Prostituição em Franca/SP: um pretérito imor(t)al?

Abstract

The present work, at first, aimed to present a brief historical background and the struggles of sex workers in the city of Franca, interior of the state of São Paulo, and to know how they lived and survived during the pandemic. Then, due to the impossibilities, to analyze the public policies directed by the public power to this population. An analysis based on a data collection and field research about the sex trade was proposed, trying to reveal how the municipal administration assisted the workers of the field during the pandemic. After going through the public social assistance agencies, searching for documentation and books from the city's historical archive, it was discovered that there was an erasure of the history of prostitution in Franca, located, since very early times, mainly in the Jardim Guanabara area. Thus, how and why this fact happened was searched since the representations of prostitution, the neighborhoods, the local news and historical archives. Without written sources, it was attempted to recover the history of the neighborhood through the memory of one of its former residents, since the oral source can bring a point of view about the collective memory, a living dimension of representative fragments of this past, even if partially and crossed due to the stimuli for its selection. Individual memory "is not entirely isolated and closed. To evoke its own past, in general, a person needs to resort to the memories of others, and transport themselves to reference points that exist outside of them, determined by society. More than that, the functioning of individual memory is not possible without those instruments that are words and ideas, which the individual did not invent, but borrows from their environment" (HALBWACHS, 2013, p.72). For theoretical foundation and analysis, works by Rago, Roberts, Bourdieu, Butler, among other authors were used. The history of prostitution can only be understood in the different contexts in which it occurred, defined sometimes as sacred, sometimes as profane and sometimes as libertarian, and the representations of today were historically constructed. Despite this work not having obtained the results it initially set out to, new paths have been taken and others remain to be traveled. From the studies undertaken, in the city of Franca, it is possible to see that through the symbolic power, there is a hegemonic discourse that naturalizes certain ideologies, instituting and determining prostitution as something deviant and as an abject to be corrected and to have its history erased. This symbolic violence can be perceived in the absence of data and of records in the diagnostic research of public policies directed to the sex workers.