Sex workers in the Brazilian pandemic: effects on and relations with health

Abstract

This paper describes the results of the study I Want More! The Lives of Sex Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic, which is part of the EPIC community research program. The study analyzed the effects of the pandemic on the lives of cis, trans and travesti sex workers in nine Brazilian states and 11 cities throughout 2020 and 2021. This article focuses on the qualitative component of the study, which was based on semi-structured, remote and face-to-face interviews carried out with 43 sex workers, and its comparison with the quantitative component. The effects are analyzed in relation to the Brazilian pandemic framework, considering the social, economic and political dimensions of the COVID-19 virus. Some of the key themes of the analysis are cases of illness, specific social isolation practices, prevention and care management practices, individual vaccination and collective vaccination strategies. We also share the daily and activist responses drawn up by sex workers in a political agenda that opposes the individualistic, familialist, domestic, and neoliberal logic of isolation by adopting community care perspectives, which was the only line of health action for this work category during the pandemic. Collective actions reposition sex work at the interface between public health and human rights and take as their principle the "street knowledge", from activism, and the workers' power of decision over their own bodies.