Love and anger: Putafeminismos/whore feminisms in Brazil

ABSTRACT

In this article, I discuss how love and anger have affected the political struggles of putafeministas/whore-feminists in Brazil. Love, considered to be at the centre of diverse social justice and, particularly, feminist projects, is a relevant assertion of decolonial feminism, a line of thought that has vastly disseminated during the last years in the country. In an ominous political context, marked by growing conservatism and the destablisation of rights that had been previously guaranteed, feminisms' expansion has led to the incorporation of an array of heterogeneous ideas. Putafeministas political struggles have taken place in a milieu in which the multiplicity of histories, needs and strategies of different categories of women seemed to be recognised and celebrated. Yet, far from being acknowledged by lines of decolonial thinking, putafeministas have faced a growing spiral of violence and anger from other Brazilian feminists. I explore this process, basing myself on ethnographic studies conducted since 2010 about relations between feminisms and prostitution in Brazil. My main point is that these confrontations are related to the incorporation of transnational flows of feminist ideas regarding ‘rape culture’ that associating sex work with paid rape encompass decolonial possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Putafeminismos
• transnational feminisms
• decolonial feminisms
• sex work

Introduction

This article examines how love and anger have affected the political struggles of putafeministas/whore-feminists in Brazil. Analysing the risks involved in the expansion of feminist concepts in the transnational sphere, it sketches some reflections about recent confrontations between feminists in Brazil. These conflicts have particularly affected prostitutes who consider themselves feminists and define themselves as putafeministas.

In the recent history of feminism in Brazil, the dissemination and appropriation of feminist categorisations have productively collaborated with activism¹ to promote women’s rights, contributing to cross-border political articulations and the circulation of theoretical tools. In this process, categories and concepts that are relevant to feminist practices have been translated, appropriated and promoted from particular angles, and have had an impact on theoretical reflections, actions and on the formulation of public policies. I can mention as examples the categories of gender disseminated in the 1990s (Thayer, 2001) and of intersectionality used since the decade of 2000, and more recently the concept of ‘rape culture’ (Piscitelli, 2017). Nevertheless, the dissemination of feminist ideas in the transnational sphere also involves risks.

As Costa (2006) observes, in cultural translation, processes of description, interpretation and dissemination of ideas are always entangled in relations of power and asymmetries between languages, regions and peoples. In this paper, I argue that the circulation of feminist lines of discussion and concepts in Brazil has sometimes contributed to strengthening feminist collectives that considered themselves marginalised, such as Black feminist groups. Yet, in a moment of expansion of decolonial feminisms built upon notions of decolonial love that operate between those rendered other by hegemonic forces (Ureña, 2016), it has paradoxically led to the marginalisation and exclusion of certain feminisms in movements full of anger.

These risks have in some ways been considered by readings informed by critical feminist perspectives, such as versions of feminist thinking that are opposed to the idea of global sisterhood promoted by international feminists. It is worth recalling how decades ago, Alexander and Mohanty (1997) proposed perspectives that they denominated as ‘transnational feminism’ that have a capacity to: (1) consider the differences between women in various geographic spaces in the world; (2) analyse unequal relations among and within groups of people and (3) question the term ‘international feminism’, which was considered to be anchored in a liberal episteme that invoked difference in a pluralist model, neglecting the ways in which women’s locations, identities and political practices were embedded within transnational inequalities, connected to economic, political and ideological processes in which racialisation and capitalism are based.²

At the end of the decade of 2000, various authors writing from a critical transnational feminist perspective considered the dangers involved in the work of institutions like the United Nations, multilateral organisations, NGOs and transnational feminist networks, questioning whether they gave recognition to the alterity and diversity of feminisms (Collins et al., 2010; Patil, 2011). This line of critical thinking considered the relevance of the notion of women’s human rights in challenging gender oppressions (Collins et al., 2010), but also considered how these organisations reproduce geopolitical hierarchies of class and education. Analyses conducted from this perspective show the complexity of the articulations between these institutions at a time of contemporary globalisation. They considered the agency of women in the movements, but also paid attention to the tensions between key institutions and different interest groups, the problems triggered by feminism being organised through NGOs and the dependence on funding and donations from countries of the north. Within this approach, Patil (2011) how observed how these networks, considered as a form of globalisation ‘from below’ and valued for making the organisation of women from different countries around common agendas viable, have also recreated problems of international feminisms by reiterating linear notions of gender and feminism, and reinforcing geopolitical inequalities.

Through the years, versions of transnational feminisms have continued to be critiqued. Leela Fernandes (2013) observes that transnational feminist perspectives in the United States reproduce the country’s national imagination. According to this author, the transnational frame in the current dominant culture of interdisciplinary feminist work is itself a product of the national specificities of the American Academy. Yet, in my specific location, as a Latin American scholar in Brazil, the contributions of transnational feminism in terms of knowledge production are extremely valuable, not only in terms of considering transnational inequalities, but particularly in order to analyse travelling feminist categories and concepts and the relations between internal colonial relations of power.

In terms of these relations of power, decolonial feminisms are equally valuable. These lines of thought have disseminated vastly in Brazil over the past few years as part of the recent expansion and popularisation of feminisms in the country. These perspectives are relevant since they offer a frame of thought that incorporates the voices of different categories of women who have been ignored by mainstream feminisms, mainly Black and indigenous women.

Love is a central notion for decolonial feminisms. During the last decades, conceptions such as an ‘ethic of love’ (hooks, 2006) and ‘decolonial love’ (Sandoval, 2000) have been crucial elements to promote alliances and coalitions between subalternised women. The ‘love ethic’ is considered to be a call to enlarge our concerns about politics of domination and our capacity to care about the oppression and exploitation of others (hooks, 2006). ‘Decolonial love’ is a notion perceived as anchored in a view of decolonisation as political and ethical, offering a perspective on love that challenges systems of power that extend coloniality. According to Ureña (2016), in dialogue with Sandoval (2000), decolonial love, accepting fluid identities and the idea of a shared humanity, promotes loving as an active, intersubjective process, and in so doing articulates an anti-hegemonic, anti-imperialist affect and attitude that can guide the actions that work to dismantle oppressive regimes.

Here, I expand the productive aspects of transnational and decolonial feminisms considering how, in Brazil, the risks posed by the expansion of feminist concepts in the transnational sphere have acquired particular connotations. In different parts of the world, there have been tense relations between some lines of feminist thinking and prostitutes (Bernstein, 2012; Chapkis, 1997; Cheng, 2013; Varela, 2013). In Brazil, feminist confrontations over prostitution, relatively moderate until a few years ago, have intensified in a growing spiral of violence. The point that I raise in this article is that these confrontations are related to the transnational circulation of particular feminist ideas about prostitution and ‘rape culture’ that are activated in order to deny sex workers’ claims and to reject them as feminists. The accelerated dissemination and incorporation of these ideas have had a place in the recent expansion and popularisation of feminisms in the country, which are intensely mediated by the internet and social media. However, the particularities of this incorporation cannot be separated from the ominous political context in which it has taken place, marked by growing conservatism and the destabilisation of previously guaranteed rights. These troubling developments took place concomitantly with the grave crisis that led to the removal of elected president Dilma Rousseff, and have intensified during the far-right government that rules the country.

In the first section of this text, I will present a brief history of the relations between prostitution and feminisms in Brazil’s recent past. In the next, I consider new confrontations among feminists, commenting on the demands raised by putafeminismos in the country and the tensions and the hostile reaction of other feminist lines of debate and action. Concluding, I comment on the particular risks that the dissemination of certain feminist concepts presents in Brazil’s recent history.

Shifting perspectives

This article is based on ethnographic research conducted between 2010 and 2018 about the relationship between feminisms and prostitution in Brazil. It also builds on an analysis of recent confrontations between feminists in the country, including attacks against sex workers who consider themselves feminists (Piscitelli, 2016). I use interchangeably the terms sex work and prostitution throughout this paper because in Brazil the word prostitution does not necessarily have a derogatory meaning, since the terms prostitute and puta (whore) have been reclaimed in a positive sense by sex workers’ organisations. The research involved participant observation in diverse meetings, seminars and workshops involving sex workers, governmental and/or non-governmental agents in several Brazilian cities, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Brasília, Campinas, Rio de Janeiro and in depth interviews with feminist activists both sex workers and non-sex workers in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In parallel, the research involved accompanying internet pages and social media networks, particularly abolitionist and prostitutes Facebook pages between 2015 and 2018.

These studies integrate a larger scope of research relating to sex work, sex tourism and sex trafficking that I have carried since 2000. These experiences have been important regarding my critical reflections on my positionality, on the normative positions I have hold and the perspectives that have informed my research agendas and that are crucial for the production of knowledge. I started this research taking several principles of feminist research into account: the need to reflect upon my situatedness and to consider how my history, class and racial position influenced the construction of the research process and relationships. I also based it on a belief that research should not be conducted purely for the sake of knowledge, but rather that it should aim to support social change and build non-exploitative relationships.

However, this did not prevent me from beginning these studies in 2000 as a feminist who was drastically against prostitution. Certainly, this normative position had connections with the diverse privileges connected with my social class, colour, education, being perceived as white in Brazil, and social position as a researcher at a prestigious university. Thus, in spite of being engaged with the principles of feminist research, I uncritically shared a number of assumptions present in the Brazilian public debate. I imagined that the women involved in the sex tourism universe were in positions of extreme subordination and sexually exploited by foreign men.

However, watching and listening in a situated perspective led me to interrogate several ideas about sex work and about the transnationalisation of the sexual economies. My perspective started to change through paying serious attention to the experiences of the women with whom I worked. Confronting the perceptions of my research subjects, for whom exploitation in the sex industry was always commercial and never sexual, helped me to question the assumptions about sexual exploitation in feminist abolitionist perspectives. In this process, the dichotomies between women of the Global South/sex workers as 100% victims and men of the Global North/costumers, as 100% monsters were replaced by a complex portrait of power relations in which sex workers’ dimensions of agency were significant. The displacement of my own position as researcher illuminated my insights regarding those power dynamics, nourishing my critical reading of some feminist, mainly abolitionist, approaches. Concurrently, I also perceived that by producing knowledge about sex work and sex trafficking we are taking a position in a debate in which it is impossible to only observe, since as researchers we are agents that take part in the disputes.

Feminist thinking and prostitution in Brazil

When feminists in the Anglo-Saxon world engaged in the so-called ‘sex wars’ that debated pornography and prostitution (Rubin, 1984), feminist groups in Brazil focused on other issues related to opposition to the military regime; struggles for democratisation and for amnesty; and what was considered as ‘specific struggles’ regarding women’s issues, such as the fight against male domination; confronting violence against women and struggling for the right to pleasure. In analysing statements from various activists during the 1970s and 1980s, I did not find prostitution be among the main concerns of the movement. Corrêa and Olivar (2014) affirm that in these decades, prostitution provoked intellectual curiosity, and some feminists frequently equated the sexual and economic exchanges present in prostitution to those involving marriage, as part of a strategy of critical analysis of traditional gender relations.

Meanwhile, some sectors of the feminist movement and of the women’s movement that had organic ties with leftist political parties or with progressive churches, considered prostitution as the culmination of capitalist exploitation of the female body. However, the narratives of feminists and prostitutes interviewed in my studies suggest that, although prostitution was not one of the main feminist issues in this period, it generated productive interest. Discussions about the issue led to new perceptions about sexuality and also an approximation to and certain support for prostitutes along with the negative stances of some groups mentioned above (Piscitelli, 2014).

Gabriela Leite, founder of the first organisation of prostitutes in Brazil and of the National Network of Prostitutes in the late 1980s, also registered this spirit. According to Leite (1992), the first contacts with feminists during the 1980s were positive. The situation changed over time, expressed since the 1990s either through open rejection by feminists who refused to listen to the voices of prostitutes, or through an ambivalent relationship. She affirmed, ‘society changed and this is reflected in the movements, which are much more conservative than in the 1990s, given that then they were already more conservative than in the 1970s’ (personal communication, 2010, in Rio de Janeiro).

Since then, feminists influential on the national scene affirm that prostitution is a form of exploitation of women, though they also recognise the challenge posed by positions such as that of Leite – who affirms that the exercise of prostitution is a choice and a right – because it expresses a concept dear to feminism: autonomy. At times, however, there were open feminist rejections of prostitution. These positions have been more widely promoted since the late 1990s, as the Brazilian feminist movement became reconfigured through its articulations with the state and insertion in non-governmental organisations (Pinto, 2006; Shumaher & Vargas, 1993). This process has intensified since the turn of the century, with the expansion of international feminist articulations.

According to authors who study the history of the feminist movement in Brazil (Matos, 2010), the decade of 2000 in the country was characterised by work in parallel arenas of activity, in the realm of civil society and at the frontiers between it and the state. It is also characterised by the articulation with transnational feminist networks. This moment coincides with the rise of movements for global justice, involving a range of actors from outside the state, and networks such as the World March of Women against violence and poverty (Alvarez, 2009). In Brazil, these feminisms, in conjunction with the protagonism of ‘feminist youth’ – who for the first time presented an agenda differentiated from that of previous generations, and whose articulations intensified in the decade of 2010 (Ferreira, 2016; Sorj, 2016) – produced effervescent currents in the movement.

This moment coincided with the consolidation in Brazil of the fight against human trafficking. In the second half of the decade of 2000, human trafficking became a theme for important coalitions of Brazilian women. Feminisms in the country did not have great relevance at the beginning of the movement against human trafficking, which domestically was particularly close to movements in support of the rights of children. During the decades of 2000 and 2010, the articulation between feminisms and anti-trafficking movement was produced at a time when the Brazilian state was responding to transnational political pressure about trafficking (Castilho, 2015) in part, according to Paul Ammar (2013), because of the government’s interest in promoting the country internationally as a model of humanitarian security.

Brazilian feminists linked to US NGOs critical of the effects of globalisation on women chose as one of their preferential targets the commodification of the body. Based on a concern about human trafficking, they began to discuss prostitution with greater intensity, framing it as sexist violence. The connection between national feminist networks and radical US feminist movements influenced by abolitionist ideas (Barry, 1997) is important because it is in the context of these national-transnational articulations that sectors of Brazilian feminism came to publicly endorse the fight against prostitution at the national level (Piscitelli et al., 2011). And the voices of feminists who were against recognising prostitution as work, and who were linked to sectors of the state, forming part of the architecture of governmentality (Foucault, 2006), made these critical positions more visible.³

In the first years of the decade of 2010, however, this was not a homogeneous position in Brazil’s feminist movement. This relative heterogeneity also appeared in new expressions of feminism, such as the SlutWalk, and in alternative feminist publications on the internet. The SlutWalk, focused on the struggle against sexist violence, is organised by decentralised, autonomous collectives, as coalitions between people and not groups. In Brazil, SlutWalks were held in various cities, acquiring specific characteristics in different places. In some cities, the participants in the SlutWalks had a certain concern for the problematic of prostitution, and in some cities a real articulation with organisations of prostitutes (Barreto, 2015; Tavares, 2014). And in the alternative press on the internet, some feminist youths recognised prostitution as work.⁴

In parallel, some feminists openly rejected discussions with prostitutes who affirmed that their activity is a form of labour. This rejection was also found among university youth. There was a striking episode in 2013 at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina when for the first time academic researchers gathered at a meeting, myself among them, were confronted by feminist youth hostile towards them and their debates about prostitution. They were young women who identified with some aspects of feminism and carried posters declaring: ‘What you call individual choice we call heteropatriarchal terrorism’.

The conflict at the event indicated that although there had been a relative heterogeneity of positions in Brazilian feminism towards the demands of prostitutes, within the realm of articulations with transnational feminists and among versions of youth feminisms, the rejection of the prostitute movements’ positions had intensified. This intensification became more serious in the following years in a context in which prostitution itself and not necessarily human trafficking has been delineated as a ‘problem’. In this context, prostitute activism introduced new elements to the relations between feminisms and prostitution.

Love and putafeminists/feminist hookers

The ‘love ethic’ (hooks, 2006) with its request to challenge the politics of domination considering the subjugation of others certainly permeated both the organisation and alliances of the feminist movements in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s and of the sex worker movement. According to Murray et al. (2018), the fact that the latter was founded in the context of Brazil’s redemocratisation process in 1987 and has its roots in resistances to the military dictatorship, against police violence, and the early stigmatisation of sex workers as vectors of HIV strongly structured the movement and its alliances. These confrontations, as well as the importance the emerging sex worker movement gave to sex and pleasure while claiming rights point to some common aspects with the organisation of feminist groups in the country in those years. But while these commonalities inspired the approximation between feminists and sex workers initially, afterwards they were frequently ignored.

In the view of Gabriela Leite (1992), ‘tesão’/desire, sexuality, fantasy and pleasure are key features of prostitution, ignored in the policies directed towards prostitutes. These aspects have been central in the puta politics, term cast by Laura Murray (2015) to describe the playful and provocative, yet also very serious, strategies of the sex worker movement in Brazil that include using humour and pleasure as mechanisms to challenge normative moralities, social hypocrisies and reconfigure relationships between institutional structures and the street. While abolitionist lines of feminism in Brazil seemed to activate what Ureña (2016) defines as colonial love, that based in an imperialist logic fetishises the beloved object, participating in the oppression and subjugation of difference, through puta politics, the sex worker movement in Brazil has activated a different modality of love.

In the Brazilian sex-worker’s movement, puta politics materialised through solidarity among prostitutes woven in informal encounters, in cheerful meetings in bars and serenades, in what Gabriela Leite named as ‘denouncing with happiness and cheerfully’ (Murray, 2015, p. 20). This was the spirit that inspired the creation of DASPU, the clothing line Gabriela Leite’s NGO DAVIDA created in 2005 that continues to have an impressive social impact through fashion shows and performances. This playful/cultural/political action recalls the idea of another way of love that goes beyond that of traditional Western and colonial binary thinking. Daspu is anti-hegemonic and tries to heal the psychological, affective and epistemic wounds occasioned by the hierarchical division of the world into colonisers and colonised. This is suggested by Gabriela Leite’s statements, quoted by Lenz (2016), regarding the Daspu first fashion show. She commented on how her friends walking on the catwalk were beautiful and haughty, expressing themselves and their bodies without shame of being putas as part of an extremely political and revolutionary act. Daspu was part of a broader shift in the late 2000s, early 2010s during which, facing problems of institutionalisation, funding crises and increasing conservative backlash that led to sexuality and rights fading from the centre of the government-supported projects, sex workers’ organisations sought to reduce their dependence on the Ministry of Health and increasingly turned towards cultural actions (Murray et al., 2018).

The second half of the 2010s was also a time in which putafeministas challenged feminist lines of thought that were against prostitution, reactivating the challenge posed earlier by Gabriela Leite (Piscitelli et al., 2011). They affirmed that they were feminists and called for a feminism that accepted their demands. I highlight that the term putafeminismo was not created, nor has it been used exclusively, by sex workers in Brazil. The term circulates among transnational networks of prostitutes, is used also in Argentina and Spain and is attributed to Pauline Ezquerra, a prostitute originally from Argentina who has exercised this activity in Barcelona.⁵

Monique Prada, a prostitute, digital activist and founder of the United Confederation of Men and Women Sexual Workers (CUTS)⁶ in Brazil, affirms that prostitution and feminism walk hand-in-hand in the struggle for women’s rights to sexuality. She seeks this convergence through her digital activism in which she argues that this meeting is possible given that prostitution is a form of affirming female power to confront conservative visions. She calls for a feminism that unites women in a struggle against concepts that maintain the feminine hostage to a patriarchal social creation. These ideas are expressed more widely in the puta-feminist movement.

In a text by Terra Grammont that inaugurated the Facebook page ‘putafeminism in debate’, the author presents herself as an ally of the prostitute movement and the movement is described as organised by women of different realities who share the fact that they are sex workers. Its objectives include: calling for a feminism that accepts and includes their demands; organising themselves in collectives articulated with other social movements to struggle for better working conditions; combating the stigma against sex workers, which causes social exclusion, and strengthening the support network among women so that more sex workers can escape situations of risk.

The putafeministas, some of whom have been extremely active on social media, quickly gained visibility. This visibility, and the reaction to it, cannot be separated from the complex configuration of feminisms in Brazil today. Sonia Alvarez addressed (2014) this complexity by considering feminisms as discursive fields of action. She perceives these fields as being currently marked by a horizontal flow of plural discourses and practices that expand in various parallel sectors of civil society and beyond it, multiplying the feminist fields, leading to a geometric proliferation of actors who identify with them, and to a decentring at the interior of these plural feminisms. According to Alvarez, these fields are articulated through political-communicative networks and languages, which encompass meanings and visions of the world that are at least partially shared. And in this expansion and popularisation of feminism, the internet has acquired a prominent place.

Agreeing with this insight, Ferreira (2016) observes that since the beginning of the 2010s, the internet has had a central role in Brazil in the constitution of networks. This has deepened contacts in and among already existing groups, while creating other communication networks, as an instrument for identifying and a resource for strengthening political actions. Because they do not require a previous ‘feminist consciousness’ or militancy, these new networks considerably expand the number of people reached. It is worth recalling the various types of campaigns and large street demonstrations on a variety of issues which, mediated by the internet, have taken place in Brazil since 2015.

This particular moment of expansion of feminist activisms was denominated the ‘feminist spring in Brazil’. This expression alludes to the existence of various types of campaigns and large street demonstrations, organised mainly over the internet by feminist networks, since 2015.⁷ These protests took place at a time marked by a growing conservatism,⁸ and an alarming destabilisation of guaranteed rights, culminating in political crisis and the removal of elected President Dilma Rousseff.

In the first half of the decade of 2010, the web mediated the intensification of debates and campaigns about sexual violence. It is worth mentioning the discussions about charges of sexual violence on university campuses⁹ and the 2014 campaigns #EuNaoMereçoSerEstuprada, a reaction to a study about rape by the Instituto de Pesquisas Aplicadas/IPEA, held in 2014¹⁰ (Modelli Rodrigues, 2016, p. 56), and #meuprimeiroassédio, a campaign that requested that women reveal their first case of sexual harassment or the first time that they remember having suffered some form of abuse (Sorj, 2016). In 2015, however, the campaigns proliferated in reaction to attacks by conservative politicians on the rights of women and LGBT people.

Bila Sorj (2016) analysed these offensives in the national congress and found that the attacks operated on two fronts. The first was the pursuit of legislative reforms that reversed sexual and reproductive rights, such as those that create obstacles to public health care for women who become pregnant after a rape, thereby reducing access to legal abortion. The second front was an attack on the new visions of citizenship that had been constructed by feminist, black and LGBT movements in recent decades. In 2014, a portion of the National Education Plan was removed, under pressure from conservative parliamentarians who argued that it would promote the ominously titled ‘gender ideology’. The offending passage stated that schools must promote equality of gender, race and sexual orientation as well as actions to fight sexual, gender and ethnic-racial prejudice in public schools. In this way, conservatives denied the acceptance of the plurality and diversity of social positions demanded by social movements.

Sorj (2016) and Modelli Rodrigues (2016) both indicate that the climate of moralising campaigns and of setbacks to individual rights triggered feminist activism among youth. Demonstrations promoted over social networks, particularly the ‘Women against Cunha’,¹¹ in October and November 2015, had strong support and impact in the media (Sorj, 2016). In reaction to attacks on women’s rights, there was more traffic on pre-existing blogs, while new blogs and feminist pages appeared on the internet (Modelli Rodrigues, 2016). In Brazil, the demands of the putafeministas emerged at this time of a geometric expansion of the discursive fields of heterogeneous feminist action, to use Alvarez’s terms (2014), through extreme agitation mediated by the web.

These claims have been accepted in some feminist spaces in Brazil. In 2017, Monique Prada was selected to integrate the Brazilian Civil Society Advisory Group for UN Women, a UN-sponsored agency.¹² She thinks that her inclusion is related to the strength of digital activism, which makes it impossible to ignore certain demands for rights. Another element that seems to be important is the political leadership assumed by organisations of prostitutes in Brazil. As the right gained strength, putafeministas positioned themselves in defence of democracy and the presidency of Dilma Rousseff, and against ‘machismo’ and misogyny.¹³ A letter written in 2016 by Prada expressed prostitutes’ support for the embattled president, asserting that women who are at the margins – where the public programmes that reach them are those that are designed to ‘save’ them – want to conduct their activity in peace with protection from a regulatory model that considers their needs.

‘Rape culture’ and anger

In parallel, the attacks on the demands of the prostitutes expanded, and became marked by an unprecedented symbolic violence. And some of this violence was triggered and expressed through concepts linked to ‘rape culture’, a concept produced in the United States, which had already been circulating in Brazil and spread intensely in 2016, after a widely publicised gang rape in Rio de Janeiro.¹⁴ After this rape, the dissemination of the concept was stimulated by the mobilisation of a collective empathy, activating the circulation of notions of gender inequality, ‘machismo’ and sexual violence, and stirring emotions by appealing to a vulnerability common to all women, albeit in extremely different contexts.

The term ‘rape culture’ was created in the United States in the 1970s, and marked differences between readings of rape conducted by liberal and radical feminisms. According to Rebecca Whisnant (2013), the liberal readings tend to consider rape as a neutral assault, in terms of gender, on individual autonomy, being analogous to other forms of assault and/or illegitimate appropriation. These readings focus particularly on the damage that rape causes to individual victims. The more radical readings, Whisnant indicates, affirm that rape should be understood as an important pillar of the patriarchy, linked to patriarchal constructions of gender and sexuality, in the context of broader systems of male power. These radical readings highlight the damage that rape causes to women as a group.

Different conceptualisations of ‘rape culture’ currently circulate in Brazil on the web, but they tend to follow the one used by the UN Women’s Office in Brazil, ONU Mulheres.¹⁵ In a re-elaboration of the previous formulations, this conceptualisation considers ‘rape culture’ as ‘the ways by which society blames the victims of sexual harassment and normalises the violent sexual behavior of men’.

In Brazil, the concept ‘rape culture’ has been used to denounce the patriarchal culture that nourishes sexual violence against women. But the point is that feminists opposed to considering prostitution as work went beyond this usage, drawing on authors such as Dworkin (1976) and Catherine Mackinnon (1982), who view it as inherently violent. Catherine MacKinnon (1982) considers heterosexuality as the institutionalisation of male sexual domination and female submission. She affirms that male sexual supremacy forges the eroticisation of domination with the social construction of the feminine and the masculine. Prostitution, rape and pornography are the sharpest expressions of this institutionalisation and of the institution of gender it accomplishes.

Brazilian feminists against prostitution merged these authors’ views about prostitution and the concept of ‘rape culture’ and the latter was used to diminish and stigmatise putafeministas. In this context, Facebook pages were created on which terms began to circulate that were not common in Brazil years ago, such as ‘radfems’. In these pages, prostitutes have been denied opportunity to position themselves against rape.

These Facebook pages have make sharp accusations against those who demand labour regulations for prostitution, asserting that they ‘defend pimping’ and thereby ‘defend rape culture’; and that those who defend the ‘continuity of the professionalization of sex (…) defend the perpetuation of trafficking of women’. These accusations go beyond denying the rights demanded by prostitutes as the rights of women: they basically convert the objects of these demands – the decriminalisation of prostitution and labour regulation of prostitution – into a source of violence against women and treat prostitutes as accomplices of ‘rape culture’. From this perspective, shocking attacks were made both in person and on the internet against Monique Prada. Describing this situation, she said:

The radicals began to accuse us of being accomplices of rape. It was a horrible moment … later at a roundtable at a festival I was attacked for this. And I received posts like, ‘if each one of the 30 [participants in the gang rape in Rio] had left R$10 that would have been ok for those who defend the regulation of prostitution’.¹⁶

These assaults, permeated by anger and sometimes by hate, have also been extended to putafeministas allies, including academic researchers and took place in the context of the incorporation of other travelling feminist perspectives. The expansion of ‘redfams’ in Brazil has coexisted with the increasing dissemination of decolonial feminist approaches. As Ureña (2016) observes, these perspectives goal is to revalue knowledge, shifting the balance of power away from the Eurocentric perspective and toward that of the marginalised and oppressed, exposing this underside, recovering and revaluing their epistemological claims. In Brazil, these approaches have been embraced by a heterogeneous array of feminisms. Black feminists, lesbian feminists, aboriginal feminists have increasingly shared a critical view regarding hegemonic feminism and colonialism. Yet, putafeministas experiences, knowledge and claims have been violently excluded from this possibility.

The transnational sphere, transnational and decolonial feminisms

The cross-border circulation of feminist concepts and actions is far from new in Brazil. According to authors who study the history of feminism in Brazil, an international circulation of ideas and their articulation among feminists has been present in the different ‘waves’ or successions of generations of feminists. In the ‘second wave’, two lines of thought influenced the formation of feminism in Brazil, one from France and another from the United States. The one from the United States focused more on personal and cultural transformation and led to the translation of books that dealt with issues such as sexuality, contraception, abortion and the organisation of groups that reflected on the body, sexuality, reproduction, healthcare and stereotypes in education (Goldberg, 1982; Sorj & Montero, 1985). Throughout the decades, the dissemination, appropriation and re-elaboration of concepts have taken different routes in Brazil, in articulation with demands of women from different social sectors (Moraes, 1996; Pedro, 2006; Rago, 2003; Sarti, 2001; Teles, 1993).

In this sense, the cross-border circulation of abolitionist notions towards prostitution and ideas linked to ‘rape culture’ can be read as a continuity in the tradition of travelling feminist theories (Costa, 2006) marked by the particularities of the current expansion of feminisms in Brazil. The domestic appropriation of some feminist theories has, in the past, contributed to marginalising some feminisms, such as black feminisms. At the same time, the cross-border circulation of other theories and theorists has offered relevant tools for the resistance of such collectives.¹⁷ However, the virulence of the feminist attacks on the putafeministas marks a difference between the present exclusion of these feminisms and marginalisation of other feminisms in the past. This violence suggests that in the current political context, the demands of putafeministas have provoked a new and different order of tension that is nourished and expressed through feminist notions that circulate in the transnational sphere.

Though there are critiques to be made of some transnational feminisms, the analytical tools offered by other versions are useful for analysing the effects of these expressions of hostility. I consider that some readings of transnational feminisms (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997; Grewal & Kaplan, 1994; Gupta, 2006) have offered fertile possibilities for analysing other feminist perspectives, by highlighting differences among women and, moreover, providing analytical tools for reflecting on how historic processes of racialisation linked to global capitalism are articulated with and have effects on internal ‘colonization’ (McClintock, 1995).

In Brazil, this production of knowledge was anticipated decades before by black feminist thought, particularly by the pioneering and innovative work of Lélia González (1982, 1987, 1988), which has only recently been disseminated with greater intensity beyond the realm of Black activisms. These perspectives have offered elements for analysing processes of subalternisation as well as the resistance of some women and some feminisms. In the current turbulent political context in Brazil, groups of women – including Black women, lesbians, rural women, young women, barely considered years ago in Brazil – have demanded their right to difference and equality, and to resist the colonisation of these differences by hegemonic feminisms. Alongside putafeministas, indigenous feminisms stand out. Some groups denounce ‘the extremist feminist militancy that, with Eurocentric Western thinking, interferes and advances in indigenous territory’,¹⁸ alluding to the imposition of the Maria da Penha Law, against violence on women, in the indigenous communities. Although these denunciations provoke anxiety, efforts to understand them are evident among feminists who are increasingly incorporating concepts of decolonial feminisms (Costa, 2010). But the putafeministas in particular appear to have greater difficulty to inspire the solidarity of other feminists. And opposition to them is organised around the expression of feminist notions that circulate across borders.

Final remarks

In conclusion, I return to the particular risks that the dissemination of certain feminist concepts present in Brazil today and consider the productive aspects of a different modality of love as practiced in the sex workers’ movements. The material that I have shared indicates a new and accelerated diffusion and appropriation of feminist concepts of prostitution that circulate across borders, including some aspects that appear to be paradoxical. The risks of ignoring or repressing forms of difference in the realm of feminisms – which in this case are materialised in often cruel attacks on other feminist voices – do not come in this case from groups considered to be particularly problematic by critics of transnational feminisms writing at the beginning of this decade.

For instance, a feminist agency linked to the United Nations, UN Women Brazil, one of the entities considered to reproduce geopolitical hierarchies of class and education (Patil, 2011) in the realm of feminism, has incorporated to its body of advisors a putafeminista. The violent attacks also do not necessarily come from feminist articulations that are ‘established’ in Brazil and linked to transnational networks that do not support the recognition of prostitution as work. They appear to be an effect of the particular incorporation of these concepts about prostitution in the realm of the recent expansion and popularisation of feminisms in Brazil, marked by the climate of hate and impunity which is disseminated at this political moment in the country and that is manifest in a particular but not exclusive manner on the internet, the very media that has been essential to making this expansion viable.

Yet, the Brazilian sex workers’ movements, including putafeministas, have offered powerful ‘tools’ to face those risks, acting decolonially. In Ureña (2016) terms, this entails shifting the balance of power away from the Eurocentric perspective and toward that of the marginalised and oppressed, thereby exposing this underside by working to recover and revalue its epistemological claims, in particular. She states that their claims complicate our understanding of normative categories, calling us to address the wounds of coloniality by attending to the experiences of those most marginalised in order to make ethical, loving and human relation possible. And I would add that this form of love is crucial in order to stir the empathy (Piscitelli, 2016) that is decisive to recognise the rights of others.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Millie Thayer and Tambe Ashwini for the previous reading of an earlier version of this text, and for the organisation of the Panel: Whither Transnational Feminism? in the Conference 13th WWC/Fazendo Genero 11, Florianopolis, 2017 where it was first discussed. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of this text for their insightful commentaries, Laura Murray for her generous suggestions and Janice Rodrigues Bicudo de Faria for her emotional support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by successive CNPq/Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico grants.

Notes

1 I refer to activisms, considering the imbrication between activism and theory (Mohanty, 1988) and the exercise of theoretical practices as forms of activism (Spivak, 1990).

2 It is important to remember that Grewal and Kaplan (1994) extend to ‘global feminism’ the negative characteristics that Alexander and Mohanty attribute to international feminism.

3 Following Sharma and Gupta (2006), I think of the state as a set of institutions, practices and people who, permeated by contradictions, operate in different dimensions.

4 Marília Moschkovich, O feminismo em disputa, in http://www.outraspalavras.net/2012/03/28/o-feminismo-em-disputae.

5 Personal communication of Monique Prada, Belo Horizonte, 2017.

6 ‘The name is a play on the name of Brazil’s largest national union confederation (CUT)’.

7 Primavera feminista no Brasil, El País, 12/11/2015, in: http://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2015/11/13/opinion/1447369533_406426.html.

8 In the reading conducted by Lia Zanota Machado (2016), this conservative rise had begun earlier, considering that the great tension that changed the terms of negotiation between feminism and the state began in 2005/2006. Beginning with the denunciation of the ‘Mensalão’ congressional vote selling scandal, in an exchange of political currency, the government gained support from the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil in exchange for an agreement not to promote the legalisation of abortion.

9 Violência sexual é mais comum em festas e trotes, diz professora da USP, Globo.com, 23 August 2014, http://g1.globo.com/educacao/noticia/2014/08/violencia-sexual-e-mais-comum-em-festas-e-trotes-diz-professora-da-usp.html.

10 According to this study, whose data were corrected shortly after their release, 65.1% of the people interviewed agreed with the affirmation that ‘women who use clothes that show their body deserve to be attacked’. According to the correction, it was only 26% (Modelli Rodrigues, 2016; ‘Ipea errou: 26%, e não 65%, concordam que mulheres com roupas curtas merecem ser atacadas’, in http://veja.abril.com.br/politica/ipea-errou-26-e-nao-65-concordam-que-mulheres-com-roupas-curtas-merecem-ser-atacadas/).

11 These protests opposed the approval by the Chamber of Deputies’ Commission of Constitution and Justice (CCJ) of a law proposed by then president of the Chamber Eduardo Cunha, which would make access to abortion and emergency contraceptives even more difficult for victims of sexual violence (Sorj, 2016).

12 ONU Mulheres, 25 May 2017 – ONU Mulheres divulga resultado da seleção do Grupo Assessor da Sociedade Civil (GASC). Among 150 people registered, seven assistants were chosen. They represent the movement of black women, sex workers, sports, community action for generating income, solidarity economy networks, and prevention and elimination of violence against women, in: http://www.onumulheres.org.br/noticias/onu-mulheres-divulga-resultado-da-selecao-do-grupo-assessor-da-sociedade-civil-gasc/.

13 Prostituta divulga carta aberta à Dilma Rousseff. In letter sent to President Dilma Rousseff, Monique Prada, prostitute and leader of the sex workers trade union criticizes the sexism in the cursings against her. Pragmatismo Político, 14 May 2016, in http://www.pragmatismopolitico.com.br/2016/05/prostituta-divulga-carta-aberta-a-dilma-rousseff.html, consulted in June 2016.

14 Adolescente é vítima de estupro coletivo no Rio de Janeiro, 26 May 2016, Band notícias, in http://noticias.band.uol.com.br/brasilurgente/videos/15875174/adolescente-e-vitima-de-estupro-coletivo-no-rio-de-janeiro.html, consulted in July 2016.

15 Porque falamos de cultura do estupro? ONU mulheres, 31 May 2016, in: https://nacoesunidas.org/por-que-falamos-de-cultura-do-estupro, consultado em julho de 2016. I refer to this conceptualisation because it maintains close relations with the material surveyed on the internet, but recognise that more nuanced concepts of ‘rape culture’ circulate in academic studies and work documents.

16 Monique Prada, personal communication via messenger, December 5, 2016.

17 Here, it is worth mentioning the intense dissemination of the work of Angela Davis in recent times through the young black feminist collectives inside and outside the academy in Brazil.

18 Facebook page of Tamikuã Txihi, 4 de maio de 2017.