Sex work and exclusion in the tourist districts of Salvador, Brazil

Abstract

Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, in the Northeastern region of Brazil, is composed of racialized, gendered, and sexualized spaces in which certain people are welcome, while others are marginalized and excluded. Praça da Sé, in the Centro Histórico, is a major site of both the local commercial sex industry and the tourist industry in Salvador. With their public visibility in sites heavily frequented by tourists, sex workers in Salvador reveal how sexuality is public, politically contested, economically charged, and, most significantly, racialized. If, as Tom Boellstorff argues, ‘globalization resignifies the meaning of place rather than making place irrelevant’ (2007, 23), how does one then study racialized sexualities in the context of the globalized tourism industry? How do class, space, and race influence practices of sex work and sex tourism in Salvador? This article offers a critical analysis of racialized sexualities in the study of the sexual economies of tourism in Salvador. I conceptualize Salvador as a ‘site of desire’ (Manderson and Jolly 1997) where issues of socioeconomic inequality, racism, and sexism coexist alongside celebratory affirmations of Afro-Brazilian cultural production in Salvador. This article explores how the touristic cityscape of Salvador is divided into carefully demarcated zones where class and race are crucial factors in determining who ‘belongs’ and who is ‘out of place.’

El trabajo sexual y la exclusión en los distritos turísticos de Salvador, Brasil

Salvador, capital del estado de Bahía, en la región noreste de Brasil, está compuesta por espacios racializados, generizados y sexualizados en los cuales ciertas personas son bienvenidas, mientras otras son marginalizadas y excluidas. Praça da Sé, en el Centro Histórico, es un sitio importante tanto para la industria del sexo comercial local como para la del turismo en Salvador. Con su visibilidad pública en lugares muy frecuentados por los turistas, los trabajadores y las trabajadoras del sexo en Salvador revelan cómo la sexualidad es pública, disputada políticamente, cargada económicamente, y, más importantemente, racializada. Si, como argumenta Tom Boellstorff, “la globalización resignifica el significado de lugar en vez de hacer al lugar irrelevante” (2007, 23), ¿cómo se estudian entonces las sexualidades racializadas en el contexto de la industria del turismo sexual globalizada? ¿Cómo influyen la clase, el espacio y la raza en las prácticas del trabajo sexual y del turismo sexual en Salvador? Este artículo ofrece un análisis crítico de sexualidades racializadas en el estudio de las economías sexuales del turismo en Salvador. Conceptualizo a Salvador como un “sitio de deseo” (Manderson y Jolly 1997) donde los temas de la desigualdad socioeconómica, el racismo y el sexismo coexisten junto con las afirmaciones celebratorias de la producción cultural afro-brasileña en Salvador. Este artículo explora cómo el paisaje urbano turístico de Salvador está dividido en zonas cuidadosamente demarcadas donde la clase y la raza son factores cruciales para determinar quién “pertenece” y quién está “fuera de lugar”.

巴西萨尔瓦多旅游区中的性工作与排除

巴伊亚州的首都萨尔瓦多，位于巴西的东北区域，由种族化、性别化与性化的空间所组成，其中某些人受到欢迎，某些人则被边缘化并遭到排除。历史中心的主教座堂广场，是萨尔瓦多在地性产业及旅游业的主要营运场所。由于萨尔瓦多的性工作者在游客经常造访的场所中具有公共能见性，因此揭露了性慾如何是公共的、在政治上是竞夺的、带有浓厚的经济色彩，且最重要的是种族化的。若如同Tom Boellstorff所主张，“全球化再度彰显了地 方意涵，而非消灭地方”（2007, 23），那麽我们如何在全球化的旅游产业中研究种族化的 性慾呢？阶级、空间与种族如何影响萨尔瓦多的性工作与性旅游产业？本文对萨尔瓦多旅游业的性经济中的种族化性慾提供批判性的分析。我将萨尔瓦多概念化为“慾望的场域”（Manderson and Jolly 1997），其中社会与经济的不平等、种族主义与性别歧视等议题，与 欣然肯定非裔巴西文化的生产，共存于萨尔瓦多。本文探索萨尔瓦多的旅游城市地景如何分隔成谨慎划分的区域，其中阶级与种族是决定谁“属于此地”、谁“不得其所”的关键因 素。

Keywords::

• blackness
• sex workers
• tourism
• Brazil
• space

Palabras claves::

• negrura
• trabajadores sexuales
• turismo
• Brasil
• espacio

关键词:::

• 黑人性
• 性工作者
• 旅游
• 巴西
• 空间

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Beverly Mullings, Marlon Bailey, and Rashad Shabazz for organizing this Themed Section on Gender and the Sexual Geographies of Blackness, and for selecting my article to be included. I sincerely appreciate the insightful and substantive comments that the anonymous reviewers offered which pushed me in my thinking. I thank the various sources of funding that have supported my research and writing over the years, including Stanford University, the Black Studies ABD fellowship at UCSB, the UNCF/Mellon ABD Faculty Fellowship, the Future of Minority Studies Summer Mentoring Fellowship, the Faculty Resource Network Scholar-in-Residence program at New York University, and the Mellon/HBCU Faculty Fellowship at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. I would like to express my gratitude to Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Amalia Cabezas, Kia Lilly Caldwell, and Shanesha Brooks-Tatum, who have willingly and enthusiastically read my work at various stages. Finally, I am grateful for the support of my Sociology and Anthropology department colleagues at Spelman College.

Notes

^1. Film Cidade Baixa (Lower City) Directed by Sérgio Machada, Palm Pictures, 2005.

^2. This, and all other names of my informants, is a pseudonym.

^3. At the time of Aprosba's founding, the sex worker community of Salvador was plagued with discrimination, unwanted pregnancies, sexual and physical assaults by both clients and police officers, and a lack of knowledge about the prevention of HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Infections. According to Fabiana, co-founder and lead organizer of Aprosba, ‘we want to show that prostitutes are also dignified people who exercise a profession like any other’ (Francisco 2006). Aprosba fits well in the context of national sex worker organizations in Brazil, which are ‘sustained by a rights-based approach which demands citizenship rights and the right to exercise their profession with dignity’ (Chacham et al. 2007, 110).

^4. While it is beyond the scope of this article, Pérola's queer identification raises questions about how sex workers reconcile their sexual orientation with commercial sexual relations and what I call ‘ambiguous entanglements.’ Likewise, Gregory Mitchell's recent work on gay sex tourism in Brazil focuses on Brazilian male sex workers who engage in commercial sexual relations with gay foreign tourists even though they are straight identified (2010, 93).

^5. For instance, Pérola showed me several pictures of a slim, elderly man whom she referred to as ‘o holandes’ (the Dutchman). They were ‘together’ for 2 months, in which he treated her and her son to dinners at fancy restaurants, yacht excursions, English as a Foreign Language course, and even bought her a house on Mar Grande island. ‘The Dutchman’ left Salvador with promises to return, but died of a stroke shortly thereafter.

^6. Although prices vary in brothels, it is customary for sex workers to charge clients $R50, of which $R15 goes to the house. The owner of the brothel charges a departure fee of $R45 if a client wants to take the woman outside of the brothel.

^7. This discussion occurred at the Projeto Sem Vergonha (Without Shame Project) workshop, which gathered sex workers from the Northeast region, in May 2007, in Salvador, Brazil.

^8. The Steve Biko Cultural Institute is a nongovernmental organization that was founded by black movement activists in 1992 to increase college enrollment among underprivileged Afro-Brazilians and to promote public policies to reduce racial inequalities.

^9. Bikuda (feminine) and Bikudo (masculine) are the terms for students who have gone through the Steve Biko Institute's educational programs.

^10. I conducted interviews, or had informal conversations with a total of 72 people, including 20 sex workers, 20 tourism industry workers, 10 foreign tourists, three NGO employees, one police officer, two caça-gringas (male hustlers who ‘hunt foreign women’), and 16 Bahian men and women who worked in the Afro-Brazilian cultural arena or who had significant interactions and experiences with foreign tourists.

^11.http://www.caribbeanstudiesassociation.org/en/history.html

^12. The Portuguese translation of sex worker is gender-neutral, and thus also includes men and travestis (male-to-female transgender individuals). Despite feelings of solidarity with male and travesti sex workers, the leaders of Aprosba felt the need to have their own space as women.

^13. However, it is important to point out that scholars, including myself, tend to prefer the term, ‘sex worker’ because it encompasses a notion of sex work as an income-generating form of labor, as well as mobilization for human rights (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998).

^14. This interview was conducted on 14 August 2007.

^15. These terms also signify the prevalence of enslaved Africans who were Muslim. The term ‘Black Mecca’ was promoted by black militants from other parts of Brazil who saw Bahia as the principal source of African culture in the country (Pinho 2004).

^16. ‘Measuring Brazil's Economy: Statistics and Lies.’ The Economist. 10 March 2011. http://www.economist.com/node/18333018/print. Accessed on 26 July 2011.

^17. The Human Development measures health, education, and income.

^18.http://noticias.r7.com/economia/noticias/salvador-tem-maior-taxa-de-desemprego-em-junho-20100722.html

^19.http://www.pnud.org/br/publicacoes/atlas_salvador/index.php

^20. Furthermore, the municipal government of Salvador passed a tax to support tourism efforts in Salvador in 1951, a council of tourism was created in 1953, and tourism was a part of Governor Juracy Magalhaes economic development plan in the 1960s (Romo 2010, 152).

^21. In July 1992, Embratur launched the National Plan for Tourism (Plantur), which sought to promote regional development by focusing on destinations outside of the South and Southeast. The Prodetur project budget was US$1,670,000, of which approximately US$800,000 came from the Inter-American Development Bank (Wilson 2008).

^22. Jocelio Teles dos Santos points out that between 1971 and 1974 the Bahian state government published a magazine called Turismo, in which it was clear that Afro-Bahian elements were being used to define cultural and touristic policies (2005, 86).

^23. ‘Roots’ or heritage tourism by African descendants was also recognized as a target market for the Bahian tourism industry in the 1970s and has been revived in the 1990s (Romo 2010, 153).

^24. ‘Italian’ has become synonymous with ‘sex tourist’ in Salvador. Over 300,000 Italians visit Brazil each year. Italian tourists were commonly described as men from ‘lower class’ backgrounds who were able to ‘live like kings’ in Bahia because of their foreign currency (Exame 2007). Interview 29 January 2007.

^25. Due to the growth of the Black Movement and the rich legacy of Afro-Brazilian heritage in Salvador, the term ‘mulata’ is no longer a salient category or popular term of identification.

^26. This interview was conducted on 15 May 2007.

^27. Since 2002 prostitution has been recognized as a legitimate form of work in the Brazilian Code of Occupations put form by the Ministry of Labor, and the law forbids the exploitation of commercial sex by third parties (Chacham et al. 2007, 110).

^28. It is important to note that in Brazil, one in three Afro-Brazilian women works as a domestic worker (Pinho and Silva 2010, 95). Domestic workers are prevalent in Brazil due to a greater availability of cheap domestic labor and the fact that domestic technologies are not widely integrated in homes (Pinho and Silva 2010, 94).

^29. Similarly, Gregory (2007) points out that in the Dominican Republic, the low wages, exploitative working conditions, sexual harassment, and abuse that women experience while working in export-processing zones made the autonomy and higher pay of sex work seem more appealing.

^30. Programa is the Brazilian Portuguese term for a commercial sexual transaction.

^31. This interview was conducted on 14 January 2008. At first, I thought João had coined this phrase. However, I later learned that this phrase referenced an important moment in the history of the sex workers' movement in Brazil. In 1979 in an area of prostitution in the Center of São Paulo known as the Boca do Lixo, police officer Wilson Richetti began indiscriminately arresting and abusing prostitutes, which resulted in the deaths of three sex workers (two travestis and one pregnant woman). People were outraged at these abuses of police power, and Officer Richetti was ultimately removed from his position (Ministério da Saúde 2002).

^32. This interview was conducted in August 2007.

^33. From an interview with Fabiana in August 2007.

^34. For instance, at the Projeto Sem Vergonha workshop, participants become outraged over a televised news report about sex tourism at the Aeroclube Plaza Show shopping center. The workshop participants were concerned that the reporters' use of hidden cameras to capture images of the sex workers would threaten their security and lead to increased persecution and criminalization.

^35. Fabiana used the term ‘putaphobic’ when she told me about an encounter she had with a European tourist on Barra beach. Upon approaching her, he dismissively assumed that the young black women she was with were prostitutes. The irony, of course, was that those women were not prostitutes, and Fabiana, was. Because he had offended her, Fabiana decided to play a game with him. Over the next few days, he took her to expensive restaurants, gave her money, and bought her clothes and shoes. The night before he was leaving, he invited her to his luxury hotel room and wanted to have sex with her, but she refused, saying, ‘what do you think I am – a prostitute?!’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erica L. Williams

Erica L. Williams is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. She earned her Ph.D. in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University in January 2010, her M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford in 2005, and her B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University in 2002. She held an ABD Dissertation Fellowship from the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2008 to 2009, a UNCF/Mellon ABD Fellowship in the Fall 2009, and a Mellon/HBCU Faculty fellowship at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University in the Spring 2012. At Spelman, Erica developed a new 5-week summer study abroad program in Salvador for students. Her book manuscript based on her dissertation, Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements, is winner of the NWSA/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize and is forthcoming in 2013.