Spaces of Sex, Prisms of Empire: Queering Sex Work in Northeastern Brazil From the Cabaré Maria Boa to World Cup Sex Tourism in Natal, RN

• In Event: Retracing Literary and Visual Aesthetics in Brazilian Cultural Production

Abstract

Known as the “Springboard to Victory” the city of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte welcomed over fifteen-thousand American soldiers into its population of forty-thousand as Brazil joined the Allied Powers in 1942 and allowed the United States to build airbases on its Northeastern coast. It was at this time that Maria de Oliveira Barros established her famous brothel, the Cabaré Maria Boa, at the city center. Due to its association with the US airbase, this“cabaré de prestigio” courted a specific image of foreign finery. A similar influx of young foreign men occurred in 2014 when Natal hosted several World Cup games, however current depictions of sex work in Natal are strikingly different from Maria’s whitened and classy cabaré. This article offers a close analysis of the mechanisms of empire in spaces of sex work, which I read as spaces of imperial formation. My theoretical framework combines queer theory, black queer studies, and black feminism, while analyzing the distribution of power and privilege within intersectional sexual identities. I frame my analysis within the historical context of the founding of the U.S. military base, Parnamirim Field, and the hosting of the 2014 World Cup games, because they are moments of transition and flux in which similar processes of imperial formation occurred and which mark significant global moments of international attention and prestige for Natal and Brazil as a whole. I argue that by exploring the marginality of sex work and considering prostitutes queer subjects we can better understand how race, class, gender and sexuality are implicated in imperial processes.

Key Words: Natal, empire, imperial formations, sex work, Northeastern Brazil, queer sexuality and transnational space

Author

• Sarah E Nicholus, University of Texas at Austin