From the House to the Street: Sex Workers and Domestic Laborers in Brazil's Democratic Transition

Abstract

This dissertation intervenes in debates about grassroots feminism and Brazilian re- democratization in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, contending that poor women of color, mobilizing around their rights as workers and citizens, actively participated in the political opening that ushered in a new democratic age after the country’s Cold War-era military dictatorship (1964–85). This project, which draws on extensive archival research in addition to oral histories and cultural production, examines social movements formed by Brazilian sex workers and domestic laborers in the late twentieth century, following their trajectories from their origins on the Catholic Left through their consolidation as organized civil society entities wielding incisive critiques not only of Brazilian authoritarianism but also of their country’s entrenched racism, classism, and misogyny.

My narrative begins in the early 1960s, just before the 1964 coup that inaugurated a twenty- one-year military dictatorship, follows the arc of re-democratization through the drafting of a new constitution in the late 1980s, and culminates in the election of labor activist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency in 2002. While scholars tend to locate Brazil’s democratic transition between 1979 and 1985, my extended periodization has allowed me to examine social-movement dynamics in different political contexts, not just in moments of grassroots agitation and confrontation, but also in periods of repression, stagnation, and democratic consolidation. It has also prompted me to think more expansively about democracy, which in post–Cold War Latin America has rarely been accompanied by the robust commitments to economic and social justice demanded by mobilized sex workers and domestic laborers in transition-era Brazil.

In the chapters that follow, I argue first that the progressive wing of the Catholic Church was instrumental in giving rise to these two social movements while Brazil was still under authoritarian rule. Subsequently, I discuss their institutionalization and alliance-building in the crucible of the democratic transition, specifically the Constituent Assembly of 1987–88, the expansion of the newly christened public health system, and the first post-dictatorship presidential election in 1989. The last portion of this dissertation casts the 1990s as a period of neoliberal consolidation, yet one that was constantly contested by radical visions of anti-capitalism, sexual heterodoxy, and anti-work politics at the grassroots. Finally, I compare the two movements’ discursive constructions of gendered labor and productive citizenship in their interactions with the state and other civil society actors as Brazil underwent massive changes in the political sphere.