Game of checkers: Ethnography of transvestites (travestis) who prostitute in Aracaju, capital of Sergipe/Brazil

Abstract

This research record is part of the cycle of an ethnographic investigation, which I carried out from 2014 to 2020, in territories of transvestite (travesti, in Portuguese) prostitution. The ethnography that moved along these years encompassed several cities, including European cities. However, I selected only part of the records made in Aracaju for this present contribution. The clipping is due to the urgency of exposing the conditions in which travestis, a silenced, concealed, stigmatized and violated group, submit themselves, as a Brazilian cultural phenomenon, when they find themselves at the heart of the tangled tensions in the field of forces that sew their nocturnal lives in regions of prostitution. Travestis are, in general terms, people designated male at birth, whose gender expression deviates from what is imposed on them and aligns with what is socially established as female. However, they do not consider themselves women.