The benevolent and the “victim” in prostitution: power and symbolic violence in interactions between prostitutes and the Marginalized Women’s Ministry

Abstract

This article addresses the role of organizations dedicated to the “rescue” of female prostitutes in Brazil, whose handicraft-like practices of assistance are assumed mainly by religious organizations. Such organizations are imagined as benevolent subjects, while constructing prostitutes necessarily as “victims”. Based on an ethnographic inquiry, I analyze the inequality of power, and symbolic violence permeating the relations between prostitutes and members of a Catholic Church organization – the Marginalized Women’s Ministry. The process of subalternization of prostitutes shows disagreements between the discourse and practices by which the organization intends to change the life of the women subjected to their intervention, particularly by speaking to them, but without hearing them, or by silencing them.