ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on sex work politics, activism and knowledge production. Inspired by foundational texts by Audre Lorde and Gayle Rubin, it analyses the conceptual and practical intersections of the erotic with stigma and systems of power, and how sex work activists, and the theories inspired by them, navigate and subvert these systems. It draws on the author’s experience as a researcher, filmmaker and activist within the Brazilian sex worker movement over the past two decades. It examines how sex workers in Brazil have worked hard to connect sex work and related activism to a variety of broader struggles. By so doing, they strategically rework and outwit limits that have long troubled and divided activist and academic discussions of sexuality, opening up opportunities for revolution in the sense of provoking a complete reorientation of how we think about sex, economies, pleasures, feminism and research. The chapter concludes by suggesting that deconstructing (and embracing) contradictions may offer a path towards a world less structured around inclusion and exclusion and, in the field of sexual rights specifically, a more emancipatory and pleasurable journey towards affirmative rights.
