Between Rio's Red-Light District and the League of Nations

Immigrants and Sex Work in 1920s Rio de Janeiro

Bibliographic Data

ID5846823
AuthorsCristiana Schettini (0000-0003-3955-7730, National University of General San Martín, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume62
IssueS25
Pages105-132
Publication date2017-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Review of Social History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-8590 • E-ISSN: 1469-512X
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020859017000621
OpenAlexW2783733040
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited15

This article focuses on sex work relations in the Mangue, one of Rio de Janeiro's red light districts in the 1920s. It follows multiple simultaneous trajectories that converge in Rio's changing urban landscape: League of Nation's investigators (some of them undercover), local Brazilian authorities, particularly the police, and Fanny Galper, a former prostitute and madam. It argues that the spatial mobility of the persons involved in sex work is part of broader debates: On the one hand, these experiences of mobility are closely connected to the variegated attempts at surveillance of sex work that characterized Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s and the specific racialized organization of the women's work as prostitutes. On the other hand, the actors analysed in this article also participated, in different ways, in the production of meanings in broader debates on the international circulation of policies intended to regulate and surveil prostitution. These encounters offer the opportunity to explore some of the intersections between this international circulation of policies, local social dynamics of European immigration, and the racialized history of labor relations in Brazil

Circulation (fluid dynamics · Sex work · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Sex work and related issues

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