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

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

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-

ii iii 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.

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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 30 Janeiro 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 39 Revolution 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

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

2 3 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

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 –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

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

6 7 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 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

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

8 9 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.

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

10 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

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

12 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

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

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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.

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.

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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

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

18 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.

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)

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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

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)

22 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

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)

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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 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,

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.

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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.

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

32 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.

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

34 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.

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).

36 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)

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.

38 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

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

40 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

– 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.

42 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

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

44 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

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

46 47 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).

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

48 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

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.

50 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.

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.

52 53 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.

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.

54 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.

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

Objectives Questions Data Sources

Determine the (envisioned To what extent is the sport Document analyses of and/or experienced) mega-event prostitution, event and human entrepreneurial opportunities perceived/experienced as an trafficking-related informational whittled from the sport mega- income-generating, profitable material as well as relevant event, in relation to sexual urban intervention? media documentation. commerce. What are some of the profit- (Participant) Observations of sex Examine the tactics (material or motivated strategies employed workers' rights organizations, immaterial) used to maximize by those involved in sexual volunteers, and the these opportunities and/or commerce, in the midst of an working/living conditions of overcome event-related international, male-dominated their members. challenges. sport mega-event? Semi-structured interviews Document the spatial How does the sport mega-event conducted with key informants transformation observed in sex- materially (particularly with identified through data collection related industries as a result of respect to urban space) (i.e., in document analyses and the sport mega-event. transform sexual commerce, if at participant observations). all?

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,

56 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

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;

58 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

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 ). 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

60 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.

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

62 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

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

64 65 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

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).

66 67 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

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

68 69 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

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

70 71 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.

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

72 73 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

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

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

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.

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.

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).

82 83 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

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.).

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

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

88 89 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

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.

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.

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.

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

96 97 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

“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.

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

100 101 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.

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

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

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

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

108 109 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.

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 (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

110 111 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.

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

112 113 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

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

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

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

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.

120 121 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

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

122 123 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

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

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

126 127 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

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.

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).

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

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

134 135 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.

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

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

(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.

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).

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!

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.

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)

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

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Appendix 13. Ethical Protocol Approval

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 [email protected].

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 [email protected].

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 [email protected] www.observatoriodaprostituicao.wordpress.com

Appendix 15: Pamphlet

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Appendix 16: Men congregate outside Balcony Bar after the France vs. Germany game (July 4, 2014)