VELVETS, RUINS AND WORN SLIPPERS: PROSTITUTION, MEMORY AND EDUCATION OF BODIES IN BELLE ÉPOQUE MANAUS

Abstract

This research investigates female prostitution in Belle Époque Manaus as a space for knowledge production and body pedagogies, analysing the formation of subjectivities and resistance within moral and hygienist discourses of the period. The study aims to understand how the practices of marginalised women configure non-formal educational processes grounded in experience, memory, and survival. The methodology adopts a qualitative, bibliographical, and interpretative approach, supported by critical analysis of works linking body, city, and education, identifying the urban as a pedagogical territory. The reflection reveals prostitution as a social language and formative practice that challenges control over femininity and establishes alternative ways of teaching and learning. The body, understood as text and archive of the city, mediates between lived experience and symbolic production, becoming an instrument of resistance and transmission of knowledge. The study concludes that female marginality, far from absence, constitutes an epistemological locus that challenges the limits of formal education and broadens its humanising dimension by recognising the margins as a fertile space for learning and creation.