Putafeminista by Monique Prada, Translated and edited by Amanda De Lisio

A pioneering manifesto from Brazil about the centrality of sex workers to feminist struggle.

As long as feminism has existed as a movement in Brazil, sex workers have taken to the streets in solidarity—despite the fact that mainstream feminist discourse positions sex work, and the “putas” who enact it, as detrimental to women’s rights. In Putafeminista, activist and sex worker Monique Prada calls for feminists to retire this hypocrisy and embrace putafeminism: a working class women’s movement that rejects whorephobia and its classist, colonial dimensions.

Drawing on her firsthand experiences with sex work and movement building, Prada argues for the validity of sex work as feminist labor and tracks the innovations introduced by Brazilian sex workers to feminist internet discourse, street actions, and governmental advocacy. For readers seeking the glimmers of tomorrow’s feminism, Prada places that future with putafeminists, naming the brothel a “final frontier” for all women to gather, reform, and revolt.

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So What If I’m a Puta by Amara Moira, Translated by Amanda De Lisio and Bruna Dantas Lobato, Foreword by Charlotte Shane

An incisive, intimate diary of the life of a travesti sex worker in Brazil.

(So What) If I’m a Puta?, originally published on author Amara Moira’s popular blog of the same name, consists of 44 crônicas that wryly portray her experiences as a trans sex worker in Brazil. In a brazen, funny, and at times heartbreaking voice, Moira explores the political and personal textures of her encounters with the men who buy sex from her, and the complex reality of her labor of a sort of love.

Woven through Moira’s essays are reflections on transition, safe sex, desire, whorephobia, consent—in the grim context of Brazil’s record rates of violence against trans women. Ultimately, Moira writes to “give a voice to us prostitutes” and center trans sex workers in Brazil’s putafeminist movement, modeling a feminism that envisions inclusivity, safety, self-determination, and joy for us all.