by Monique Prada
Feminist Press
7/8/2025, paperback
SKU: 9781558613393
A pioneering manifesto from Brazil about the centrality of sex workers to feminist struggle
As long as feminism has existed as a movement in Brazil, sex workers have taken to the streets in solidarity—despite the fact that mainstream feminist discourse positions sex work, and the “putas” who enact it, as detrimental to women’s rights. In Putafeminista, activist and sex worker Monique Prada calls for feminists to retire this hypocrisy and embrace putafeminism: a working class women’s movement that rejects whorephobia and its classist, colonial dimensions.
Drawing on her firsthand experiences with sex work and movement building, Prada argues for the validity of sex work as feminist labor and tracks the innovations introduced by Brazilian sex workers to feminist internet discourse, street actions, and governmental advocacy. For readers seeking the glimmers of tomorrow’s feminism, Prada places that future with putafeminists, naming the brothel a “final frontier” for all women to gather, reform, and revolt.
Translated and edited by Amanda De Lisio.
Reviews:
“In Putafeminista, Monique Prada challenges readers to rethink feminism from her own puta perspective. Both astutely framed and accessibly written, this book is an urgent intervention into debates on the meaning of gender, power, and labor that surround sex work. North American readers have much to learn from their Brazilian counterparts, and this text traces these radical traditions of putafeminist thought with piercing insight and clarity.” —Juana María Rodríguez, author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex
“Monique Prada’s Putafeminista is a nuanced analysis of the ways that colonial frameworks have both produced and diminished the puta across time and place. She provides a historical account of sex worker movement politics from which all feminists can learn, and through that learning, transform. De Lisio’s translation of a work that is very much about language is an impressive feat. An all-around forceful and necessary addition to the growing archive of sex worker writing.” —Chris Belcher, author of Pretty Baby
“Required reading for every sex work activist, not to mention anyone who considers themselves a feminist.” —Tina Horn, coeditor of We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival
About the Contributors:
Monique Prada is the author of Putafeminista, published in 2018 in Brazil. She is a militant defender of sex worker rights, creating the blog Mundo Invisível (Invisible World) in 2012 and participating in popular debates. She also served as president for the Central Única de Trabalhadoras e Trabalhadores Sexuais (CUTS), member of the UN Women Civil Society Advisory Group, and advocated for Bill 4211/2012 by Federal Deputy Jean Wyllys, which sought to regulate the profession in Brazil. She lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Amanda De Lisio is an assistant professor of physical culture, policy, and sustainable development in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science, executive member of CITY Institute, and codirector of the Critical Trafficking and Sex Work Studies Research Cluster at the Centre for Feminist Research at York University. Her research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in England, Mitacs Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and published in academic and popular presses in English and Portuguese. She is based in Toronto, Ontario.