ABSTRACT
Prostitution is a practice present in the West from the Old Age, passing through the
Middle and Modern Ages, in the different so-called Western territories. Each historical
period had its own specificities about the activity, which oscillated according to social,
spatial, economic, cultural, and so many other aspects that pervade human relations
in general. Economic and urban developments seem to corroborate the effectiveness
of this practice. This relationship is verified when historically analyzing prostitution in
Brazil. In the present study, we start with a brief historical-geographical
contextualization of the phenomenon, and then we will analyze concretely the spatial
practices of prostitute women who territorialize an area known as Zero, located in the
city of Varzea Grande / MT. The territorialities developed in Zero are intrinsic to the
spatialities of the life of their agents, and the complementarity of both is an
interrelationship of the global and local scales, a phenomenon that is concretely
implicitly implicitly implicit in the spatial practices that they perform. We recognize that
our interviewees can not be reduced to the specter of prostitution. In addition to the
actual practice, there are women with their own identity, with different life histories,
with different uses and considerations about prostitution. They concretize the
territorialities that have been carried out for about forty years, corroborating the
existence of a peculiar environment permeated by coercive practices, that is, spatial
relations of power. Such practices obey an intelligibility specific to the place where
they are performed. In this way, specific conduct norms and behavioral rules are
established, governed by the needs pertinent to the activity developed there, that is,
prostitution. This phenomenon is easily verifiable from the observation of different
perimeters of influence within the studied territory: peripheral, pericentral and central
areas. These perimeters are used according to the territorial empowerment capacity
of each socio-spatial agent, obeying the rules and norms of spatial appropriation
instituted from the accumulation of territorialities mentioned above. In order to
elaborate the present discussion, we used the results obtained in some specific
questions of the script of interviews, as well as bibliographical revision that guided us
to questions that competed with the present problematic.
Keywords: Territoriality. Female prostitution. Territory.Power