Among sex, help and work: dilemmas of sexuality in the context of gen-tleman’s clubs in Lisbon

Abstract

This article investigates the experiences lived by Brazilian womenwho work in gentleman’s clubs in Lisbon – clubs where women work to entertainthe customers and to make them consume – paying special attention to the in-strumental use of sexuality. I will present two episodes of my field work that relyon the first experience with the involvement between money and sex lived by twowomen. The first one is a narrative, reproduced exactly the way it was narrated,that brings an elaborated, reflexive and coherent discourse. The second one, col-lected through participant observation, presents a sequence of events that rely onthe sudden rupture with what was considered normal by the interlocutor and theidentity’s threat caused by the possibility of being defined as a “whore”. In thissense I demonstrate how biographic narratives work as an important comple-ment to the field observation for the construction of the ethnographic research.