Banquet of men: sexuality, kinship, and predation in female prostitution practice

Abstract

What we propose here is an ethnographically based reflection on the nature of prostitution relations. Its substrate is a dialogue amongst anthropological reflections on sexuality, kinship, and body. For two years, I accompanied the daily life of four prostitutes who are militants of the category's movement and maintained contact with many other prostitutes and related actors in Brazil. One of our results is the strong biographic tension between kinship "devices" and sexuality, individuation processes and alliance (and affinity) constructions, and the war and predation tone - prior to reciprocity and mercantilization - that prostitution takes in social life. Besides that, in an diachronic view, intensive body-relation fabrication and transformation processes are evident.

Prostitution; kinship; body; sexuality; Brazil