O capitão cafetão e o bordel cívico-militar em Fortaleza dos anos 1940

Abstract

The city of Fortaleza, state capital of Ceará, throughout the first half of the 20th century, experienced an increase in population from 48 thousand to 180 thousand inhabitants. And with this increment in demographic density, several discourses and practices emerged as the daily-life manifestations of power and its hinders over the circulation of bodies and their markings (and hierarchies) of gender, race, and sexuality in disputes over and for urban spatiality, configuring different conditions to perceive and feel that population expansion. One of the themes forged within and for these tensions used to appear in the pages of newspapers, reports, dispatches, and in various inquiries, such as in “the location of the prostitution locus”, also raising a routine quarrel over the physical and spatial limits of prostitution within the city. In this article, therefore, I discuss the time settings and the setbacks of an urban government made up of confabulations and pornographic heteronormative conspiracies.