Brazil has made international headlines for the government’s inept and irresponsible response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, sex worker activists have once again taken on an essential role in responding to the pandemic amidst State absences and abuses. Drawing on the theoretical framework of necropolitics, we trace the gendered, sexualized, and racialized dimensions of how prostitution and work have been (un)governed in Brazil and how this has framed sex worker activists’ responses to COVID-19. As a group of scholars and sex worker activists based in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, we specifically explore the idea of sex workers as “essential workers”, but also of sex work as, essentially, work, demonstrating complicities, differences, and congruencies in how sex workers see what they do and who their allies in the context of the 21st century’s greatest health crisis to date.

A análise do turismo sexual e o tráfico das mulheres tem concentrada na subjugação das mulheres, situando-as como passivas - objetos de câmbio que são "traficados" entre universos nacionais subordinados e dominantes. Todavia, como Lévi-Strauss advém, as mulheres também são geradoras de símbolos. Baseando nossa análise em trabalhos de campo feito entre turistas sexuais e prostitutas em Copacabana, buscamos demonstrar como a capacidade feminina de criar e manipular símbolos potencializa o movimento internacional de brasileiras e de estrangeiros.

O crescente pânico moral acerca do "tráfico de seres humanos" tem criado uma situação na qual os agentes que tratam do tema, ao tentar oferecer informações concretas sobre o fenômeno, muitas vezes, transformam termos de denúncias em categorias analíticas. Esse artigo analisa a produção recente nessa área, buscando recuperar e problematizar as fontes originais acerca do "tráfico", no sentido de evidenciar como dados contraditórios são transformados em "fatos" no processo de produção de saberes, no qual a militância política pode se confundir com a pesquisa científica.

This article provides an overview of how trafficking in persons has come to be imagined in Brazil. We stipulate that a mythical narrative has become central to discourses about trafficking used to guide policy-makers and educate civil society. We perform a structural analysis of this myth arguing that its acceptance, combined with the persistence of laws that define trafficking solely as the migration of prostitutes, has shifted public discussion towards a paradigm of passivity and law enforcement where members of certain social categories must be "educated to understand that they are victims" and their movements must be curtailed.