Book Review: Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore

Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore: The Story of a Woman Who Decided to Be a Puta, by Gabriela Leite (2024). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Prostitution has long been debated, regulated, and criminalized, often without considering prostitutes themselves. In academic, political, and cultural discourse, prostitutes tend to appear as figures through whom moral anxieties are negotiated. Dominant representations of sex workers therefore rarely align with lived realities, instead reproducing rigid dichotomies: a passive victim in need of rescue or, conversely, a powerful-yet-immoral figure – the family breaker, the disease carrier, the monster. The autobiography of Brazilian former prostitute and activist Gabriela Leite intervenes precisely in these debates. Not only is this book an act of Leite “claiming her voice,” it is also a sustained effort to narrate prostitution as part of an ordinary life – marked by joys, unexpected turns, disillusionments, and choices. Written without moral judgment, which is uncommon in discussions on sex work, Leite’s autobiography is, as its subtitle declares, the story of “a woman who decided to be a puta.”

In Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore, Leite narrates prostitution as work – structured, rule-bound, and socially embedded – challenging dominant moralizing frameworks and making clear that sex work intersects with class, gender, and state power. Her life is presented as potentially anyone’s: it is shaped by her reciprocal affection for her father, conflicted relationship with her mother, and formative professional years, which took place under Brazil’s military dictatorship. Against this backdrop, she pursues her passion for literature, confronts the necessity of working while studying, and negotiates her mother’s opposition to her attending university instead of pursuing a more conventional teaching career. Rather than framing these moments as exceptional, Leite presents them as contingencies that shape – but do not determine – her path.

The book’s narrative unfolds through what I would describe as a Russian-doll structure: moments that might conventionally be read as exceptional are presented within scenes of everyday life, and personal episodes are situated within their broader social and historical contexts. The text deliberately leaves the distinction between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” ambiguous, inviting readers to assess events through their own assumptions and experiences. In this English translation, rendered skillfully by historian Meg Weeks, said ambiguity is reinforced through Leite’s blunt, matter-of-fact prose style that relies on plain declarative sentences and offers minimal moral judgment. A particularly striking example of this is her account of a violent first sexual experience with a friend-of-friends-cum-theater director in the early 1970s, at the height of the sexual revolution. Marked by her inexperience, his violent indifference, and the normalization of coercion in a period often retrospectively framed as liberatory, the episode exposes how violence and asymmetrical power relations can remain invisible when folded into narratives of freedom and progress. At the same time, these experiences trace the formation of Leite’s political thinking, prompting her to distance herself from what she calls the “traditional Left,” which she criticizes for its moralizing tendencies, dogmatism, and reluctance to confront prejudice.

Formally, the book resists linearity. The lack of chapters underscores a conception of life as discontinuous and recursive, in which episodes take on meaning through their relation to one another rather than their place in a timeline. This logic is reinforced by the recurring “Ten Commandments of the Whore,” which punctuate the narrative without stabilizing it. Acting both retrospectively and prospectively, these commandments establish xperiential knowledge while refusing to function as a fixed moral code. Collectively, they highlight sex work as a practice through which work-related values, rules, and strategies are continuously produced. Together with the book’s Russian-doll structure, the commandments enable readers to experience the interplay between ordinary life and social exceptionality in Leite’s world.

The nonlinearity and fragmentation are also evident in Leite’s character. She reflects – sometimes explicitly, sometimes indirectly – on her ambivalent relationship with the ideal of “being modern,” observing with irony that she is a “modern woman who wanted to change the world [but] didn’t use contraceptives” (55). This led her to consider an abortion, “but it was just a passing thought. My modern ways had limits and were so inconsistent that I didn’t even know where to go and who to ask for” (55). Consequently, Leite becomes unexpectedly pregnant, leaves her studies in literature, and focuses on her work as a secretary, hiding her pregnancy from everyone.

Prostitution entered later into Leite’s life – or, more precisely, she later chooses to engage in it. It provides her with a means to escape her mother’s strict household rules, sustain herself, and move from São Paulo, first to Belo Horizonte and ultimately to Rio de Janeiro, which she adopts as her home. In São Paulo, she learns the informal rules of the profession, including the importance of never having a pimp. At the same time, she becomes increasingly politicized. In the late 1970s, in the waning years of Brazil’s dictatorship, Leite and other sex workers organized a protest against police violence, a persistent threat in their lives. Through prostitution, she also finds a community, which helps care for her second daughter, especially when she leaves São Paulo to move to Belo Horizonte for work. For Leite, this separation represents the “severing of an umbilical cord […] a journey into the unknown” (89), though she quickly learns that, for a prostitute needing extra money, belo-horizontinos make for enthusiastic clients.

While Belo Horizonte signifies a place with abundant work, Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s represents a site and moment of political ferment – from the participation of prostitutes in the first Conference for Women from the Favelas and the Urban Periphery to Leite’s militancy within AIDS prevention campaigns. This trajectory culminated in an irreversible shift in 1987 with the first National Meeting of Prostitutes, marking a decisive moment in the political organization and visibility of Brazil’s sex workers.

Leite’s figure is crucial for feminist and critical scholarship because she dismantles the boundaries between prostitution, activism, and academia, introducing what Carol Leigh, in the foreword, calls the “whore’s-eye view” – a perspective that “offers front-row seats in the theater of society’s hypocrisies” (ix). Before sex workers began intervening directly in public and in academic discourse, scholars, sociologists, and intellectuals frequently spoke about, or even for, them – usually in terms of victimhood. Academic research from this era, conducted without their participation, often reinforced preconceived notions – nowadays, however, the situation is much different, as Leite observes: “it is rare to come across a study on prostitution that does not cite us” (136).

Importantly, these developments unfolded when society had not yet embraced the discourse of minorities. As Leite notes, “[sex worker militancy] was well before Lula’s golden years, when social justice and the rights of minorities became fashionable” (138). These years coincide with some of the most intense moments of her personal life: the difficult beginnings of her relationship with Flavio Lenz, the love of her life; the death of her father; and, simultaneously, the founding of Davida, an NGO defending sex workers’ rights and advocating for prostitution as a profession. They also mark her collaboration with the federal Ministry of Health, the creation of Daspu (das putas, “of the putas” – a clothing brand generating income for the NGO), and the consolidation of Leite’s political and affective legacy.

Gabriela Leite’s Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore is more than a memoir; it is a study in the lived realities of prostitution, the politics of visibility, and the shaping of social norms through everyday labor. Her accounts of organizing protests, negotiating brothel work, and managing family responsibilities provide vivid ethnographic insight into the labor of being a prostitute. By recounting to us her life, Leite not only documents personal experience but also challenges dominant narratives about sex work, activism, and knowledge production – leaving readers with a nuanced understanding into politics of everyday life.