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Travesti Sex Workers’ Bodily Experiences and the Politics of Life and Death

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Brazilian 'Travesti' Migrations

Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences ((GSSS))

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Abstract

This chapter describes the different meanings that sex work has for the travestis and how this activity shapes their social interactions, bodies, and lives. It situates this discussion within readings of Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to understand the structural exclusions that dehumanise travestis. As abject-others without value as citizens in a neoliberal scenario, sex work becomes the main opportunity travestis have to survive but is also the space of construction and learning of femininity, and of reaffirmation of their bodily transformations. The chapter also examines travesti embodiments of their ‘Brazilianness’ as an identity that gives them value in the transnational and competitive sex market.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I employ both ‘sex work’ and ‘prostitution’ to name the activity in which sexual services are offered in exchange for money (see endnote 1 in Chap. 1 for a further explanation).

  2. 2.

    Sex work is included within a wider sex industry which involves, according to Agustín (2005, 622) ‘bars, restaurants, cabarets, clubs, brothels, discotheques, saunas, massage parlours, sex shops with private booths, hotels, flats, dungeons for bondage and domination, Internet sites, cinemas and anywhere that sex is offered for sale on an occasional basis, such as stag and hen events, shipboard festivities or “modelling” parties.’ Moreover, the sex industry is not limited to those who sell sex directly and their customers, other social actors such as waiters, business owners, drivers, doctors, travel agents, among others, are also included.

  3. 3.

    Many of them identify with the less-stigmatised term ‘transsexual.’

  4. 4.

    I have kept here, though, her pseudonym name.

  5. 5.

    During my fieldwork in Brazil, I met some people who self-identified as bichas (effeminate gay male) and only cross-dressed for working on the streets to earn more money as sex workers. Contrary to travestis, they made a strategic use of their transitory female appearance.

  6. 6.

    This manuscript does not adhere to an abolitionist position regarding prostitution and does not consider the travesti sex workers as ‘victims who need to be saved.’ Although this activity can expose the travestis to situations of more vulnerability, I support sex workers’ emancipatory use of this profession (see also endnote 1 in Chap. 1).

  7. 7.

    Paradoxically, mães and madrinhas, like Alessandra and Reyna, press hard for the travestis to pay their ‘debts’ towards them (the renting of the room/bed they have to pay daily, the injections of silicone, the financing to arrive in Rio or Europe, and so on).

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Julieta Vartabedian

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Vartabedian, J. (2018). Travesti Sex Workers’ Bodily Experiences and the Politics of Life and Death. In: Brazilian 'Travesti' Migrations. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77101-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77101-4_6

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