At Rio de Janeiro’s 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, where athletes were celebrated as symbols of national achievement, sex workers – reclaiming the term puta – mobilized their own bodily labour within neoliberal regimes of visibility and control, leaving behind embodied and unexpected legacies of resistance. Play Naked reclaims sex work as a site of puta economic agency and political resistance, where femme and trans bodies can assert value and visibility within state systems designed to exploit or erase them. Moving beyond spectacle and protest, Amanda De Lisio draws on extensive interviews with sex workers in Rio de Janeiro, whose stories are often ignored, infantilized, or co-opted to foment moral panic about human trafficking at major sporting events. Their narratives reveal the persistence of state violence and the complex strategies of defiance used by workers to navigate – and sometimes turn to their advantage – the rapid urban transformations driven by mega-events. Rejecting familiar narratives of displacement, De Lisio illuminates everyday acts of endurance and defiance where land reform, urban renewal, and capitalist expansion collide with gendered and racialized bodies.
