Economies of Flesh: Event-led Urbanism and the Impact on Sex Work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Physical Cultural Studies has examined the extent to which a (sport) mega-event, like an environmental disaster, can facilitate the implementation of a “shock doctrine” (Klein, 2007) in which controversial policies, used to impose particular ideological ends, are pushed through in the wake of a cultural spectacle (Boykoff, 2013; Hayes Horne, 2011), and the urban environment is created as a series of spectacularized spaces of leisure consumption, the ultramodern sanctuaries for bourgeois bodies (Belanger, 2000; Friedman Andrews, 2011; Silk, 2013). The sentiment of shock or enthusiasm is used to distract from, and rationalize, the political-economic restructuring observed in a moment of crisis or celebration. At the heart of disaster (or event) capitalism is the need to facilitate accelerated capitalist expansion by reconfiguring the existent sociopolitical agenda. Celebration capitalism has been characterized by the emergence of a state of exception, unfettered commercialism, repression of dissent, questionable sustainability claims, and the complicity of the mainstream media (Boykoff, 2013). The manifestation of narrow, market-driven ideologies, coupled with the aggressive pursuit of growth-inducing resource material, has continued to foster resistance across host cities. In the current moment, FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) and the IOC (International Olympic Committee) have generated an increasing scale of dissent (Davidson, 2013; van Luijk Frisby, 2012). Yet the overemphasis on resistance has detracted from the everyday realities of those stuck in the pseudoshadow of the mega-event spotlight. In my work I ask: How does the everyday react to the intervention of a mega-event? This dissertation focuses on the “lived experience(s)” of local women who embodied market-oriented ideologies to react entrepreneurially to a FIFA-crisis/celebration, in order to create and enhance their “survival circuits” (Sassen, 2009) within contested urban terrain. Through the collection and analysis of ethnographic data, I document stories of everyday life from women involved in sexual commerce in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the 2014 FIFA World Cup to connect their “everyday” with larger social processes of global capitalist expansion, and demonstrate the manner in which these local women produce (un)intended/under-examined embodied physical cultural legacies associated with the sport mega-event.Ph.D.2018-11-30 00:00:0