THE POWER OF NOT GIVING: GIFT RELATIONS AND BROTHELS

• Autor(a) principal: Blanchette, Thaddeus
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Farol - Revista de Estudos Organizacionais e Sociedade
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.face.ufmg.br/index.php/farol/article/view/5750
• topic: Prostitución; Rio de Janeiro; Relaciones de regalo; Reciprocidad; Trabajo engendrado; Prostituição; Rio de Janeiro; Relações do dom; Reciprocidade; Trabalho engendrado; Prostitution; Rio de Janeiro; Guft relationships; Reciprocity; Engendered labor

This article is based on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, a nexus in the global sexual landscape where prostitution is not criminalized and where brothels, though illegal, tend to be tolerated, protected, and even managed by police and other authorities.  Given the moral sanctions employed against women who engage in the sale of sex, we believe that the institution of the brothel may be, in some situations, more important for women to delineate the boundaries of intimate reciprocity than for men, a fact that is often overlooked by feminist theorists who talk about prostitution but rarely observe it in the field.  In this sense and context, brothels and the support structures associated with them can be understood as strategic "circuit breakers" for women seeking to avoid the engendered logic of reciprocity and sex.