What Does a Puta Want?

In 1984, the year before Brazil transitioned from a military dictatorship to a tenuous democracy, a young woman named Gabriela Leite attended a national meeting for sex workers held by a progressive ministry of the Catholic Church. There she shocked those assembled by taking the microphone and unabashedly calling herself a prostitute. As she recalled in her 2008 memoir, the ministry tended to use euphemisms like “girl” and “marginalized woman”—which she had come to reject. “I told the audience: ‘I think it is because people are ashamed of the word prostitute.’ That caused quite a commotion,” she wrote.In the years that followed Leite and her colleague Lourdes Barreto, echoing a number of their peers around the world, chose to refer to themselves with the dreaded words prostituta and, especially, puta, even as “sex worker” emerged as most activists’ preferred term. Puta can mean either “whore” or “slut” in both Portuguese and Spanish; its reclamation, both in Brazil and by Spanish-speaking activists such as Georgina Orellano of Argentina, has signaled a rejection of the taboos endured not only by sex workers but by any woman who transgresses traditional sexual mores. “I’ve always li...