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