In 1984, the year before Brazil transitioned from a military dictatorship to a tenuous democracy, a young woman named Gabriela Leite attended a national meeting for sex workers held by a progressive ministry of the Catholic Church. There she shocked those assembled by taking the microphone and unabashedly calling herself a prostitute. As she recalled in her 2008 memoir, the ministry tended to use euphemisms like “girl” and “marginalized woman”—which she had come to reject. “I told the audience: ‘I think it is because people are ashamed of the word prostitute.’ That caused quite a commotion,” she wrote.
In the years that followed Leite and her colleague Lourdes Barreto, echoing a number of their peers around the world, chose to refer to themselves with the dreaded words prostituta and, especially, puta, even as “sex worker” emerged as most activists’ preferred term. Puta can mean either “whore” or “slut” in both Portuguese and Spanish; its reclamation, both in Brazil and by Spanish-speaking activists such as Georgina Orellano of Argentina, has signaled a rejection of the taboos endured not only by sex workers but by any woman who transgresses traditional sexual mores. “I’ve always liked the word,” Leite said shortly before she died of cancer in 2013. “If all putas didn’t live with so much stigma in their heads, they would use [it].”
Leite and Barreto defined their movement as a repudiation of the shame that had, for so long, discouraged prostitutes from speaking out about the abuses they suffered. Such abuse often took the form of police brutality, which Leite had begun protesting in the late 1970s. While selling sex has never been illegal in Brazil, prostitutes have long been persecuted on charges such as vagrancy and pimping, repression that intensified in the late 1970s, over a decade into Brazil’s iron-fisted military dictatorship. When two women disappeared after being loaded onto a police van in São Paulo in 1979, Leite, then a young university dropout, led a group of sex workers in staging a series of demonstrations in the city’s main square. By 1980 they had joined with gay men and travestis1 who were decrying a recent wave of arbitrary arrests in their own communities, all of them part of a broader redemocratization movement that also included feminists, trade unionists, and student activists. At protests in São Paulo, sex workers joined their queer allies in chanting a slogan that brought together the militancy of the New Left with the hedonism of the counterculture: “Abaixo a repressão, mais amor e mais tesão!” (Down with repression, more love and more desire!)
As the democratic transition progressed, Leite and other sex-worker activists organized for their rights through the Catholic Church, whose progressive clerics, inspired by the liberation theology that had taken the Latin American Church by storm in the previous decade, had begun pastoral outreach among prostitutes. Breaking with a precedent of treating women who sold sex as reprehensible deviants, they sought to understand the structural factors that shaped their decisions, such as sexism, prejudice against single mothers, and unchecked capitalism—sketching the outlines of an analysis that would later be central to the sex workers’ movement. These clerics’ rejection of the stigma against prostitution and their emphasis on prostitutes’ self-worth and dignity deeply appealed to Leite and her cohort. Yet they soon came to chafe at the Church’s paternalism: even the most left-wing clergy were staunch abolitionists, meaning that they objected on religious and moral grounds to prostitution as such. If women developed sufficient self-esteem, these priests believed, they would have the psychological wherewithal to leave the profession and opt for more respectable ones.
Through its ministries, the Church provided sex workers with the resources necessary to jumpstart their activism; in fact, it was at the 1984 meeting that Leite and Barreto first met each other and began scheming about moving out from under the clergy’s watchful eye. By the end of the 1980s they had publicly rejected its abolitionism and formed an autonomous social movement. In her memoir, published in my English translation in 2024, Leite recalls the origins of the sex-workers’ movement, including the Primeiro Encontro Nacional de Prostitutas (First National Meeting of Prostitutes) in Rio de Janeiro in 1987, where several dozen delegates from across the country discussed issues such as violence, public health, and stigma. Together they devised a platform that involved defending prostitution as a legitimate livelihood, demanding an end to police violence, and shifting public attitudes toward prostitutes and their families.
The movement, led by Leite and Barreto, went on to collaborate with the newly reconfigured Ministry of Health on accessible, non-stigmatizing HIV/AIDS prevention materials; launch an eclectic newspaper for sex workers and their allies, an impish clothing line, and numerous other cultural ventures; and lobby politicians to fully decriminalize all aspects of adult, voluntary prostitution. (The latter achievement still eludes them: third-party activities, such as owning a brothel or otherwise facilitating sexual commerce, remain criminalized in Brazil, meaning that most establishments operate underground, leaving sex workers more vulnerable to exploitation from employers and violence from clients.)
Over its almost fifty-year history, the Brazilian sex-workers’ movement has taken pleasure in ruffling feathers and poking fun at the pieties of the bourgeois mainstream. Barreto, for example, now an octogenarian and still an important national leader, has “Eu sou puta” (“I am a whore”) and “Vagina tem poder” (“Vagina has power”) tattooed on her forearm. The reclamation of the word “whore” was not a gesture unique to Latin America: in the 1980s a series of World Whores’ Congresses in the US and Europe produced a manifesto of sex-worker rights and staged cheeky parades and a flamboyant “Hooker’s Ball.” The irreverence and playful tone of the international movement found a good home in Brazil, the country of Carnaval, where hedonistic revelry, raucous genderbending, and freewheeling attitudes toward sex and nudity have long coexisted with traditional Catholic piety and preoccupations with female sexual honor.
Even Carol Leigh, the crimson-haired firebrand who coined the term “sex work” in 1979, was skeptical of the zeal with which it was taken up in activist circles and beyond. While the label “has been politically advantageous for us,” she wrote in her foreword to Leite’s memoir—shortly before her own death from cancer in 2022—she agreed with Leite that “we cannot forget the provocative spirit of the whore, and the power that comes from embracing the terms that have been used to stigmatize us.” Leigh recalled that Leite, whom she first met at the 1989 World Whores’ Summit in San Francisco, believed that “sex worker was thrust upon her in NGO circles to sanitize prostitution,” while “puta was a rich, evocative word with a history and a culture.” Rather than submit to a form of respectability politics, Leite, Barreto, and other Brazilian activists retained and relished what Leigh called their “whore’s-eye view.”
So what is a puta, and what does she want? Like her whore sisters to the North, she embraces deviance and provocation while also making pointed critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, empty moralism, and US hegemony. In the last decade, this venerable tradition of puta organizing has given rise to what the Brazilian activist and sex worker Monique Prada in the 2010s named putafeminismo, or putafeminism. For reasons that are perhaps obvious, feminist and sex-worker movements have often found themselves at odds regarding questions of sexuality, agency, and empowerment. But putafeminism aims to reconcile the two, calling for a working-class, sex-radical feminism that positions whores as its flagbearers.
Thanks to a recent spate of translations, a number of these putas have reached the bookshelves and bedside tables of the Anglophone world. In addition to Duke University Press’s publication of Leite’s memoir, last year Feminist Press released Prada’s Putafeminista: A Manifesto of Sex Worker Feminism, edited and translated by Amanda De Lisio, and So What If I’m a Puta: Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire, by Amara Moira, translated by De Lisio and Bruna Dantas Lobato. (Both were originally published in Brazil in 2018.) Moira and Prada, a generation younger than Leite, have emerged alongside the activist and author Indianarae Siqueira as what Prada calls a “puta trinity” at the vanguard of a new sexual politics in Latin America’s largest and most populous nation. Their writings present sex work not just as a legitimate livelihood under patriarchal capitalism but also as an opportunity to redraw the predictable lines of desire and self-determination.
Putafeminista is a call to arms, building on Prada’s longstanding advocacy for sex workers across Brazil. In 2015 she cofounded the Central Única de Trabalhadoras e Trabalhadores Sexuais (Unified Central of Sex Workers), or CUTS, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), Brazil’s national union federation, which emerged as a major player in national politics during the democratic transition of the 1980s—and which in 2013 refused to recognize sex work as legitimate work. Today, she is affiliated with the Articulação Nacional de Profissionais do Sexo (National Articulation of Sex Professionals), which sponsors research projects on sex work, organizes national conferences, and supports local sex-worker groups across the country.
In public appearances and on her popular blog mundoinvisível.org, Prada speaks about prostitutes primarily as workers, foregrounding their labor and material struggles: “I consider it politically important to make a clear statement that sex work is work,” she writes in Putafeminista. “Prostitution, if it cannot be considered just another form of work—a definition that would erase its specificities and issues, not only labor related but also a series of taboos, stigmas, and oppressions tied to human sexuality, especially female sexuality—has been a possible profession for a vast number of people in the place where I come from and in many places I have been.”
Prada has prioritized finding common cause with broader working-class movements. In the 2010s she advocated for the socialist congressman Jean Wyllys’s bill to fully legalize and regulate sex work, and she often speaks out against the growing cohort of evangelical lawmakers pushing to criminalize the profession: “Simply repressing or banning prostitution would not effectively end the stigma,” she writes in her book. “Instead of providing safety, these laws often worsen the precariousness of already vulnerable individuals, forcing women into hiding and into social isolation.”
Her fellow activist Moira—whose So What If I’m a Puta is essentially a diary of her first few years as a travesti prostitute in the state of São Paulo—is one of Brazil’s most outspoken advocates for trans rights and the full decriminalization of sex work. In recent years she has also become a public intellectual of sorts, routinely lecturing on sex-worker writing, trans rights, and depictions of queerness in literature, both in Brazil and abroad. In 2024 she published Neca, a critically acclaimed novel written in bajubá, an amalgam of Brazilian Portuguese and West African languages spoken by enslaved people that was developed by queer communities during Brazil’s military dictatorship to evade police repression, and is now a sociolect among travesti and trans women.
Rounding out the puta trinity, Indianarae Siqueira, the author of a recent memoir, Uma vida em DesTransição (A Life in DeTransition) (2024), leads Rio’s Casa Nem, a shelter and cultural center for queer and trans people. In June 2026 Siqueira announced that they were running to be a state representative on the Workers’ Party ticket, hoping for more success than Leite and Barreto—both of whom sought public office in decades past—at convincing voters to support the putaagenda. Across Brazil, in the face of a burgeoning social conservatism, these activists and many others channel the movement’s longstanding spirit of revelry, playfulness, and provocation into a serious political commitment to bettering the lives of sex workers and other sexual minorities. In recent years, groups in Rio de Janeiro and the Amazonian city of Belém do Pará have organized Carnaval floats that pay tribute to the movement’s “putriarchs,” marching through city streets and Rio’s famed Sambódromo—a stone’s throw from the location of the city’s first red-light district, Mangue—dressed in fishnet stockings and red sequined bustiers alongside giant likenesses of the whores of times past.
Leite, Prada, and Moira’s books are part of a genre of sex-worker writing that has long enjoyed critical and commercial success. Why do readers pick up any of the dozens of memoirs, manifestos, and tell-all volumes written by sex workers? Surely some hope to uncover titillating details about the sex lives of others, curious about what kind of sex men request when they pay for it, when the terms of pleasure are exclusively defined by one party in the sexual exchange. (Do they seek to please the sex worker, some may wonder, or simply enact their own fantasies, unencumbered by the interpersonal ethics, social conventions, or political convictions that in unremunerated sex may keep their more violent and domineering desires in check?) Or perhaps it is to vicariously access the presumed expertise wielded by the sex worker, that goddess of the erotic arts. By reading her words, we might just take on some of her desirability, the allure and skill that compel people to pay to take her to bed.
Some works in the genre tap into voyeuristic impulses, tending toward the confessional or even the graphic, containing little in the way of political critique. Publishers splash provocative titles on covers adorned with lithe silhouettes, strappy high heels, or voluptuous bosoms stuffed into intricate corseting—or with a coy (or not so coy) portrait of the writer herself. (The cover of Liara Roux’s Whore of New York, for example, features her reclining in bed, her ample cleavage framed by a red silk dress pulled down over one shoulder.) In Brazil, this voyeuristic tendency is best represented by the blog-turned-bestselling memoir of Bruna Surfistinha, the nom de guerre of Raquel Pacheco, a high-end escort who chronicled her sessions with clients in São Paulo in the 2000s, quickly becoming a media sensation and later the subject of a feature film.
That’s not to say that such writing has no sociological or literary appeal. The feminist porn actress and director Candida Royalle, whose artistic, literary, and flesh-bound endeavors are brilliantly memorialized in a recent biography by the historian Jane Kamensky, wrote with candor and sensitivity—as well as her characteristic coquettishness—about her work both in front of and behind the camera over a decades-long career.2 Perhaps most idiosyncratic (and beloved) in this vein is The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore, in which the veteran Swiss prostitute divulges a client list complete with charmingly frank annotations. (“Alfredo: Near-dwarf Sicilian—suck, fuck, do not rush him 70 F.”)
Sex sells. Yet some sex-worker memoirs—rather than disclosing lurid details about people who could be our neighbors, colleagues, or even spouses—deploy a more defiant and less salacious tone, focusing less on the sex than on the work of the authors’ profession. Carol Leigh, aka Scarlot Harlot, the self-proclaimed “unrepentant whore” and grande dame of Bay Area sex-worker activism, was a pioneer of politicized sex-worker writing, blending a penchant for theatrical provocation and bawdy humor with hard-hitting critiques of sexism and moralism.
In recent years a younger cohort has taken up this approach even more zealously: in Revolting Prostitutes (2018), the British activists Molly Smith and Juno Mac argue for defending sex workers’ rights while remaining skeptical of the tendency, however well-intentioned, to claim that sex work is good work. They remind us that most sex workers labor in precarious if not dangerous conditions—risks that often correspond to race, gender, immigration status, and disability. In the US, the journalist and former sex worker Melissa Gira Grant has written extensively about the harms both of repressive legislation like SESTA/FOSTA, which pushes sex work underground, and of global efforts to eliminate sex trafficking, which, she argues, often lend themselves to a draconian, prohibitionist, and anti-migrant agenda that ultimately exposes workers to more violence and exploitation. Elsewhere, Charlotte Shane, who wrote the foreword to Moira’s English translation, has reflected more broadly on the often contradictory—and at times troubling—nature of desire and power in intimate relationships. Sex work, in her depiction, becomes a terrain in which practitioners and clients can work through such quandaries free from the constraining social conventions that govern noncommercial sex and dating.3
Sex-worker literature also has a rich history in Brazil, dating back to the 1980s and the founding of the Brazilian Network of Prostitutes. It now appears to be in its golden age. Barreto’s poignant and plainspoken memoir, Puta autobiografia, was published in Portuguese in 2023, joining Leite’s 1992 and 2008 volumes and the many essays and editorials that have appeared in the movement’s newspaper, Beijo da rua, since its founding in 1988. In her prolific writing, Leite championed prostitution as not only the world’s oldest profession but also one of its noblest, a sacred calling to meet people’s most profound needs for intimacy and companionship. She eulogized the prostitutes of Ancient Greece—who, in her rendering, were highly respected connoisseurs of art, philosophy, and science—and waxed poetic about the glamor and seduction of the “red lights” of prostitution zones. In addition to acting as confidantes, informal psychologists, and friends, Leite believed that prostitutes could serve as sex therapists for the handicapped, insecure, or inexperienced. In her memoir, she recalls “blind men, guys paralyzed from the waist down that couldn’t have erections but still had desire.… Not all prostitutes understand that this is a privilege of our profession, that it is one of its most noble aspects—this learned solidarity, the breaking of prejudices that are so embedded in our society, forces that worship beauty and marginalize difference.”
Prada and Moira pay homage to their puta foremothers, especially Leite, but they also challenge some of their premises. Prada in particular is unsentimental in her appraisal of contemporary prostitution, dispensing with Leite’s nostalgia for the bohemian meccas of the past and taking a much less sanguine view of the power dynamics that structure the commercial sexual marketplace. For her, the brothel is “the final frontier…where misogyny nests.” In paid sex, she writes, “women’s sexuality is often positioned to serve the desires of clients,” an arrangement that offers few opportunities to subvert entrenched gender hierarchies. Repudiating both the uncritical sex positivity of some figures in her milieu and the radical feminist conviction that prostitution is tantamount to selling an organ (“as of the last time I checked, my pussy was still intact,” she quips), she arrives at a matter-of-fact, heterodox view of sex work that makes room for ambivalence in debates long characterized by their polarizations.
Another divergence from Leite’s intellectual legacy is Prada’s unequivocal self-fashioning as a feminist, an identity of which Leite remained wary. While Leite felt snubbed and alienated by abolitionist feminists starting in the 1980s, Prada is part of a younger, iconoclastic third wave that has room for her brand of feminism—one that is “not moralistic, punitive, or victimizing”—under its big tent. For her, feminism is best represented not by orthodox radicals or intellectuals but by working women, grassroots militants who live “a raw and essential feminism necessary for their survival.”
Prada takes particular aim at what she considers the “naïve” claim that sex work is “empowering”; for her, no work under capitalism, especially precarious work, can empower the worker or wholly subvert the system. What prostitutes can and do subvert, she writes, echoing the socialist feminists of the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s, is the logic of patriarchal capitalism that mandates and naturalizes women’s unpaid labor behind the facades of romance and family. On why women pursue sex work, Prada takes a nuanced view. She recalls how, in her own case, a capacious desire for sex prompted her to take up the profession, even as she bluntly states that most women who sell sex do so because they have to. Like Smith and Mac, her politics is, essentially, anti-work: all work under capitalism is bad, she suggests, but in certain situations sex work is the least bad option.
And even if sex work is often bad work, Prada insists, its practitioners are nonetheless entitled to more robust rights, more respect, less shame. It is partly for this reason that Prada prefers “sex worker” to other monikers. At the same time, she writes, “I like the word puta a lot,” enough to christen a movement under its banner. Putafeminism, she writes, transforms an enduring stigma into a militant pride, “strengthening our fight for rights without having to give up our work or be ashamed of it.”
Unlike Prada, Moira treats sex work as a vocation. “Giving pleasure was my bitter fate,” she writes in So What If I’m a Puta, a collection of short vignettes in the tradition of the crônica that offers a contemplative, morally ambiguous, and searching rumination on sex work and transness. “Giving, but also receiving. If getting pleasure from work is a key factor in choosing a career, then mine was already chosen.” Moira was pursuing a doctorate in literary theory at the prestigious University of Campinas when she started selling sex, meaning she came from a different class than many of her colleagues in the dark streets and squalid parking lots where they peddled their wares. She points out, however, that professional opportunities are scarce for any gender nonconforming person in Brazil, regardless of their educational qualifications or social capital. In deft prose, Moira writes unsparingly about the violence and exploitation she experienced on the job: painful and degrading sex, stealthing (non-consensual removal of a condom), shameless haggling, verbal abuse. All this dehumanizing treatment weighs on her as the narrative progresses: she speaks of hitting a “crisis point with that merciless string of bastards,” feeling “not just physical pain, but also the psychic pain of being unable to say no.”
And yet she ultimately suggests that the work offered a psychological lifeline as well as an economic one, validating her transness and allowing her to feel like a woman—which, as all women are surely aware, may involve violence and contempt alongside “admiration and desire.” Prada and Moira both first became public figures through blogs in which they divulged their exploits, and it is clear that, for Moira, writing became a way to make sense of her often bewildering and paradoxical experiences of precarity, violence, and desire. “These men paid me close to nothing for the sex I performed for them,” she writes, “but they didn’t know I was getting a story out of it too…. I was always the narrator.” Struggling to find rewarding sex and companionship in nonremunerative relationships—and aware that being with her could make her partners vulnerable to the violence and discrimination directed at trans people—she concluded that sex work afforded “the only love society had reserved for me—the only kind of love I could experience that wouldn’t put anyone else at risk.”
Unlike Prada, who tells us that she “never looked for even a shred of soul or humanity in my lovers per hour,” Moira makes a generous attempt to understand her clients’ lust and internalized prejudices, expressing sympathy for fat, brutish men, ones with hairy nipples and bad breath, society’s unwanted, who can only fulfill their desires by paying for sex. As Siqueira has said, defending the Johns so often painted as rapacious or uncaring (even sex-positive defenses of sex work don’t have much to say in favor of clients): “They’re not the soulless villains of popular imaginaries, sick, dirty losers—they are our parents, our brothers, our uncles, our children, our neighbors.”
By simultaneously offering a defense of sex work and a critique of it, putafeminism seems to offer a way past some of the most caustic divides in Anglophone feminism—those rooted in the “sex wars” that polarized the second wave in the late 1970s and 1980s. Anti-pornography radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin famously argued that commercial sex reduced women to the status of objects; in an influential 1979 book, for example, the anti-trafficking activist Kathleen Barry equated prostitution to “female sexual slavery.” Pro-sex or sex-radical feminists such as Patrick Califia, Ellen Willis, and Gayle Rubin, on the other hand, while they rarely defended conventional pornography and prostitution as good for women, believed that paid sex offered the potential for experimentation, self-expression, and liberation for men and women alike.
This sex-positive camp also argued that banning porn and sex work would ultimately serve reactionary, moralistic ends, a warning that has proved prescient. Radical-feminist arguments against legalizing sex work—including those for the so-called Nordic model, which only criminalizes clients and third parties like pimps—have indeed inadvertently contributed to the criminalization of vulnerable women by depriving them of safer, regulated workplaces while justifying crackdowns on migrants who are detained and deported for selling sex. They have also fueled a dangerous conflation of voluntary and coerced sex work. The 2018 SESTA/FOSTA legislation, for example, which was supposed to combat sex trafficking and the exploitation of minors, and was supported by the radical feminist Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, shut down online platforms that had allowed sex workers to exercise more control over their client selection and working conditions.
These debates were never really laid to rest. Radical feminists’ attempts to ban pornography now seem almost quaint, or perhaps even comical, amid the oceans of professional porn and the armies of amateur creators operating via websites such as OnlyFans. Yet in my experience teaching college students about the history of sex-worker activism, I routinely hear young people suggest that prostitution is inherently degrading or repeat sensationalized claims about the prevalence of sex trafficking. In some progressive circles, on the other hand, young women producing content for online platforms proudly proclaim themselves to be sex workers. Here the discourse of sex work as work—even good, empowering work—has taken on some of the trappings of a defanged neoliberal feminism: women as erotic entrepreneurs, girl bosses getting rich from being desired. Despite some of its more transgressive gestures—its attempts to subvert notions of female sexual propriety and challenge taboo—this posture feels unsatisfying, too, exchanging a genuinely radical politics for an indiscriminate embrace of work under capitalism and sex under patriarchy.
Like the sex radicals before them, putafeminists have little trouble accepting the premises that sex involves both pleasure and danger and that we may not always fully understand or endorse the things that turn us on. They depict sex, and even paid sex, as a terrain of struggle: a potential venue for self-expression, but also, or perhaps more importantly, a paycheck, a workplace, a means of resistance. Many of us who work for money can probably identify with the experience of having a job that is both pleasurable and burdensome, something we choose to do but that also weighs us down. And virtually everyone likely understands that any job only ever represents, at best, the least bad option in a limited array. Putafeminism is a feminism that speaks to the world as we live in it, affirming pleasure, deviance, and the complexity of desire while also foregrounding the material concerns and demands—about working conditions, violence, health, and precarity—that tend to populate the agendas of postcolonial feminists.
“I urge you to listen to a sex worker as you would to anyone else,” goes Prada’s final entreaty—yet the proposition of putafeminism is that putas have something unique to tell us. Rather than relegating sex workers to the shadowy corner that mainstream feminism reserves for anyone who bedevils its taxonomies of good and bad, putafeminists stress that the whore’s experience of sex and work gives her particular insight into the female condition. In this sense, putafeminism repurposes the Black feminist call to center the most vulnerable among us; as Margo St. James argued, “the word whore is used to stigmatize any woman that doesn’t fit the criteria of a good girl.” If whores themselves refuse to be daunted by stigma and shame, then perhaps we can collectively chip away at the forces that too often make sex unfulfilling and perilous for all women, forces that make rape, femicide, slut-shaming, and revenge porn all too common. To take a “whore’s-eye view” on questions of desire, power, and human frailty is to discover a feminism in which “no one loses,” Prada writes. “On the contrary, we all win.”