Escopo: A Proa: Revista de Antropologia e Arte é uma publicação semestral virtual, de acesso irrestrito, vinculada ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (PPGAS – IFCH – Unicamp). Sua primeira edição foi publicada em agosto de 2009. Qualis: A3 Área do conhecimento: Ciências Sociais Ano de fundação: 2008 E-ISSN: 2175-6015 Título abreviado: PROA: Rev. de Antrop. e Arte E-mail: contato@revistaproa.com.br Unidade: IFCH Editor responsável: Christiano Key Tambascia Prefixo DOI: 10.20396
O periódico Proa: Revista de Antropologia e Arte utiliza a licença do Creative Commons (CC), preservando assim, a integridade dos artigos em ambiente de acesso aberto.
The present text, written in epistolary form, is a set of small letters to my friends whose memories resurfaced while reading the exhibition catalog. Through them, I wish to reflect on how worlds encounter other worlds that are connected, even when we do not move through space.
Copyright (c) 2026 Denise Ferreira da Costa Cruz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This essay addresses the practice of drawing in the field, highlighting the Carlos Marighella Occupation (OCM) in Fortaleza, Ceará, through the memories of the occupants, examining their organization and political mobilization during the COVID-19 pandemic. I use ethnographic design to portray the experiences of the occupation’s residents, highlighting the changes, tensions, and perspectives throughout the fieldwork. The results highlight fundamental issues for anthropology, emphasizing the need for deep immersion in the field to understand the use of graphic techniques. In addition to not being afraid to use other writing styles, we must overcome the frustration of the process until we can see the best ways to learn about doing research. Just as in the city, everything is constantly changing, and our ethnographic gaze must keep pace with these changes.
Copyright (c) 2026 Francisca Raquel de Oliveira Temoteo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Addressing points of contact between anthropology, art, politics, and sex work, this dossier offers a plural and polyphonic overview of texts focused on one of the most relevant themes in contemporary Brazilian public debate. It is part of a tradition inaugurated by Gabriela Leite and Lourdes Barreto in the late 1970s, which has since been carried forward by many sex workers—anonymous and well-known alike—at both national and international levels.
Copyright (c) 2025 Natânia Lopes, Gabriel Morais Medeiros, Amara Moira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The year 2025 was especially significant for Proa: Journal of Anthropology and Art, and we are delighted to close another cycle. Together with our authors, readers, and other collaborators, we experienced a year full of activities, thought-provoking publications, and, of course, rich dialogue between Anthropology and a wide range of artistic expressions. Following the continuous publication model, the journal released contributions addressing diverse themes, formats, and experiences, with special emphasis on the dossier “Sex Work and Sex Workers’ Movements: Art and Politics,” which brilliantly forms part of Volume 15.
Copyright (c) 2025 Júlia Vargas, Mariana de Carvalho Ilheo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Love Saga in pass-classing life narratives:
The article aims to analyze how the notion of Love Saga is identified in A Princesa: a história do travesti brasileiro na Europa escrita por um dos líderes da Brigada Vermelha (1995). To achieve this goal, an interpretative work methodology is adopted in which there is a constant dialogue between the corpus and the concepts of theoretical references coming from Semiolinguistics, as the main discipline, and other fields of knowledge, such as Gender Studies and Queer Studies, through of a focused interdisciplinarity. Based on the epistemological production of transfeminist authors, it was found that transphobia, performativity within the framework of a binary normativity, the feeling of jealousy, suicidal ideations and dilemmas financial resources not only affect the Love Saga of Fernanda, a Brazilian transsexual sex worker, but they also insist on negatively impacting the love lives of several sex and gender dissident people today. In this way, the life narrative of the person-who-is-narrated, despite being singular, opens up to the impossibility of isolating their memories at an individual level, demonstrating that the experiences are potentially collective.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gyovanna Bardini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Quantitative data on the perspective of camgirl-researchers
Based on our experience as camgirls-researchers and our lived experience and coexistence within webcam model communities, a form was developed in order to address gaps related to brazilian webcamming. With the objective of better understanding the mental health demands of our population, we constructed a set of questions aimed at obtaining both baseline data (age, race, gender, sexuality, parenthood, and income) and specific data on mental health demands within this class of professionals. A total of 127 responses were collected. The results draw attention to several points, especially by demonstrating both a high proportion of LGBTQIA+ individuals (77.2%) and significant challenges in the fields of mental health and parenthood. We highlight the relationship between mental health issues among webcamming professionals, which identified the most frequent complaints as “States of anxiety and fear” (75.6%), “Mood states” (58.3%), “Self-knowledge and self-development” (54.3%), and “Self-esteem” (53.4%). As less frequent aspects, the data indicate “Gender-based violence” (6.3%) and “Rights violations” (7.9%). From a critical perspective, we analyze this phenomenon through discussions on the platformization of labor, neoliberal entrepreneurial discourse, and the putafeminist perspective on sex work.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carolina Carvalho Dias, Laura Leão Foine https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Based on two theoretical and methodological assumptions of the Materialist Discourse Analysis, this article analyzes the book Puta História (2024), by Fátima Medeiros, understanding it as a putagrafia (Ribeiro, 2020) in the format of an autobiographical romance that appears in discourse as a memory produced on the margins and despite the stigma. Starting from the notion of place of enunciation (Zoppi-Fontana, 2002), we investigate the discursive mechanisms for the author, historical militant of the category, projects different feixes de formações imaginárias e efeitos-leitores, diriginó-se both to other sex workers and to an external public. Articulating the concept of putagrafias (Ribeiro, 2020), understood as “a new place to enunciate about a prostituição in which its voice, by means of writing, can be ressoar and make echo” (Ribeiro, 2020, p. 17), we show how the jocosidade in Medeiros’ work operates as a refração da experiência (Lopes, 2023b), I decompose and reconfigure dinners experienced with clients through writing. The analysis demonstrates that the work functions as a subjective gesture and an aesthetic and political intervention that transforms marginalized life into a literary narrative, allowing the author to singularize her trajectory and dispute representations. Furthermore, we show how autobiographical writing acts as self-care and freedom practice (Parteka, 2016), creating symbolic conditions for the realization of intersubjective mourning work (Dunker, 2023). We conclude that the work promotes a positive self-representation of sexual workers, constitutes an artefact of cultural memory and operates as a device of resonance and ressignificance, transforming personal narrative into a powerful object of symbolic and political dispute.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Fernanda Moreira, Mónica Graciela Zoppi-Fontana https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The construction of aesthetic language in camgirl performances and the spectator’s desire
The article looks at the construction of aesthetic language in camgirl performances, using concepts from psychoanalysis and aesthetic anthropology. It analyses how male fantasies, influenced by the Oedipus Complex (Freud), shape interactions with camgirls, seen as sexualized figures who allow the expression of a freer libido. Camgirl performances explore the balance between the beautiful and the sublime, creating tension and desire through elements such as suspense, lighting and costumes. In addition, they construct performative identities adapted to the demands of the market and the preferences of spectators, using fantasy characters and names. These performances are presented as artistic expressions that challenge social norms and explore male desire, revealing an aesthetic game that balances communication and concealment, keeping excitement and idealization at the heart of the experience.
Copyright (c) 2025 Caio Ferreira Romano, Ana Carolina Fiori, Natânia Lopes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In what follows, I briefly outline an overview of artistic representations of prostitution during the first phase of Brazilian Modernism (1922–1930). I select this period as a point of departure because I discern, within avant-garde modernity, a certain shift in the discourses surrounding prostitution – particularly when compared to the pathologizing and criminological imaginaries that shaped discussions of sexual commerce at the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the Brazilian Belle Époque. Formally (and therefore methodologically) this text operates on the threshold between the encyclopedia entry and the aphorism. This methodological choice seeks, however illusorily, to compensate for an irremediable absence within such epistemes. What remains to be constructed – and this would require a work of considerable scope – is a history of prostitution in Brazilian visual and literary arts.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gabriel Morais Medeiros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
During the 20th century, the city of Itabaiana, located in the interior of Paraíba, developed an intense trade with the exploitation of female bodies, which, in most cases, were considered commodities and objects of pleasure. These women, who lived in extreme poverty or were seduced and abandoned by corruptors, saw prostitution as the only means of survival in a patriarchal, sexist and exclusionary society. A century later, Itabaiana is still considered a city suitable for male pleasures, since there are still “barbarés” – cabarets disguised as bars – where women turn to prostitution as a means of survival. Instead of accepting to be treated as objects, they make profits and try to obtain social and economic autonomy. This work, using the methodology of oral history and ethnography, tells the life stories of these professionals. Through listening and observation, we will address the sociability they face, including their experiences in combating gender-based violence that still exists in society.
Copyright (c) 2025 Flaviano Batista Ferreira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this essay we share the processes of collaboration in visual arts and memory through which we have engaged with the Coletivo Puta Davida. Among the potentialities and contours of the alliances, we highlight the importance of critical reflection and an interrogative attitude, from the positionalities of the world we inhabit, as a key element for consolidating coalition strategies. We understand that the alliance with the movement must be woven relationally between knowledge and lived experience. Efforts must converge to enhance the vocalities of the activism of the prostitutes’ movement. Through artistic devices that reach and circulate in different social spaces, we have developed, in partnership with members of the Coletivo, activations of the documentary content of the Arquivo Davida that can contribute to breaking down stigma, building empathy, and making progress in the macro and micro-political fields.
Copyright (c) 2025 Angie Donini, Amanda Calabria https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The purpose of this series of drawings is to celebrate the memory of powerful and influential women who were once perceived as whores for their sexual conduct. Some did so of their own free will and defended the dignity of this practice, others did so under brutal violence and did everything they could to free themselves from a humiliating condition. Regardless of the moral evaluation we have of this aspect of their lives, they all left an indelible mark on history. By celebrating the memory of their whores, I hope to contribute to the destigmatization of these women and others that readers will certainly be able to add to this gallery. Often the stigma of prostituted women and ignorance about their real experience causes more harm than the eventual violations suffered while performing sex work. While sexist historiography sees them as a lost women, they have proven that a whore can become many things: movie actress, marchioness, queen, interpreter, military strategist, vice president, philanthropist, saint or simply a whore, with great pride and no hypocrisy.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcio Zamboni, Natânia Lopes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper aims to shed light on the sexual culture currently known as BDSM, presenting its main characteristics, ethical codes, and the importance of aesthetics in erotic play and its public image. It also explores BDSM in its intersection with sex work, a practice that takes on distinct contours, as demonstrated in the ethnographic account of a professional dominatrix. For this reflection, bibliographic references are used in dialogue with field findings. At the end of the text, a photographic essay with field images is presented, visually complementing the proposed analysis. The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of new ethics and aesthetics for the development of new sexual politics.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jorge Leite Junior, Paula Nogueira Batista https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
What cannot be elaborated from the female body returns in the form of prostitution?
The article analyzes female prostitution from a psychoanalytic, historical and social perspective, articulating gender, sexuality and stigma. The research, linked to a PhD study currently underway at USP, is based on interviews with seven cis and trans women who work in prostitution, discussing their narratives in light of prostitute feminist authors, such as Monique Prada and Melissa Gira Grant, and Freudian and contemporary psychoanalytic frameworks. The study highlights how society constructs the division of femininity, reducing women to the binary of virgin/whore, and how the female body, historically controlled by patriarchy and Christian morality, returns as a subversive act through prostitution. The stigmatization of this activity reveals the social difficulty of elaborating female sexuality, which is often repressed and transformed into an object of symbolic and concrete violence. The interviewees’ statements show contradictions between desire, morality, and power, exposing the role of prostitution as a space of resistance and paradoxical support for the institution of marriage. It is concluded that discussing prostitution is essential to deconstruct stigmas, rethink social values regarding women’s sexuality, and highlight the return of the repressed in society, as “what cannot be elaborated in the female body returns in the form of prostitution.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Christiana Paiva de Oliveira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article seeks to discuss how the centrality of the gaze in Western culture is manifested in audiovisual media through a hierarchy headed by the image that makes various types of sound a passive complement. The identification of this hierarchy occurs through the visual and sonic discussion presented in the film Space is the Place (1974), where the boundaries between music and noise are broken, as well as a questioning of the centrality of the image in audiovisual narrative.
Copyright (c) 2025 Vinícius Teles Córdova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Drawing the comic book markets in Porto Alegre
The visual essay explores the modes of circulation of comic books in Porto Alegre, intertwining methodological approaches and theoretical discussions that focus on two artistic-mercantile circuits: the editorial-traditional and the independent. 1. The work traces the flows of comic books throughout the city, mapping routes that originate from and pass through secondhand bookstores, comic shops, and fairs - spaces that enable interactions among comic artists, editors, shopkeepers, readers, and consumers. 2. In addition to identifying the networks of humans and non-humans that agence different circuits of mercantile exchange, the essay highlights the role of drawing as a central practice in the ethnographic endeavor. Drawing is mobilized both as a catalyst for interactions during the construction of the empirical field and as a tool for registering and analyzing, organizing and presenting the anthropological reflections derived from the research. Thus, integrated into the ethnographic process, drawing functions as both a descriptive and analytical element. In this ethnographic and visual production, it contributes to demonstrating that, although markets are often perceived as spaces devoid of social ties, the scenes and commercial flows rendered through drawing reveal the interconnections between bonding, art, and market.
Copyright (c) 2025 Victória Perfeito https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Des-ubicá — memorias de una dinosauria travesti sudaka (Des-ubicá — Memories of a South American Travesti Dinosaur), a title shaped by the typical Chilean pronunciation of the word desubicada (meaning out of place or disoriented), was an independent publication and zine-collage by Sofía Devenir, released by Editorial Gata Kuir in 2018. Sofía is a historian, artist, sex worker, and composer, and a member of the travesti band Las Indetectables, alongside Noelia Shalá and Divina Tota.
Copyright (c) 2025 Bárbara Piazza dos Reis, Priscila Lira de Oliveira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Community Flour House of Lagoa de Fora, São Raimundo Nonato, Piauí
Between the solidity of materialities and the fluidity of daily life, we present this visual essay that intertwines architecture and human dynamics within a space of sociability and subsistence: the community flour house of Lagoa de Fora, a village in the rural area of São Raimundo Nonato, in the southeastern region of Piauí.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nailton Negreiros Ribeiro, Vanessa Linke, Henrique Alcântara e Silva , Edna Paula de Negreiros Paes, Samara Sandra de Negreiros Paes, Tamires Alves de Negreiros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article systematizes and updates the main reflections of my doctoral thesis on music production processes, in the context of recording studios. In view of the institutional configuration of the Brazilian phonographic field, taking into account Anglo-American matrices, I analyze those environments, the professional categories that work in them and the equipment in circulation, as elements of an objectifying ritual of this sound world. I use as methodological resources bibliographic and documentary sources, as well as interviews and multi-situated ethnographic experience, conducted especially between 2017 and 2018, among the middle classes of the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, southeastern Brazil. By problematizing the topics mentioned within the theoretical framework of sound studies, in dialogue with an anthropology of objects and ritual, I present a scene from the Space Blues studio to argue that the phenomenon in question spreads and materializes in networks that intertwine, gaining specific local contours. I expect thus to bring subsidies to the material culture, labor relations and ethnomusicology fields, among others disciplines.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniel Ferreira Wainer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
I got off a bus in Belo Horizonte on a cold July morning in 2024, stepping onto a land I had only set foot on a few times in my life, back when my great-grandmother Natália was still alive. Returning to the home of relatives is a movement driven by longing and the search for our origins — a process of "getting to know the family" that intertwines with my PhD research in Social Anthropology. During this visit, I was surprised by the discovery of a two-part DVD titled "Aniversário Vó Natália" (Grandma Natália’s Birthday), which portrays in detail the celebration of my great-grandmother’s 90th birthday. It was in 2004, and my family had ventured for the second time by car from São Paulo to Minas Gerais. Like a survival of the past and a glimpse into our future, this footage — which I didn’t even remember existed — was filmed with a camera rented by the family and passed from hand to hand, a collective gesture to preserve that day in memory.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tayná Almeida https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Between dirty work, exploitation and exclusion
Prostitution is widely framed as ‘dirty work’ in discussions about the labor market, a concept introduced by Everett Hughes to describe occupations that, although diverse and essential, carry social stigma. These activities range from jobs considered arduous or hazardous to those marked by connotations of immorality or crime, such as prostitution. This essay analyzes, through a bibliographic review, the prostitution of transgender and travesti women, investigating how moral values influence the lack of regulation of this activity and perpetuate the exploitation of marginalized minorities. The discussion aims to reflect on the role of morality in sustaining the status quo and evaluate to what extent regulation can contribute to the dignity of these workers, addressing historical stigmas and inequalities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Igor Souza de Abreu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This text is a historical analysis of the relationship between prostitution and the (in)disciplining of bodies and spaces in the urban configuration of the city of Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará, between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th one. Throughout these decades, we’ve had emerged discourses and practices that made meretricious behaviour a problem for the urban, social, and moral organisation of the city, which also came to be described, thought about, and disputed from the point of view of sexual morality. This was a period in which attempts were made to regulate and control existences and behaviours considered inappropriate and deviant in relation to the norms in force and a model of what a civilised and modern society would be. The individuals and groups marked and stigmatised with the images and profiles of these ‘deviants’ were the objects of the attempts at repression and segregation that were being organised and institutionalised. It was in this context that the prostitute appeared as one of the figures in this gallery of social outcasts and prostitution began to be talked about and defined as a threat and a danger to the ‘good customs’ of the capital of Ceará.
Copyright (c) 2025 José Humberto Carneiro Pinheiro Filho https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Nossas Senhoras” is a book of oddments that narrates some of the journeys of Mardina, a character who is the result of the history of three generations of seamstresses, wanderers, and storytellers. The book was produced during the Covid-19 pandemic and is one of the material outcomes of the autoethnographic process entitled “entre o grito e o respiro, costuro em minhas mãos rotas de fuga: aprendizagens em antropologia" ("between the scream and the breath, I stitch escape routes in my hands: learnings in anthropology") (Guimarães, 2022), which explores sexual violence, racism, racialization, and training in Anthropology. The book’s playful nature echoes the possibilities of multiple simultaneous narratives, where violence is not the final story for women. It expresses memories from Mardina’s path, the learnings she experienced with other women, and the slow insistence of the exhausting acts of trying.
Copyright (c) 2025 Isabella Alves Guimarães https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Report on the visit to the exhibition Lia D Castro: everywhere and nowhere, at Museu de Arte de São Paulo. The text provides information about the characteristics of the artist's creative process as well as the viewer's refletions on the experiencie.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniela Mucinic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article analyzes the meanings attributed to the practice of drag queen performance, based on the results of the research Mapping Transformist Art in the Federal District and Surroundings, conducted between 2021 and 2022. Through the prosopography of forty transformist artists from the metropolitan area of the Federal District, we examine their motivations and the relationships they establish between their artistic practices and their sexual identities. The study reveals how bodily expressions, often ridiculed during childhood and adolescence, are re-signified and transformed into forms of aesthetic consecration, made possible by the process of “autonomization” and “ratification” of transformism. We demonstrate how various social agents contribute to legitimizing transformist art as a specific language of a social group.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rodolfo Godoi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
I met with Coraly Zahonero, actress, member of the Comédie Française, on a rainy autumn day in Paris. Coraly wrote, directed and performed in 2016 a show about Grisélidis Réal. Due to the warm rain, which didn't make us want to go outside, we stayed talking for more than two hours in his 20 square meter dressing room, furnished with charm and equipped with practically everything: a bed, two sofas, table, dressing table, and tea and coffee service. The actors of the Comédie française spend their days in their dressing rooms working on their characters and resting between rehearsals. At night they perform in one of the institution's three theaters, and Coraly's dressing room is at the main headquarters, the Salle Richelieu, founded in 1680 in the heart of the Palais-Royal, in the 1st arrondissement of Paris. The long conversation now costs me double work to listen to and edit the interview amidst our also long parentheses and digressions: we have been friends for over 30 years, she is my daughter's godmother and I am her godmother. I participated closely in the process of creating the show about Grisélidis Réal, whose poster I could see above his head, on the central wall of the dressing room. Coraly could actually be confused with Grisélidis, which is difficult to know at first, such is the physical resemblance and her admirable work of composition: the black eyes outlined in a Barbara style, her long hair, the bangs, the huge earrings.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tânia da Costa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Embodying Spirit, Female Exu, Lady of the Crossroads. Messenger, Daughter of Disorder, Queen of Laughter. Loving, Loyal Friend, Gatekeeper Sentinel. Serpent-Woman, Divine Lilith, Beautiful Lady, Red Rose, Poisonous Snake. Advocate. I bow my head and ask permission to present this work. Photographs of Queen Pombagira Sete Encruzilhadas in the crown of Pai Valdo de Iansã, from the Cabana do Preto Velho da Mata Escura, in the Bom Jardim neighborhood, Fortaleza-CE. The images unveil the subtle body, between worlds, bringing and carrying Pombagira to and from the crossroads of existence. Daughter of the streets, Majesty Pombagira enchants through the blood pulsing in her medium’s veins. The images are rides and laughter. Spins, turns, circles. Pulsing life. Shedding. Binding. Knife’s cut. Pleasure and ecstasy. Prayer and healing. Mystery.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jean dos Anjos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The review of the film "Suely in the Sky" ("O Céu de Suely"), directed by Karim Aïnouz, uses tools from social sciences and psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian theory, to think about how the protagonist's desire and idealizations about love and territory(ies) (s) that he inhabits, and/or wherever he passes, are articulated with the body and identity, producing transits and recurrences. The exit through prostitution, in this context, translates into a turning point, into the possibility of creative agency of living conditions through the adoption of a provisional name that resituates the search for money
Copyright (c) 2025 João Paulo Severo da Costa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The text recounts the knowledge and experiences, described through personal memories, of a sex worker in three brothels in the city of Guarulhos, São Paulo. It focuses on the pole dance performances in the club stages.
Copyright (c) 2025 Melissa Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cutting the taboa fibers in the taboal, that is, in the marshland, is the first step in the production process of the crafts sold at Quilombo Campinho da Independência, located in Paraty, in the southern part of the state of Rio de Janeiro. This stage involves knowledge and techniques related to the use of this natural resource, which are integral to the community’s way of life. Beyond this knowledge of production (Appadurai, 2009), the taboal is also a privileged arena for understanding conflicts between artisans and researchers regarding the management of taboa.
Copyright (c) 2025 Leonardo Vidal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0