Three Views Over the Mangue: Representations of Prostitution in Rio de Janeiro During the First Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

At a time when Rio de Janeiro was modernizing itself, with urban reforms, the Mangue, Rio's low red-light district, was the ultimate emblem of dirt. The Mangue represented everything upper classes wanted to ignore in favor of an alleged urban development and sanitation. Journalists, judges, doctors and other people who occupied positions of power in society were particularly interested in prostitution, a topic perceived at the time as intrinsically linked to women's behavior and public morality, in a time of intense urban growth, as pointed out by Margareth Rago (2008, p. 21) Considering the exercise of prostitution as a paid activity, and also taking into consideration the context of the epoch, this article seeks to analyze how women who sold sexual services were represented in the arts and literature. Thus, we chose three speeches about the subject: the poem “O santeiro do Mangue”, by Oswald de Andrade; the engravings that make up the album Mangue, by Lasar Segall and some works (untitled) produced by Aurora Cursino, a painter who also worked as a prostitute in Rio de Janeiro during the 1920s and 1930s.