Using one’s body: sex,money and agency from the coast to the backlands of Northeast Brazil

Introduction

Situated within the scope of sexual economy studies (Hunter, 2002; Kempadoo, 2004; Piscitelli, 2005; Zelizer, 2005; Piscitelli, 2007; Cabezas, 2009; Hunter, 2010; Piscitelli, 2013; Piscitelli et al., 2011), this article discusses the idea of using one’s body for sex, kinship, affection and money transactions, based on the accounts of young sex market participants in two Brazilian north-eastern towns. In this project, the specific context is local rural economies, where traditional patterns of gender asymmetries persist and intersect with contemporary forms of exploitation and high cash flow; in short, where paid labour is associated with masculinity, and caregiving and generosity are associated with femininity. Our study analyses the different forms of exchanging sex for money, intertwined with affective relations, motherhood and multiple ways of ‘using the body’.

This study is based on interviews conducted with young women (fifteen to twenty-five years old) involved with prostitution in two towns in different states of the Brazilian north-eastern region – Cabrobó, in the state of Pernambuco, and Mataraca, in the state of Paraíba – that took place between February 2012 and July 2014. The researchers interviewed twenty-four women between the ages of 18 and 27, and visited bars and places where prostitution was active. The collected material allowed us to sketch an overview of prostitution and the sex markets associated with lower-class areas and groups in these cities. We found tension surrounding the use of ‘prostitution’, a notion that was initially introduced by the study but that was not necessarily echoed in the field. This tension led us to reflect on the transactions and economic exchanges in dispute.

We found that the women’s views, conceptualisations and experiences express various differentiation categories (Stoebenau et al., 2011) that intersect with and are related to a set of moralities common to the local/regional economies and to notions of family. Among these categories, we focused on pedição, ¹ and deemed it a type of sexual economy (Cabezas, 2009; Groes-Green, 2013).

This article is divided into four sections. The first section introduces the international definition of sexual economies. The second section focuses on our study, which is entitled ‘Lipstick Stains’ and constitutes the basis of this article. Conducted in Brazil, the project examined prostitution, sex market studies and sexual economies. This section also provides a brief description of the two research loci, based on interviews, observations and field notes. The third portion of this article focuses on understanding the differentiation categories; it describes the various ways in which the participants understand, produce and name their sexual participation in the local/regional economy, that is, the ways they use their bodies in order to have access to money. From this perspective, we highlight the economy of requesting/accepting money, or the logic of pedição. The fourth section is an attempt to explain, from the women’s standpoint, the kinship configurations implied in such sexual economies, and their relationships to practical conceptions of their bodies and the possible ways of using them. The last section is a comparative discussion of the forms of economy found in our research and those in the literature.

Sexual economies

Since the 1990s, anthropological research on sexuality, HIV, sex tourism and prostitution in the Caribbean, African and Brazilian contexts has concluded that terms such as ‘prostitution’ and ‘sex work’ are insufficient to explain an array of exchange relationships involving sex, money, affection and material assets (Hunter, 2002; Dos Anjos, 2005; Piscitelli, 2007; Cabezas, 2009; Piscitelli, 2013; Piscitelli, 2014). Research on so-called ‘sex markets’ and ‘sexual economies’ enables us to better understand the multiple transactions involving sex and money, and which unfold both within and beyond the narrow scope of ‘sexual labour’/’prostitution’. For instance, such markets and economies encompass wider economic configurations and power inequalities (Kempadoo, 2004); other economies where sex is tactically used are described as ‘economies of desire’ (Cabezas, 2009). Sex, in some contexts, could be understood as entirely ‘transactional’ in its relationship to money (Hunter, 2002; Groes-Green, 2013). On the other hand, care and affection within wider systems of reciprocity (Piscitelli, 2013), such as the mutual exchange of intimacy (Zelizer, 2005), need to be considered to understand such economies.

Commenting on the differences between sex as tactics, and sex work – the former being connected to affection and caregiving – Cabezas states: ‘I challenge the concept of sex work as an analytical tool for understanding interactions between tourists and locals. […] I propose an analysis of interviews that detail the incomplete and fungible nature of relations and the degrees of commodification that bring complexity to these arrangements’ (2009: 117). A semiotic understanding of money (Zelizer, 2005), transnational feminism (Piscitelli, 2013) and research on work and caregiving (Cabezas, 2009) are major influences on these studies, which highlight the centrality of agency. Political and theoretical considerations regarding sexual labour, as reflected in sexual worker activism and union activity (Kempadoo et al., 2005), are also important. Scholarship on sex markets and sexual economies includes analyses of notions of difference, agency and autonomy, in order to complement structural explanations that focus only on lack of resources, poverty or underdevelopment. Finally, an emerging line in this field of studies is influenced by analyses developed in the anthropology of kinship and the body (Groes-Green, 2013; Olivar, 2013, 2015).

Research on prostitution and sexual economies has a special place in Brazil. There, the exchange of sex for money is not a crime. However, it is a crime to take advantage of someone else’s prostitution, to share in profits deriving from prostitution or to make a living from it. As described by Piscitelli (2014) and Olivar (2014a, 2014b) when reviewing such literature, Brazilian academic literature on prostitution and sex markets is extensive. ² So far, such academic production has explored topics related to the working world, sexual practices, violence and affection. It has also established important connections with studies about public policies, kinship, social movements, urban changes, transnational mobility and borders, among others.

In Brazil, notions such as sex markets, sexual practices and affection have been used creatively. One example is Piscitelli’s (2013) work, which focused on cities in north-eastern Brazil to analyse women’s participation in the transnational dynamics of international tourism sex markets. In her study, Piscitelli uses an intersectional analysis to describe the place of economic/sexual exchanges within the lower classes, and proposes that such exchanges can be understood as open resources: ‘The proposed idea of sex markets allows us to think of relationships that are more intensely framed by market economy and which are frequently attached to the sex industry. Yet, this idea situates the exchanges within a much wider universe concerning sexual, economic, material and symbolic exchanges’ (2013: 30; translation ours). Piscitelli highlights that sex encounters (programa) and help (ajuda) are distinct pairs that constitute an analytical scheme for studying transactional sex and sex markets. A programa would refer to the most commodified way of exchange (prostitution). A programa is the main good transacted between a client and a prostitute. It is a relationship whose conditions and limits are explicitly negotiated between the two parties and which generally begins with haggling about the price to be paid and which ends in sexual intercourse.

On the other hand, ajuda denotes a specific and widespread form of affective and/or sexual economic exchange unrelated to prostitution, with lower levels of commodification. The character of ‘an old man who provides help’, which is seen in Fonseca’s (2004a) work as well, is a widely accepted practice within the lower classes. ³ The study of sexual economies, as presented here, has offered new answers to old questions and new questions for old convictions. There seem to be ambiguous explanations about the reasons why poorer women resort to prostitution as a means of subsistence, with generalising and universalising notions that deny their affective constructions and homogenise their worlds. This intensifies even more when we intersect prostitution with other difference markers, such as age group, race/ethnicity, region and so on.

We propose analysing narratives in context, and avoiding pathologisation and negative epistemologies (Strathern, 1990), thereby allowing the singularities and positivities of the women’s logic and experiences to take centre stage. As Montgomery (2001) states in her landmark study about child and teenager prostitution in Thailand, this is especially significant when one addresses the issue of minors in prostitution or sexual economies: ‘Their world-views and understandings of their situation deserve serious consideration, even when alternative explanations can be offered’ (2001: 89).

The Lipstick Stains study

The study followed young women active in the sexual market of two rural towns: Mataraca, which borders a Potiguar indigenous village, and Cabrobó, which is close to Ilha Assunção, on Truka indigenous land. Mataraca is a small town, located in an area where sugarcane plantations are abundant. Its proximity to BR 101, the major highway between the states of Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte, means it attracts a large number of seasonal workers, peasants, local indigenous people and truck drivers. The residents’ main sources of income are activities related to sugarcane mills and emerging tourism. Mataraca is part of a network of native indigenous villages, closely connected through commercial and kin relationships. This context helps explain how prostitution, as an economic and sexual practice, occurs along the overlapping layers of economic, sexual and affective relationships, which crisscross rural, urban and native indigenous worlds.

Cabrobó was selected as a comparative site due to the nature of conflicts that take place in the area. Known as the Marijuana Polygon, ⁴ the region’s roadways were considered dangerous places until the Armed Forces were sent to the area in 2007 to begin diverting the São Francisco River. ⁵ Since then, the area has been a permanent centre of tension and conflict between the government and those opposing the construction work. The size of such construction work, the history of violence in the region and the subsequent protests all raise important research questions, especially on the changing vulnerability for young women participating in the sex market. The interviews were conducted by a group of research assistants, all social science and psychology undergraduate and graduate students. Our experience has shown that the participation of women in fieldwork in these sites may not only be methodologically counterproductive (as it can be more difficult for them to gain access, and they are more likely to arouse suspicion), but also compromise their safety, putting them in risky situations. Therefore, in our research it was male research assistants who took on the task of finding the bars, approaching the places and addressing the women. After that, female research assistants conducted interviews at locations and times outside of the women’s workplace. The principal investigator would introduce the group and project, but did not participate in the interviews. We noted that the women were clearly more comfortable with the female students, who were close in age to them. Participants remained anonymous, to abide by confidentiality and ethical considerations.

In Mataraca, locals indicated the bars that then became our interview spots. Such bars are sometimes indistinguishable from a local home, for they often had fruit gardens and pets in the backyard. These places are known as ‘prostitution bars’ or access-to-money-in-exchange-for-sex bars. In Cabrobó, things were somewhat different. We identified three areas of prostitution: six bars with rooms in the back, where a sexual encounter might cost 30–40 reais (US$8–10); the downtown market; and gas stations located along the highway, where sex would cost 20 reais (US$5). There are no nightclubs; clients are construction workers, small business owners, street vendors, drug dealers, truck drivers and army officers who find their way with local ‘chicks’ (periguetes).

In the Mataraca bars, the women were very poor. Biographical narratives and observations during fieldwork revealed that some of them lived in extreme poverty. None of them had graduated from secondary school and some had had fewer than eight years of formal education. In Cabrobó, we met women with secondary education degrees. According to those women, dropping out of school was a necessity, so they could start working and contribute to supporting their family. Another reason given for leaving school was a stable relationship, particularly moving in with or marrying a partner. Having a stable partner would often evolve into having children, thus reducing the chances of going back to school. The majority of the interviewees had at least one child.

In Mataraca, children actively help around the house by cleaning, doing laundry, taking care of younger siblings or cooking. Those tasks are assigned according to gender, with mothers and daughters – not men or boys – being responsible for carrying them out. In some cases, young men are not even allowed to learn such tasks. This context reveals a central element in our argument that is largely present in local economies and their resulting inequality: the distinction between work (a man’s thing) and care (a woman’s thing). Consequently, not only is there unequal money circulation, but also uneven distribution of responsibilities between men and women.

Even though we did not spot minors in the bars, we were informed that girls aged twelve to fourteen were regulars in such places. This corroborates the interviews that reveal that nearly half of the participants started having sexual intercourse with men for money before the age of eighteen. In Mataraca, the youngest person to start sex work did it at the age of twelve. These findings contrast with those in Cabrobó, where the youngest woman started working at age seventeen.

There was no evidence of male coercion, violence or blackmail prompting the sex exchanges. We found that the onset of prostitution or participation in such exchange economies was described as a personal decision. The reasons to engage or remain in the sex market were related to finances – factors such as having no job offers or wanting a better income. For instance, one central issue for some women was their husbands’ refusal to give them money to spend beyond the cost of maintaining the household. Those women then resort to alternative forms of obtaining money for themselves.

Although financial reasons seem to play a fundamental role in the choice of prostitution as an economic activity, there are other arguments involved, so prostitution acquires other meanings. Some of the statements do not stress money as the main reason; rather, they present other motivations or explanations, such as: ‘I wanted some personal experience’, ‘I chose this profession because I needed to forget him’, ‘out of curiosity’, ‘to seek adventure’, ‘as a way to seek change in life’ or ‘because I had no self-esteem when working as a maid’.

As previously mentioned, poverty and the lack of access to money are central issues. For the women, money is scarce because it is a man’s task to provide for the family and men are remunerated for their work, while female labour, seen as caretaking, is not financially compensated. Such gender differences contribute heavily to the women’s lack of resources and their search for survival alternatives, such as using their bodies in the sex market. As borne out by the interviewees’ narratives, it is in this tension among structural conditions, agency and an organised sex trade that we must understand and leverage these women’s sex work as an expression of agency.

Multiple differentiation categories: from selling one’s body to pedição

Delving into the native constructions and life narratives of our interviewees, we identified a generic distinction between programa/work and ajuda/donation, as seen with Piscitelli (2013). Nevertheless, the differentiation scenario presented itself as multiplied and replete with fuzzy areas and filters. Moreover, this scenario introduced a new generic configuration, the economy of pedição, intimately linked to ‘body uses’ and kinship-and-gender configurations.

When asked about the beginning of her work in bars, Shelly, ⁶ a twenty-five-year-old, promptly replied that she started at twenty. However, later, while reminiscing about her sexual life trajectory, she said: ‘I don’t know, […] maybe I was eleven, twelve, when I became a woman, […] at twelve I sold my body. I moved in with a man when I was eighteen’.

The interviews reveal that ‘selling one’s own body’ and ‘working in bars’ are two different moments along this path, as well as different stages in the sex market: ‘selling one’s own body’ indicates the beginning of participation in the business, whereas ‘working in bars’ designates a specific space and a particular form of sexual exchange.

Shelly continues: ‘When I met him [her partner], he didn’t know about my work. After the beginning of our relationship, I stopped working. And now? I work in a bar. […] I’m a prostitute, right?’. The statement ‘I’m a prostitute’ is uttered without reservation and is widely understood. It marks a defined labour identity, which implies working in bars and selling one’s body. ‘Selling one’s body’ is a widely used expression in moral discourse about/against prostitution and is criticised by prostitutes’ organisations, which, in opposition, see prostitution as a type of work or service, and sometimes as a kind of controlled ‘rent’.

For the groups that favour legalised prostitution in Brazil, ‘being a prostitute’ is a cause that requires that women ‘recognise their profession’ (Olivar, 2013). Their rejection of the term ‘selling one’s body’ can often be explained by the stigma it engenders. From this point of view, this expression is a distinct and contrary idea to that of practising a profession. As we shall see, ‘selling’ is one among many of the possible uses of one’s body.

Another interviewee, Salomé, proposes a dual logic of separations and distinctions associated with different life stages. While pregnant, she met an elderly man who was willing to help her and with whom she started a sexual exchange when she accepted his material assistance. Her statement allows us to understand the dynamics and rationality taking place in the process of money access and circulation, as well as the economic articulation on multiple levels (kinship, affection, needs, possibilities, desires). Indeed, Salomé’s narrative displays clear and important delimitations and differentiations. The first identified period is when acts were not characterised by financial gains, when she claims it was all ‘just for fun’, owing to the fact that she was very young (eleven to fourteen years old). The second period is during her relationship with the elderly man, which does not imply a prostitution exchange, as it involves a multitude of aspects, such as time, affection, networking, spaces and economies completely distinct from those related to sex work. The old man based their relationship on the sexual and affective exchanges. To Salomé, it meant somewhat premeditated and convenient support, mixed with affective wellbeing, more than occasional sexual intercourse per se. Her mother likely mediated their initial meeting. ⁷ To Salomé, there is explicit interest involved, as she builds a relationship of tactical sex favoured by her mother, which allows her to provide ‘the best resources’ for her soon-to-be-born baby. The third period is characterised by her work at the Central Market, which she calls vender-se – to sell one’s body. Salomé draws a very clear line between such ‘help’ and the ‘selling of the body’ that follows:

After having my second child […] then, that was it; I gave up the child to the [baby’s] grandma and plunged into that kind of life again. […] In João Pessoa, my spot was the Central Market area. Then, I was whoring myself out to many men. I was nineteen, I was always in bars making myself available for turning tricks. A friend took me there […] that was how I started selling my body.

Another idea often mentioned by participants is the notion of wrongdoing, misdemeanour or misdeed. Tiffany explains the concept of a ‘wrong thing’: ‘if you are with someone for money, in this case to prostitute yourself, you go, right? Someone offers you money, you go. This is the only way out here, there are no jobs over here’. Along with her friends, Tiffany started ‘doing the wrong thing’ when she was eleven years old. She has never worked in a bar. Tiffany’s perspectives are similar yet also distinct from Salomé’s, and help to demarcate the idea of ‘prostitution’ along moral and practical lines as well as to create particular conceptions that make sense to her.

I was afraid. I had two friends who used to do it. They always told me: ‘come on, do it and you will get your own money. You will run out of money only if you choose to’ […] I went to the harbour area with them. One of them told me: ‘you’ll charge the same as we do’. I asked for 50 reais [US$12]. From then on, I’ve become used to charging for sex […]. I would do those wrong things and [my husband] would ask where that money was coming from since I didn’t have a job. I would tell him that my mom gave it to me. And my mom knows about what I do but she never tells him, she fears that he might do something to me if he finds out.

Doing the wrong thing is similar to and at the same time different from the help given by Salomé’s ‘old man’. On the one hand, help and doing the wrong thing are transactional sex relationships at the margin of institutionalised and nominated spaces of prostitution. On the other hand, this help is not a programa and is intertwined with an affective relationship, which does not happen with Tiffany and her friends. The money earned by Tiffany is close to donations or wages, as occasional and explicit as in a programa, but dissolved in a non-job situation, in spontaneous connections and quick escapes. At the same time, this wrongdoing includes certain similarities to the programa and ‘selling one’s body’ mentioned by Salomé when she works at the Central Market. The similarity lies in moving to a different territory, a different town where she will not be easily recognised; ⁸ and, maybe, also in her relationship with her girlfriends, as we will discuss later.

When doing ‘the wrong thing’, distinctions between giving, asking, helping and charging do not seem final or radical. Actually, they constitute a relatively ambiguous and diffuse notion of work, as in the case of the women in the city of Porto Alegre – ‘battling and hunting’ for men – who are featured in Olivar’s (2013) work. This notion of work drifts between the logic of labour/commodities (the charge, the group) and the logic of a gift (the request) that does not imply the notion of fair return for a job done. The wrong thing is a non-job – as Tiffany says, ‘there are no jobs over here’ – that does not require hanging out in a bar, affective involvement or management of kinship relations. Tiffany is an ‘unhappily’ married woman who independently earns the money that her husband does not give her or their son, through one of the ways in which these women, excluded from the labour market, manage to access money: by asking, going out or making out for money, or by prostituting herself.

Suzi presents another way of organising those elements. She states that she is no longer a prostitute; she has changed but has not stopped ‘selling her body’. She explains how, for five years since the age of fifteen, she worked in bars and drank. In those bars, part of her ‘job’ was to have drinks with male customers and pave the way to paid sexual encounters. This is an institutionalised sex work environment; drinking with the purpose of having sex with a man, or ‘getting it on’, was her job. Tired of working in bars where she had to drink, and wanting to give up ‘that kind of life’, she looked for an ‘express bar’ where the only purpose was for men to seek women for sex. As contradictory as it sounds, for Suzi, picking up men at a place solely and explicitly for sex meant she was no longer a prostitute.

Note that ‘that kind of life’ is linked to the notion of ‘selling one’s body’. The new arrangement would allow her to continue making money and to have a more interesting type of life. Therefore, working in this ‘express bar’ acquires a non-sexual meaning to her and, more importantly, frees her from the obligation to drink. She was the only interviewee who stated that she gets paid by the bar and not by the client, which is a rather unusual practice among working-class sex workers in the country.

In her narrative, Suzi distances herself from any notion of work that does not fulfil her need to have access to money. In her account, she associates ‘selling her body’ with specific events of ‘entering that kind of life’, ‘going crazy’ in a nightclub and making connections with male acquaintances, so she can travel and fulfil her financial or material needs. This way, she enters the local and micro-regional economic dynamics, in which the main vector of access to money is always male.

She does not mention affections materialised into money or assets. She simply enters ‘that kind of life’ and, upon entering it, she ‘sells her body’ in short-term sexual and pleasurable transactions. In this new scheme, she distinguishes herself from the idea of ‘being’ a prostitute: ‘I’m no longer a prostitute. I’ve changed’. From her point of view, having changed enables her, more than anything else, to avoid people’s gossip about her in the community, and to earn her mother’s forgiveness.

Narratives from Mataraca indicate that, in bars where sex work takes place, the act of paying for such services can be loose and, therefore, not clearly agreed upon in advance before a programa. Plus, the charges could be triangulated and mixed with other expenses or debts originating in the bar. Thus, not only does a labour or commodified logic permeate the sexual encounters, but also a principle of donation.

In Cabrobó, the type of sexual economy practised was especially interesting to us because it stretched the limits of the rationality embedded in the exchange between sex and money, as well as any other reciprocity system, not to mention the more ‘labour-related’ forms of the sex market. We called it pedição. This dynamic is used by Julliany and her two sisters who hang out at the Crazy Horse bar, in order to get some money to pay for daily expenses, as one of the research assistants, Giovannini, recorded in his field notebook:

When we got to the place, we had the first bottle of beer placed on our table and it didn’t take long for at least five girls to approach us, teasing and asking us to buy them some beer. One of them asked if we wanted to get laid. Some others invited us to dance and others just started a sexy dance in front of us. We all left the place and looked for a hot dog stand on the street. However, the pedição for a sandwich or a motorcycle ride continued. Julliany asked for 5 reais [US$2] to buy a bottle of beer and left.

Pedição does not require actual sex to result in a financial gift from a man. If having sexual intercourse does not seem to be a necessary exchange term, neither is the act of ‘charging’. Such fuzzy areas make the setting of local production of sex and money even more complex. One might not ‘charge’ and may just ‘accept’ money.

If the guy likes it and wants to give me some money, I’ll take it. No, I never explicitly charge, never! I used to live in Salgueiro and date this one guy, […] he gave me some money but I never asked for the money, he gave it to me because he wanted to. I don’t do this as a job (Julliany’s other sister, Paloma).

The same logic – to not seek monetary compensation, extra money, for the work done – is expressed in terms of asking and receiving money for a pedição. Thereby, pedição implies neither charge/payment nor help. In terms of reciprocity, there is no service on the line (programa), nor are any affective bonds needed; there is not even a concrete exchange that justifies the money asked for in return. What does seem to exist are gendered bodies relating to each other: a female asking a male for something, with the latter playing his role of the one who can/should give.

Finally, the economy of pedição is interwoven in multiple ways in the family circle, which also makes sense in terms of gender. Thus, this economy of requesting/accepting is distant both from work and from purely affective reciprocities; it is connected to requesting ‘support’ from someone in the woman’s family circle of ‘help’ (Garcia and Nascimento, 2014a).

‘Body use’ within family (affective and moral) connections

In this last section, we set out to understand the relationships between ‘body uses’, the production of kinship relations and gender, by analysing the interviewees’ differentiation practices. To this end, we follow the path of the three relational-spatial spheres of daily existence. In the interviews, the women’s worlds are produced in the transit and connection of three distinct parties: their home, their work and the streets. When traveling through these worlds, one must be able to use one’s own body in order to live.

When we think about the experiences and the notion of uses of the body, kinship emerges as a grounding structure, evoking notions about the constitution of family bonds, affective relationships, affinities and co-responsibilities. ⁹ The categories of differentiation unfold in a triple and irreducible distinction, located in different spatial spheres in daily existence: the bar/spot, for prostitution; home, for family/conjugal living; and world-and-life, the street and public spaces. There is no ambiguity between the first two. In the women’s narratives, family and bar do not mix. Family, especially on the mother’s side, appears as an extremely important referential space. Moreover, it becomes the starting point for the dialogical connections between work, sales, exchanges and tactics, where the tactics acquire meaning and contribute to the importance of the mother and husband figures. A third necessary element of this triangulation is the world of the streets, within which another constitutive element appears: friends, who will function as another important affective bond.

Tiffany provides some insight into how many women get started and become more involved in the sex market by creating shared meanings, with their friends, about the experiences they have during these sexual exchanges. When they talk about financial hindrances, they do not tell us about episodes when they made decisions on their own, distant from social and moral conventions. Instead, they describe these situations as a positive dynamic among friends, evoking a sense of freedom and adventure away from their married life. At the same time, this dynamic fosters traits of a trade union, as seen in the friends’ instructions: ‘you’ll charge the same as we do’. Noticing how friends teach friends, we concluded that prostitution is something to be learned, for it requires intense circulation of information via listening and tips (SOUSA, 2012); the collective practice and shared knowledge with more experienced women becomes the major source of reference for the new ones. This is how ‘doing the wrong thing’ takes on new meanings.

Throughout the narratives of these women, the mother figure – their own mothers and themselves as mothers – is crucial in the production of economic, sexual and affective exchanges. Being a mother is important not only to justify the moneymaking but also to produce a sexualised and financial sociability.

Tiffany’s mother is the keeper of her secret in face of the fear of her husband’s retaliation, and is discursively activated as a donor when Tiffany needs to justify the money ‘collected’ from other men. However, in Tiffany’s account, there is another mother: her mother-in-law, who is her mother’s antagonist and her main threat. It is the mother-in-law who calls her a ‘cheater’, who warns her husband and who she has to lie to and fend off. Like her own mother, the mother-in-law, who assumes an oppositional role, knows the universe of female economy well:

On many occasions, my friends called me over, and I was not able to go because I used to live in my mother-in-law’s house. I just couldn’t go because she is always suspicious and when I go out she fills my husband’s head with her suspicions. [H]e asks me: ‘what money did you use to buy this clothing?’. My mother gave it to me. But it was with the money I had received after a ‘sexual encounter’. I told him that I used the money from Bolsa Família. ¹⁰ But this money from Bolsa Família is to be used on things we really need.

The universe of labour is combined with the universe of consumerism and that of the fulfilment of basic needs and desires; there is the universe of giving (‘waiting for someone’, ‘if he gave me […]’), characterised by gender, and which structures the local economy. From the intersection of those existential levels, doing sexual labour is taken to be the best/necessary option, partially due to poverty or the need to go way beyond the practical reasoning of ‘poverty’ (Sahlins, 1976). Here, overcoming poverty and necessity takes shape by using the body as a source of acquiring money. The possibility of economic gain and the efficacy of seduction (Groes-Green, 2013), as well as the ontological ability to successfully mediate between different relational fields and compositions (Olivar, 2013, 2015), are bound to and depend on these women’s bodies.

Ongoing reconceptualisations of the body are at the core of feminist scholarship. It would be impossible to comprehensively review such discussions here (Strathern, 1990; Butler, 1993; Mol, 2002). Therefore, we shall limit ourselves to the specific framework of the data we collected and the argument of this article. According to the logic proposed by Mol (2002), it is the practical experience of the body multiple: the body that accompanies the parataxis ¹¹ of paying, helping, living. It is the body of the daughter, of the expectant mother, of the wife, of the female worker, of the bar lady, of the friend who flees out to the world. On the other hand, in this local, sexual and economic praxeology (Mol, 2002) of the body, there is an intense moral and gender-normative dimension. ¹² It is only in the relationship with access to money through the sexual ‘use’ of the female body that it becomes a specific, deeply moral, referential framework: ‘the body’ as an object to be used, as a mechanism of praxeology that needs to be clearly demarcated and indicated. That is, ‘the body’ is not ‘used’ or ‘sold’ – in such terms and with such aesthetic and moral charge – by/to the men who work with the women’s bodies, who – through them – pay or give money to the women, or by these women as wives or mothers. In the framework of such virtual multiplication of the body, all moral praxeology that meets the relationship between sexual economies and family production implies the distinction of a very particular body: the body that is sexually ‘used’ to make money. Working, producing and providing services seem like notions to which this multiplied body has no right. The ontological abyss that places these women, their body and these ‘uses’ on the other side of the norm is then produced: the economic-sexual ‘use’ seems to transform this body into a being of a different nature, one that is essentially threatening to the male and to conjugal fantasies and genealogies.

Concluding remarks

In this article, we propose that our research can be understood through the notion of ‘using one’s body’ as related to sexual economies, which is a broader notion than that of ‘prostitution’, to explain the dynamics of the systemic and varyingly explicit transactions between sex and money. It is necessary to consider the multiplicity of categories of differentiation, operationalised by women in contexts of prostitution, around these ‘uses of the body’ so as to access money and assets, in order to get close to an understanding of local ‘sexual economies’ (Cabezas, 2009) and how they relate to the social production of gender. Therefore, we can understand the ways through which economic and sexual dimensions mutually express and structure each other. We understand that such ‘uses of the body’ imply practical knowledge about the multiple transactions of the body in the framework of strict gender norms.

In these women’s narratives about their lives, we observed a generic distinction between ‘payment/sex work’ and ‘help/gifts’ (Piscitelli, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013). Notions such as ‘tactical sex’ (Cabezas, 2009) and ‘transactional sex’ (Hunter, 2002, 2010) were useful to understand the relational systems they address, which are different from the idea of conventional prostitution. Especially in Cabrobó, it is evident that the women’s shared view of what prostitution is made it extremely hard for us to find the prostitutes. This shortcoming enabled us to gain access to multiple names and exercises of differentiation. ‘Naughty girls’, ‘floozies’, ‘hookers’, ‘whores’, ‘working girls’, ‘bar women’, among other categories, were terms used to answer our questions, while deep silence was the response when asked about ‘prostitution’. The women employed a wide range of categories, which could include, define and go beyond the term prostitution, such as: ‘selling one’s body’; ‘doing the wrong thing’; ‘selling sex’; entering ‘that kind of life’; receiving treats, help or compensation; and ‘asking’. Yet, what the participants indicated were not categories of practice that were clearly or professionally defined, but visible forms of social, economic, affective and sexual arrangements marked by gender and widely shared social mores.

Sexual services and help are not categories to classify people, but possible types of relationship that people describe and through which they move. In the case of this study, such relative polarity exploded due to a multiplicity of denominations and also due to the women’s challenge – by adopting the general notion of ‘using their own bodies’ – to both labour commodification forms and to reciprocity for affection. ‘Selling one’s own body’ and ‘working in a bar’, as well as sporadically ‘being’ a prostitute, characterise dispositions and differentiated forms within the more general level of programa.

Similarly, ‘help’ seems to occupy at least two distinct meanings characterised by the presence or absence of affection and by a large or small degree of commodification and its relation with wider networks of kinship/‘relatedness’ (Carsten, 2000). The female economy of ‘asking’ (pedição), and the willingness to receive treats as opposed to ‘charging’, imply the constraint of the pair programa-ajuda when one is trying to explain the work-affection relationships. The participants place those exchange relations on a level of economic/sexual/gender relations, which organise the social world in ways not defined by the centrality of capitalist principles, such as contract-based paid commercial work and sexual affection. This kind of economic logic suggests a triple organisation of relationships, of affection, spaces, body experiences and money circulation, which need to be studied further: the tripartite combination of home/bar/world.

The dual resource of the distinction programa-ajuda, which is a reference point in this market economy, could be complemented with another term: ‘asking’ (which becomes complete with ‘accepting’) or, in Portuguese, pedição.

The economy of pedição is not restricted to the context of sex and does not constitute a break from social norms. Someone entering prostitution and the economy of pedição seems to articulate regional macroeconomies (power plants, transportation, tourism, social welfare, agricultural production, fishery and harvest) with economic logics associated with family and gender configurations, especially within the rural context (Garcia and Nascimento, 2014a, 2014b). There is a very clearly defined distinction between work-related activities, which are specific to men, and care-taking activities, which are specific to women, and they correspond to the notions of ‘charging’, ‘asking’, ‘receiving’ and ‘accepting’. This distinction cuts across the domestic space of nurture and moves towards moneymaking possibilities in town or around the area. One asks for or expects to receive money from, or to be ‘supported by’, parents, a husband or other men. In this sense, the money received (in exchange for sex, company, laughter, gestures, promises, talks or requests) is not conceptualised as a form of ‘payment’, but as a favour, as appreciation; at the same time, it does not require the elaboration of complex affective plots or specific pathways of reciprocity.

Finally, economic dependence seems to occupy a gender-related structural order, which implies a strict distribution of the bodies (gendered according to a binary and heteronormative logic) and their possible ‘uses’ to access money, sex, labour, care. Within the aforementioned exchanges, we saw that, from the onset of puberty, the women interviewed do not depend exclusively on only one man (father, husband or boss), since the moneymaking possibilities can be increased in bars, on the streets or even on mobile phones. By explaining the logical structure of the actions of these multiple bodies and their relationships, one notices a direct implication with regard to rupturing dependence by seeking new sources of access to money: several men, diverse and multiple relationships. There will always be escapes, girlfriends and men willing to pay, help or give. ‘Using one’s body’ keeps the doors open, so that these women can go beyond the limits of their homes, to a world full of possibility.