Travesty Urbanism: essays on prostitution between the sacred and the profane

Abstract

This essay proposes a critical reflection on transvestite prostitution in São Paulo, taking the tension between sacred and profane as an analytical key to rethink urban space. By choosing Rego Freitas street and the downtown area as territory of investigation, it articulates memory, violence, dissident sociability, and transfeminine aesthetics to reveal mechanisms of exclusion while highlighting re-existence in the city’s margins. Essayistic and political in character, the work is organized in three moments – denunciation, proposition, and transformation –, with emphasis on a pedagogy of refusal and advancing the hypothesis of a travesty urbanism as a form of spatial intervention.  The historical analysis of prostitution, public policies aimed at the trans population, and necropolitical dynamics that traverse transfeminine bodies allows us to understand the city as both a technology of death and a space of reinvention. Finally, it proposes an urban prosthesis, conceived as an experimental intervention. Rather than seeking permanent solutions, it opens fissures in the urban fabric, challenges normativities, hosts other forms of being, and tensions the borders between public and private. It is, above all, a political stance: affirming transfeminine presence as a force of urban fabulation.