Zonear: perspectivas feministas sobre as dinâmicas espaciais da prostituição no Centro de Salvador

Abstract

Feminisms, in their plurality, have contributed to the advancement of urban studies by introducing new perspectives on the territory, the urban struggle and the different experiences in the city, placing women at the center of urban processes and making them visible as producers and transformers of urban space. The thoughts and actions engendered by prostitutes in dialogue with other groups of women are the fuel for the reflections on feminisms and the urban developed in this research, which focuses on the spatial dynamics of prostitution in the center of Salvador throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and especially in the context of the recovery of its historic area, which began in the late 1960s. Data collections of different origins were carried out, through bibliographic review, archival research of newspaper news, official documents and photographs, field observations, informal conversations and interviews, whose fragments of narratives of women from the center of Salvador were gathered and stitched together, in a reflective exercise interested in introducing new visions and possible avenues of investigation. From the context of the predominance of red light districts for the concentration of prostitution in the mid-twentieth century, located in the perimeter of historic heritage, to its subsequent dissolution and prevalence of street prostitution, with the occupation of prostitutes in specific points of streets and squares in the historic center transformed into a touristic area, the discussion around the spatial dynamics of prostitution in the center of Salvador contributes to new insights into how science and the city are “zoned” in different historical moments, both by ordering processes that often result in the exclusion and segregation of women in the city, as well as by the women’s protagonism in the organization of collective forms of resistance in the face of excluding spatial processes, which has the power to mess valid forms of thought and city construction and open up possibilities for new looks and approaches.