THE LADIES OF THE NIGHT AND THE MIRRORS OF MORALITY: HYPOCRISY AND MARGINALITY IN BELLE ÉPOQUE MANAUS

Abstract

This research investigates the social and symbolic representations of prostitutes in Belle Époque Manaus, understanding prostitution as an expression of moral ambiguities and patriarchal hierarchies sustaining tropical modernity. The study aims to analyse how the “ladies of the night” reveal contradictions between civilisation and exclusion, considering the city as a space of dispute among power, desire, and discipline. It adopts a historical-cultural approach and qualitative methodology, grounded in bibliographical and documentary analysis that articulates moral discourses, urban practices, and symbolic traces inscribed in the landscape of the Amazonian capital. The research interprets the city as a social text in which ruins and memories of prostitution emerge as living testimonies of structural inequalities persisting in the present. The results indicate that moral hypocrisy and the disciplining of female bodies transformed Manaus’s urbanity into a bourgeois spectacle but also into a territory of silent resistance. It concludes that the narratives surrounding prostitutes go beyond marginality and form an essential part of Manaus’s history and identity, revealing that the boundaries between the public and the forbidden, the beautiful and the decayed, continue to shape the Amazonian urban imagination.