Feminismo, liberdade e prostituição: para além do dissenso democrático

Abstract

The thesis identifies the democratic dissent around the liberalization, prohibition or abolition of prostitution, understood as a result of the disputes between the different political languages. These languages vary according to the concepts of freedom, the relation of this to the idea of equality and the scope of sexuality. The purpose of the paper is to understand the political debates surrounding the meaning of prostitution that were established in modernity and contemporaneity. In this sense, we examine a few decisive moments - the democratic republicanism of Mary Wollstonecraft; the first wave of feminism; the liberalism of John Stuart Mill; the debate on prostitution in classical Marxism and anarchism, and finally the contribution of Simone de Beauvoir, the second wave of feminism and the ensuing debates. It was possible to conclude that the concept of freedom as autonomy in feminist political thought from the eighteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century was fundamental to understanding prostitution as a form of non-freedom. This concept was destabilized during the second half of the twentieth century in the context of feminist debates about sexuality and the emergence of neoliberalism. I propose, finally, the rehabilitation of the expanded concept of freedom as autonomy, within the scope of feminism, in order to build an emancipatory normative basis for thinking of dilemmas such as prostitution.