work. Drawing on biographical interview data with women in sex work in Brazil that shows how past, present, and hopes for the future are woven together in their sex-work trajectories, this article adds to the literature that critiques anti-trafficking discourse through a focus on temporality. It argues that by following the trajectories of sex working women’s lives over time, it is possible to better grasp both the protean nature of sex work, and the impossibility of fixing people’s participation in it as either forced or free.