ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the project methodology and then focuses on the Vila Mimosa red-light district as an example of how sex workers’ images expose stark contrasts between mass media representations of sporting mega-events and their own. Displacements related to the World Cup and Olympic Games are rooted in gentrification processes that began well before the mega-events, yet since 2000 have been more directly focused on tourist areas such as Copacabana as part of broader securitization of Brazilian urban politics. The activism in the new Vila reorganized with the formation of an association of sex workers and business owners called AMOCAVIM. The association promotes social activities and courses with sex workers, organizes the area’s commerce and negotiates improvements with local power brokers. Transmitting a sense of the different spaces that sex workers occupy throughout the day, the images show lives full of activities.
