Puta pride
A Brazilian sex worker shaped a pioneering feminist outlook. Review: Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore, Gabriela Leite, by Gavin O'Toole
Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore: The Story of a Woman Who Decided to be a Puta, Gabriela Leite, translated by Meg Weeks, 2024, Duke University Press
Gabriela Leite’s remarkable memoir chronicling her life as an activist sex worker in Brazil provides a fascinating window on how Latin American social thought differs from its neocolonial counterparts.
If there was one distinguishing characteristic of Leite’s long and accomplished career organising prostitutes into a political lobby it was that she rejected any notion that they were “victims” of a cruel world.
By contrast, putas—as Leite insisted on calling herself and her peers to ensure that they were considered actors with agency—have choices, and many choose to be prostitutes.
“It’s dangerous to start from a position that people have no choices in life,” she explained to the pioneering US sex worker activist Carol Leigh. “Because, if we do that, we only look at them as victims and victims have no choice and no voice.”
This rejection of victimhood is critically important because it encapsulates a distinction that can be made in broad terms between Latin American and Euro-American feminisms at a critical moment in western social thought.
Many early Latin American feminists combined their activities with membership of socialist and anarchist parties, obeying the maxim that “there is no feminism without socialism”. This social character distinguished it early on from the rights-based individualism of US and European “liberal” feminisms that inform today’s progressive intersectional panoply.
Latin American feminism was, as Leite’s life demonstrates amply, grounded in ideas of community activism and participation that invariably supported projects of social reform. Although she might not have agreed—she was critical of the Left, feeling the Right was usually more honest—her career reflected an organic recognition of a class-based social hierarchy, in which the dominant forces struggled to keep the lower orders in check.
By contrast, individual “victimhood” permeates liberal feminism, at its most extreme in constructions of “victim feminism” as a passive ideology that, critically, denies women’s collective agency.
There is, of course, a reason for this, which also explains the contemporary fetishisation of identity politics: in the liberal universe, victimhood serves a purpose.
In its struggle to the death with “society” (recall Margaret Thatcher’s most famous saying from 1987, ironically in an interview with the magazine Woman’s Own, “… and who is society? There is no such thing!”), the neoliberal outlook has spawned endless conceptions of individual, subjective victimhood—in areas as diverse as sexuality, race and religion—as opposed to collective, systemic forms of persecution, such as class.
Indeed, neoliberalism has besieged notions of the “collective” to such an extent that victimhood has become one of the only bases on which people can unite in political struggle.
The formative period of Leite’s activism was the neoliberal turn of the mid-1980s, and her observations about victimhood—threading through a long career creating and organising the institutional voice of sex workers in Brazil—exerted a subtle but profound influence on every aspect of her work.
They were reflected in the empowerment she helped many putas to find as creative individuals in their own right, and also in her collaborations with government that shaped policy and perspectives on issues ranging from civil rights to HIV and Aids strategy.
Little known beyond Brazil, Leite’s activist formation took place at a fulminating period of social development as it began to settle upon what kind of nation it wanted to be after the military interregnum.
Her life was, in effect, shaped by the memory of repression of that era—and in rebellion to the false, Catholic moralism of conservative Brazil that nurtured it—during which she began her studies at the University of São Paulo, then chose in the 1970s to become a prostitute.
Sexuality, she writes in her memoir, consumed the thoughts of students living through the peak years of the dictatorship—and so it was inevitable that this became the mechanism by which many rejected conservative strictures.
Leite writes: “Each day my girlfriends and I concocted new sexual adventures to brag about to whoever would listen. Boyfriends, love, and marriage were linked to conservative values, and fighting against sexual conservatism was our chief goal in life.”
Over the next decades, Leite would also become a community organiser, health-policy adviser to the government, and director of a non-profit organisation, while passionately defending her fellow, stigmatised and neglected sex workers.
Inevitably, the organisation she is most closely identified with—Davida: Prostitution, Civil Rights and Health—was distinct for its unequivocal rejection of the discourse of victimhood, and advanced broader sexual and human rights issues alongside other social movements.
Leite’s perspective appears to have been shaped by encounters with Catholic activists, particularly those influenced by liberation theology. In Brazil, the Church’s “Ministry for Marginalised Women” (a euphemism for prostitutes) preached that putas were victims of a misogynist society and needed divine intervention to escape their condition.
Leite relates how in 1984 an encounter with this initiative represented a “definitive turning point” in her life. With an instinctive understanding of neoliberalism, she writes: “The objective of the ministry was to get me to take on the discourse of the victimised whore, and that would never happen. I believe that if you consider a person to be a victim, you have already established a relationship of dominance over her.”
What emerges from this extraordinary woman’s career is a radically different notion of feminism to that which finds expression in the rarefied forums and journals of the intersectional North.
As translator Meg Weeks points out, Leite was an “insurgent feminist” who did not consistently identify with this term yet nonetheless championed gender justice.
What is striking about her form of organic feminism forged on the street is that Leite rejected “political correctness”—the very vocabulary that northern liberal progressives sought to impose on her group and other marginalised social sectors.
This rejection seems now to have been another example of an innate transgression from the neoliberal tyranny that has, since Leite’s 1980s heyday, been ordering all political solidarities into categories that can ultimately be controlled.
It would seem that even in that respect, she may have been ahead of her time.