Piscitelli Shifting Boundaries Sex and Money in The North East of Brazil

Sexualities
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Shifting Boundaries: Sex and Money in the North-East of Brazil

Adriana Piscitelli
Sexualities 2007 10: 489
DOI: 10.1177/1363460707080986
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07 080986 Piscitelli
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Article
Abstract In this article I examine how discursive divisions

between commercial and non-commercial sex are produced in a
context of heterosexual sex tourism in Fortaleza, in north-east
Brazil. Here, notions of sexuality, race, class and gender create
a complex discursive framework for sexual encounters crucial to
understanding the participation of local women from different
social strata. These categories also have effects on the
organization of the sex industry directed at tourism.
Keywords Brazil, commercial sex, prostitution, race, sex tourism
Adriana Piscitelli
State University of Campinas Centre for Gender Studies, Brazil
Shifting Boundaries: Sex and Money

in the North-East of Brazil
In this article I examine how discursive divisions between commercial and
non-commercial sex are produced in a context of heterosexual sex tourism
in Fortaleza, in north-east Brazil. Local histories of sexuality are necessary to understanding the meanings of buying and selling sex in any place
(Cabezas, 2004; Kempadoo, 2004; Wardlow, 2004), but they are not
always taken into account in works about sex tourism (Agustn, 2005).
When I initiated this study I shared the common fixation that sex
tourism involves prostitution-like interactions (Cohen, 1993; OConnell
Davidson, 1996; Ryan, 2001). However, I soon realized that although
most of the sexual encounters did involve commodified sex, a significant
part could not be considered as prostitution as defined by participants
themselves. In Fortaleza, notions of sexuality, race, class and gender
create a complex discursive framework for sexual encounters that are
crucial to understanding the participation of women from different social
strata. These notions then have effects on the organization of the sex
industry directed at tourism.
The study is based on ethnographic research carried out between
October 1999 and August 2002. An important part of the fieldwork
consisted of following the movement of international tourists and local
Sexualities
Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 10(4): 489500 DOI: 10.1177/1363460707080986
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Sexualities 10(4)
women on social circuits linked to sex tourism. I also conducted in-depth

interviews with 75 people in local tourism and sex businesses, women who
maintain relationships with tourists, and tourists and expatriates in search
of sex. Homosexual sex tourism exists here, and transgenders offer sexual
services, but the main group in search of sex is composed of heterosexual
foreign men and local women. Like a tourist, I befriended locals and
foreigners, and my being Latin American (but not Brazilian) may have
helped in these approaches. In a milieu where international travel grants
symbolic capital, some of the girls appreciated the company of a foreign
woman like myself.
In the first part of the article I discuss the recent emergence of tourism
and its effect on the local economy, and I depict the setting in which travel
encounters take place. Afterwards, I examine the views of a variety of
people, paying attention to local traditions of commodified sex. Then,
considering how people define their own experiences (Geertz, 1983), I
show how local women distinguish between their own commercial and
non-commercial sex. Finally, I comment on how those ideas become part
of the local sex-tourism industry.
Tourism in Fortaleza
At more than 3000km from Rio de Janeiro and So Paulo, Fortaleza has
2,100,000 inhabitants, is capital of the state of Ceara and is considered a
centre of industry and tourism. Since the 1970s, Fortaleza has gradually
become a destination for domestic tourism, and in the 1990s, when
industrial development began, the city airport began to receive direct
international flights. Ever since, several qualities have contributed to
turning Fortaleza into an international tourist attraction: the climate, a
permanent summer; the beaches, with white sand, palm trees and warm
turquoise water; the nightlife, which guarantees endless partying; the
friendly population. Deserted beaches have been transformed into resorts,
and there has been a huge increase in the number of hotels, many built
by transnational corporations. But Fortaleza, one of the fastest growing
cities in northeast Brazil, is also one of the poorest metropolitan regions
(IBGE, 2001), and while tourism means employment, the positions and
salaries available to most of the local population, who have few educational
opportunities, are low (salaries about US$160 a month).1 Domestic
tourism is still greater than international tourism (Governo do Estado do
Ceara, 2002), but the latter is extremely visible: white male foreign visitors
are often found in the company of local girls. While tourism is considered
to be the fastest-growing source of employment in Ceara, international
tourism is regarded with both hope and anxiety, since it is considered to
be inextricably linked with sex tourism.
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Piscitelli Shifting Boundaries
The setting: Iracema Beach

In Fortaleza, sex-tourism circuits are eminently touristic places in which,
in the main, foreign and Brazilian tourists socialize together alongside
local middle- and lower-class young women. Some of these women offer
programas, a word that designates explicit agreements to exchange sexual
services for money, including prices, practices and lengths of encounters.
The word prostituio (prostitution) refers to programas.2 A local sex
worker in her late 20s said, To sell the body means to go on programas.
No matter whether cheap or expensive, that means to be a prostitute.
With these words she alludes to a hierarchy in which different kinds of
programas measure levels of prostitution linked to poverty, education
and colour.
At night, sex travellers in Fortaleza converge on Iracema Beach, on the
seafront, where colourful houses built in the 1920s and 1930s are now
mostly transformed into shops, small hotels, bars, restaurants and discos.
With the tourism boom, Iracema Beach also started to be considered
Fortalezas centre of prostitution aimed at international visitors. It is
considered a prostituio chique, a kind of elegant prostitution, differentiated both from higher versions, directed towards the local elite,
and from poorer types, which only cost US$5. On Iracema Beach,
programas rarely cost less than US$50 and might cost three times that.
Women who take part in elegant prostitution live in lower middle-class
or poor but not necessarily miserable areas of the city and have a
comparatively higher level of schooling than those who work in inferior
levels; some have completed college or high school. These distinctions
express themselves in their appearances: mostly in their 20s with cared-for
bodies, skin and hair, styled towards foreigners aesthetic preferences for
slim bodies and loosely curled or straight hair.
At the time I carried out this research, sex tourism in this area was not
tightly organized; there were some packaged sex tours, mostly small-scale.
Middlemen, predominantly foreigners who worked with men of the same
nationality, introduced them to local girls. The foreign owners of small
hotels aimed at sex tourists also mediated the encounters, as did local
tourist guides, beach bar managers, waiters and taxi drivers. One particular disco bar was considered the main spot of prostitution aimed at
foreigners, but, on the whole, organized sex tourism shared spaces with
other tourists and local middle-class people, in bars, restaurants and forrs
(dance clubs with regional music). Besides tourists and expatriates from
Europe, the USA and other South American countries, Iracema Beach
shelters travellers from other states of Brazil in search of sex. Some are
frequent visitors, returning because they enjoy the easy access to women
who do not seem to be prostitutes. Owners and managers of locales
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oriented towards international tourists understand their preferences. One

disco manager said, they are not interested in closed spaces, with
striptease shows, neon lights, they have all that in Europe. They prefer the
open air, this informality, this joyfulness.
Occupying a house in front of the sea, the disco bar is an open-air space. It has
a large patio with tropical trees, taken up by plastic tables and chairs and a dance
floor where more than 300 persons dance, drink and sing. The male customers,
all foreign, are between 20 and 60 years old, but most are young. The girls,
singing, dancing and hugging themselves, fill the space with an air of happiness.
Dressed in ordinary, slightly sexy clothes and little makeup, the girls circulate
in groups. Those wearing expensive shoes and dresses, and using delicate
gestures, look like middle-class girls who would not do programas. All the girls,
as well as the waitresses and women bartenders, flirt with the foreigners. Groups
of white, tanned, noisy young men chat, imitate rock singers and kiss the girls
like boyfriends. Old women sell roses to the foreigners, who buy them for the
girls. There is a guard at the entrance and a cashier. There is also a small noisy
crowd around the door: street children who get small tips from the foreigners
for giving messages to the girls, foreigners who try to see what is happening
inside and sellers of food and drinks. (Field notes)
Owners of such places create a certain atmosphere of normality,

distanced from prostitution stereotypes. According to one disco-bar
waitress, the relaxed and almost innocent atmosphere of the place is
explicitly set up: There are rules. A woman cannot sit on a mans lap, she
cannot grab him. The disco bar does not look much different from other
nearby bars, occupied by other kinds of tourists and local families. It does
not employ women who sell sex nor provide spaces to have sex, but the
locals do consider it a brothel, seeing all women in the disco bar, including
waitresses, bartenders and cashiers, to be prostitutes. The bars employees,
on the other hand, consider all the local female customers to be prostitutes,
but not themselves. With difficulty, sex travellers try to distinguish between
girls who go and girls who dont go on programas. They know that the
disco bar is full of accessible girls but, on Iracema Beach, girls looking for
sexual encounters with foreigners are almost everywhere.
The visitors patterns of approach and courtship consist of taking
local girls, no matter their social class and colour, to bars, restaurants,
expensive malls and beauty parlours. Given Fortalezas rigid social and
racial divisions, this provokes utter discomfort in local middle-class
customers, forcing them to share spaces with poorer and darker girls they
see as prostitutes.
When [foreign tourists] realized that here it was not like in Europe, where they
had to pay for half an hour, for one hour, they stayed married during the whole
holiday and started to take the girls to restaurants and bars. And the society,
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here, even the Left, showed its disgust, looking for other leisure spaces. (A
restaurant owner)
Local newspapers call public attention to the increase of prostitution in

this area as a cause of degradation. The Iracema Beach Association,
composed of irritated residents and businessmen who have lost middleclass customers, has organized campaigns to moralize the neighbourhood, but sexual spaces and encounters are an integral component of it.
A broad range of businesses and employees benefits from the sexual
encounters, not only women who go out with sex tourists but managers
and workers in motels, hotels, bars, restaurants, discos, beauty parlours
and shops, as well as taxi drivers and street vendors: all find better
opportunities here than in the rest of this impoverished region.
Official, tourist and local views on sex,

class and colour
In Brazil, racial classifications differ according to situation and context.
The state of Ceara is usually considered to be inhabited by fewer blacks
(with African traits) than other Brazilian states and to have more mixedrace people (pardos)3 (IBGE, 2000). The term pardo officially includes
mulatos (offspring of black and white) and caboclos (white and aboriginal
mixes), but Brazilians tend to use other expressions referring to phenotypes, which take in not only skin colour but also hair texture and facial
features (Fry, 1996). Popular terms include moreno, a term for brown skin,
as well as words that refer to shades: jambo (intense brown), cor de canela
(cinnamon colour), claro (light brown). In Ceara, people with non-white
skin are usually caboclos. In Fortaleza, local women are seen as having
bronzed, brown skin, a colour perceived as natural, from the earth (cor
da terra) or like a saputi (fruit with soft brown skin) and as having thin
lips and noses and loosely curly or straight hair.
But colours and phenotypes alone do not define people, whose social
positions also depend on class, education and income (Kofes, 1976). To
a certain extent, racial classifications are fluid; for example, when a
dominant symbol of Europeanness such as education signifies whiteness
and takes priority over phenotype (Guimares, 1999). Thus a middle-class
person with a college education, good salary and elevated level of
consumption, but whose appearance is mixed-race, can be seen as white,
whereas a person with the same phenotype, looking poorer or involved in
a robbery, will be perceived as black. To some degree, money can whiten
(Guimares, 1999) while poverty can darken.
Foreign tourists are usually attracted by the idea of sexual encounters
with women perceived to possess an intense, racialized tropical sexuality
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and who embody traits of traditional femininity (Piscitelli, 2004). This

temperamental heat is attributed to all local women, whether they go on
programas or not. Some sex tourists, acknowledging themselves as racists,
choose this city because they consider it to be full of morenas, rather than
blacks. One 60-year-old Italian resident said, The morena is the better
woman, hardly a black woman, black, no. My ideal type is light brown.
[Here] the majority of them are light brown. Tourists usually believe
morenas are mulatas, whom they stereotype as sensual women. Incorporating this confusion, local caboclas darken their skin by tanning on the
beach and adopting sensual styles of dressing, walking and dancing.
Tourists do perceive some differences among local women, particularly an
affective and sexual distance in women from the upper classes. These
occasionally escape the travellers game of rendering others inferior
linked also to the structural positioning of their countries.
Claudia Fonseca (1996) has written about traditional norms for female
sexuality in other parts of Brazil. Similarly, and in spite of foreigners generalisations, in Fortaleza womens sexuality is considered an asset, with a
high value for female virginity. And although virginity does not have today
the absolute value it had in the past, exclusive sexual favours are treasured,
and, according to local men, a certain degree of modesty still marks local
womens sexuality. A musician said, Women here smile at you, joke, like
offering themselves, but when bedtime comes they withdraw. Unless you
find a prostitute, they really dont know what to do, they dont have a
sexual repertoire. For the lower classes, pregnancy outside marriage may
still be seen as dishonour, and in the middle classes, it is not unusual to
find women who, following the tradition of other north-eastern states, do
not lose their virginity until in their 20s and 30s. This differs from
traditions in the developed south of Brazil (Heilborn, 2006).
Local notions of class and race differ from those of sex tourists. For
the locals, sexuality is more valuable when women are of the upper classes
and seen as white.
Here there is a terrible class division. The upper classes have a Miami style, they
like to show off, their life is full of luxury and prejudice [about poverty and dark
skin]. Those women do not go to the beach . . . they try to look very white. To
be tanned is something connected to the working class. The women I meet at
the gym do not work outside home. They date medical doctors, judges, military
men, never a foreigner . . . One of those girls said something that all the others
think: A woman is a luxury item. Men have to pay an expensive car for their
birthdays, jewellery. (30-year-old local woman university professor)
In the narratives of my interviewees, poverty darkens lower-class girls.

One very light-skinned hairdresser, with few years of schooling, told me
how the family of her upper-class local boyfriend received her:
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I was discriminated against because of my colour . . . his family called me negra

(black) . . . When I started to work I arrived late, at 7:30, 8 p.m. In the early
mornings I usually heard his mother saying Do you really think that she was
working? That she was not with another man?
Local women accompanying foreigners in sex-tourism circuits are sexualized and stigmatized by the people of Fortaleza. The darkest and poorest
ones are considered prostitutes, whereas the middle-class, lighter women
are mostly seen as interesseiras (women motivated by economic interest)
a concept of commodified sex that is barely stigmatizing. A light-skinned
university professor commented on her discomfort when accompanying
her foreign boyfriend in Iracema Beach, knowing that local women look
for upward mobility this way:
Here women who hang out with foreigners are full of self-interest, they are
opportunists . . . I feel embarrassed when I come to Iracema Beach with him
. . . People think that a woman dates a foreigner to improve her life . . . Nobody
thinks she might have met him while doing her doctorate abroad.
The few dark-skinned women of this social class who go out with foreign
tourists are marked by locals as prostitutes. A middle-class fashion designer
in her late 20s, intensely dark-skinned with kinky hair, said, I suffer a lot
because of my colour, my hair and he is so white, with blue eyes. People
look at us. I am sure they think I am a prostitute. When working-class
girls accompany foreigners, locals stigmatize them as prostitutes independent of their colour. On their own, or by the side of local men they might
not be particularly sexualized, but they may be barred when going with
foreigners to places trying to distance themselves from prostitution.
Here in Fortaleza, a foreigner arrives, fixes himself up quickly with a Brazilian
woman, and then goes off to the forr . . . I was barred from there, they thought
I was going on programas . . . I was with an Italian boyfriend, it was really
annoying. It is racism. After a time, I went back, but I went back alone and they
let me in, no problems. (Waitress, a medium morena with very long loose curls)
Forms of commodified sex in Fortaleza

Sexuality has for a long time been intertwined with economics in Fortaleza,
programas coexisting with other forms of sexual exchanges, such as sex
between domestic servants and their employers.
My first sexual relationship was when I was 14 years old. Here in the northeast, we could not have sexual relationships with girlfriends. We heard that in
Rio you could, but here no. We were initiated either by prostitutes or by a
housemaid. The father, the uncle, the brothers, they went to the maids room
at night. (40-year-old local middle-class male)
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One important form of relationship is between a young woman and an

older, richer local man who provides money and different sorts of
possessions. The velho que ajuda (old man that helps) is a widely known,
long-lasting tradition all over Brazil, and a recognized means of social
mobility for different social classes (Fonseca, 1996). In Fortaleza, women
who go on programas hope to find such a man as a way of reducing the
number of clients they see, but the velho que ajuda is also sought by
women not considered prostitutes. The monetary value of the presents
and the amounts of cash that women receive vary according to class as
well as the generosity and degree of involvement of the older man. As in
the Caribbean (Kempadoo, 2004), in Fortaleza, relationships with the
velho are considered by those involved to be sexualeconomic exchanges,
but without overt negotiations of money for sex. The presence of foreign
sex tourists, however, has altered this traditional practice.
In the 90s the foreigners started arriving in charter flights and found the
in the street, not behind windows like in Europe. At the beginning, the
went with them for the pure pleasure of the encounter. But after having
or five partners, they realized that it was possible to merge pleasure
economic benefits. (Owner of a forr)
girls
girls
four
and
Many lower-class women exchanged the local velho que ajuda for foreign
sex tourists offering more benefits. Furthermore, the arrival of foreign men
has altered womens tastes and expectations, so that now many women
prefer foreigners to Brazilians, above all to north-eastern men. The real and
imagined possibilities of escaping social fates in Fortaleza through sex with
foreigners have led to the devaluing of local men of their own, as well as
superior, classes. Local masculinities are now invariably perceived as
intensely possessive, aggressive, remote, disrespectful and unfaithful, while
men from North America and Europe embody the best styles of masculinity, linked to a higher level of gender equality, romanticism, tenderness
and caring. These men are frequently aestheticized, their beauty connected
with whiteness and privileged social positions, while local men are devalued
on the basis of criteria that go beyond skin colour. Relationships with these
tourists, even when money is involved, are frequently romanticized.
Research in Caribbean contexts (Cabezas, 2004) shows how international
tourism has contributed to a blurring of ideas about sexual/economic
interchanges and romance. This also happens on Iracema Beach, where
romanticism is combined with economic motives in a number of ways.
A typology of women and their views

Many women from the lower classes who are in their 20s and 30s and
who have had little more than primary schooling, go on programas with
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foreigners in the same way as they do business with Brazilian clients:

referring to prices, periods of time and types of sexual acts. These women
consider themselves professionals, and some of them belong to local
prostitutes associations. But they prefer foreigners to Brazilian men
because they can charge them more money for doing less.
Foreigners are wonderful. They are attentive, tender. They are not at all stingy.
They give lots of presents. I usually charge gringos US$50, but when they sleep
with us they give us US$80, US$90, even US$100. Brazilians only pay US$20.
Foreigners like to joke, to have fun. And they do not demand much, they never
spend a night on top of a woman, like Brazilians do. (38-year-old, medium
brown, morena)
Other girls, of the lower-middle classes, mostly in their 20s, some with a
secondary education, conceptualize their sexual/economic exchanges with
foreigners as programas but also invest heavily in efforts to conceal the
commercial nature of the involvement. These relationships are full of
uncertainty, are often long-lasting and involve unspecified payments.
Although these women allude to the fact that they are performing prostitution, they consider that hiding this is the best way to get more economic
benefits from foreigners often by maintaining longer-term relationships.
Hes 52 years old, an Italian . . . 90 per cent of those foreigners . . . think of
Brazil as a sexual thing, where they find easy and cheap sex. If you want a
relationship . . . you cannot say that you go on programas . . . Whenever he called
I asked for money: Oh, Im sick! I broke my leg! Its the only way you have to
get money . . . I never charged for a programa. (27-year-old, light morena)
Some of these women receive regular monthly allowances from foreign

boyfriends, and several started forming relationships with sex tourists after
having been helped by velhos for some time.
Other girls consider themselves to be different because they have stable
jobs in the tourist sector (waitress, cashier, manicurist, hairdresser, sales,
maid), but they exclusively date foreigners, accepting from them presents
and financial contributions to their medium- and long-term needs
clothes, watches, perfumes, mobile phones and payment of rent or
medical treatments for children.
An old man turned up. He was 58. He said that he was leaving and that he was
going to send me a present from Italy. When my birthday arrived, an envelope
with $50 inside arrives. And I didnt even do anything with him . . . With this
money I paid the rent, I paid some things off and bought others. One day, he
told me that he was arriving. He brought me a watch, three bottles of perfume,
and . . . we went to the best motel in Fortaleza. He said, I want you to wear
some good clothes. He gave me more [money] to have my hair done. When
we finished having dinner . . . [we went] to the motel. (Disco bar waitress)
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Iracema Beach also holds middle-class women originally from poorer

classes. Mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, of diverse skin colours, they
are freelance professionals, owners of bars and small enterprises, who owe
their upward mobility to foreign visitors. They studied at university
and/or opened their businesses with the help of sex tourists. Some receive
monthly allowances from foreign boyfriends. While they do not go on
programas, some hang out at the disco bar looking for promising dates.
I want to have an apartment, my own car, lots of jewellery. You can say Im full
of self-interest. But I would like to live with a man I love. Ive already got one
who pays the bills. Hes an American, good looking. I like to sleep with him,
to kiss him, but I do not like to fuck him. The most I can bear him is one week
. . . Every month there is money is my bank account, [but] its not enough,
because my expenses are almost US$2000 per month, and he only sends
US$1500. (31-year-old entrepreneur, a very light morena)
Finally, around the disco bar there are women in their 20s, 30s, 40s and
even 50s, mostly light-skinned, originally from the middle class, with
university-level education. Resenting a matrimonial market perceived as
extremely unequal, these women exclusively date foreigners, distancing
themselves from prostitution because they have jobs and have bought
apartments and cars with their own money. However, they do accept, and
long for, presents and invitations from foreign boyfriends, including
airplane tickets, house and board while abroad.
I met this Portuguese man in October and in December he sent me a plane ticket.
It was wonderful, I spent almost a month, I had a great time. But now we are
breaking up, because in fact I never really liked him. (Blonde student aged 24)
For lower-class women, ambiguous relationships with sex tourists open

the ways to real social mobility.
I had a child with a Brazilian man. I was 16. We dated for two years. I was a
virgin when I met him. He said the child wasnt his. My parents discovered that
I was pregnant and sent me away. I came to Fortaleza, I worked as a domestic
servant. I went back to have the baby. Finally my mother agreed to keep the
baby. My life now is so different. Here I met middle-class people, Ive learned
to speak another language, I might learn a new one, I know how life can be
different abroad. I work, I have my own money, I send money to my mother.
I buy clothes for my daughter, school materials. I depend on myself, on my
own money. That is what I think. And I want to give a better life to my
daughter, shes intelligent, I want her to go to college . . . I imagine her
speaking Dutch! (24-year-old, dark morena born in a poor town)
Perceptions about where women are located on the continuum of

commodified sex are intimately connected with local class and racial
divisions, and women from different social classes have to negotiate these
boundaries and categories. Some accept their status (those who explicitly
seek programas), while others struggle to be understood differently.
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Conclusion
Some local women accept current race and class distinctions, while
others attempt to transcend them by buying consumer goods with money
made on programas or occupying middle-class spaces through more
elegant presentations of the self. The wide range of women involved in
commodified sexual exchanges with foreigners, and their different notions
of prostitution, create a climate of uncertainty and controversy permeating this sex-tourism scenario. These sexual relationships nourish the
growth of a loosely organized sex industry with a strong local flavour that
subverts notions of a monolithic sex industry. On Iracema Beach, the sex
industry overlaps with general tourism businesses and acquires an aspect
of normality, distancing itself from stereotyped notions about
commercial sex.
Acknowledgements
The research on which this text is based was financed, in the first phase, by the
Carlos Chagas Foundation/MacArthur Foundation and later by Fapesp/
Sao Paulo Amparo Research Foundation. The final results were prepared at the
Rockefeller Foundations Bellagio Conference and Study Center. The fieldwork
was possible thanks to innumerable people. I am grateful to many colleagues
who commented on points developed here, particularly Laura Agustn and the
two reviewers.
Notes
1. Brazil is marked by acute inequalities drawn through lines of class, race and
gender. In addition, sharp disparities differentiate the richer regions of the
south and south-east from the poorer north and north-east.
2. In Brazil, prostitution involving persons over 18 is not a crime; only
exploiting or favouring prostitution is (National Penal Code articles 22730).
Since 2002, selling sex is officially considered an economic activity by the
Brazilian Ministry of Work and Employment. Recently there has been
extensive positive media coverage of a new radio station to be run by
prostitutes, of fashion collections designed and sold by prostitutes
associations and of books written by prostitutes. In spite of these events,
prostitution is still stigmatized.
3. People who are not white, aboriginal or amarelo (yellow), the other three
racial options offered by the National Census.
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Biographical Note
Adriana Piscitelli, originally from Argentina, is a feminist social anthropologist,
Senior Researcher and coordinator of the State University of Campinas Centre
for Gender Studies (Brazil). Since 1999 she has carried out extensive studies on
sex tourism, on the images of Brazil disseminated in websites aimed at sex
tourists and on the trajectories of Brazilian women who migrated in order to
work in the sex industry in Europe. Address: Center for Gender Studies, PAGU,
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Cidade Universitria, Campinas, Cep
13083970, SP, Brazil. [email: pisci@uol.com.br]
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Piscitelli Shifting Boundaries Sex and Money in The North East of Brazil

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Shifting Boundaries: Sex and Money in the North-East of Brazil

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Abstract In this article I examine how discursive divisions

Shifting Boundaries: Sex and Money

Downloaded from sex.sagepub.com by Mximo Fernndez on October 19, 2011

women on social circuits linked to sex tourism. I also conducted in-depth

Downloaded from sex.sagepub.com by Mximo Fernndez on October 19, 2011