Configurações do corpo-prostituto: Gasparino Damata, Marco Lacerda e Marcelino Freire

Abstract

This paper analyzes the configurations of the prostitute body in the following narratives: in the short stories “Paraíba” and “Módulo lunar pouco feliz”, present in Gasparino Damata's book “Os Solteirões” (1975); and in the novels As flores do jardim da nossa casa (2007) by Marco Lacerda e Nossos ossos (2013) by Marcelino Freire. The male prostitute body figured in these fictional texts of homoerotic expression is an operational notion proposed by it to contemplate the diversity of practices and subjects (bagaxa, hustler, call boy, gigolo, toy boy, rent boy) who monetize their young bodies by exchanging them by offering sex and companionship for money, material and symbolic goods with the owners of capital, who are generally older homosexuals treated as abject in the erotic-sexual realm. The investigation of the male prostitute body operates in four chapters in this study anchored in theoretical postulates of literary studies and in dialogue with other epistemological constructs. In the first chapter, “Before the Tricks…”, we make explicit a decalogue with discussion axes based on research and ethnographic studies (anthropology, sociology and social psychology) that encompasses multiple aspects about the male prostitute body; follows a succinct historiographical outline of Western culture on the existence and ways of viewing male prostitute bodies; and an the panorama of the male prostitute body in Brazilian homoerotic literature. The second chapter, “First Trick,” has as its scope the notion of mas(ASS)linity / mas(ASS)culinity profitable linearity which we analyze in Gasparino Damata’s short stories. In the third chapter, “Second Trick,” the exegetical process focused on how Marco Lacerda's Romanesque mlae prostitute body (Benício) builds a career out of its monetizable body in different territories (street, sauna, nightclub) and modalities (call boy, gogoboy, gigolo). In the fourth chapter, “Third Trick”, we analyze the fragmented otherness of the main Romanesque male prostitute body of Marcelino Freire (Cicero) affected by homicide in the exercise of prostitution. In the conclusion, “After the Tricks,” we spell out our research thesis proposition. As we orient ourselves by the premise of hegemonic recurrence with the interchangeability and power relations, a stigmatized and clandestine male prostitute body pauperized and /or luteinized sex work anchored in the socioeconomic condition as the most apparent motivation for engagement in the sex business profitable sex. The premise underpins four argumentative vertices: the demand for a discursive, gestural and corporeal enterprise of a “dirty”, rustic hegemonic masculinity of lower-class hyper viral men (masculine and / or muscular bodies, large genitalia); the recurrence of the street as a subordinate and marginal territoriality for sex work; the correlation between impoverishment / lumpesination of the male prostitute body and illicit practices (dichotomization between suitable male prostitute bodies or not); and the absence of fabulous centrality from the male prostitute body as an enunciating subject in the novelistic genre.