Tracce di lucciole. Sex work and the removal of perturbing bodies from the public space

Rome, home of the Vatican, counts on a wide presence of street sex workers, self-organized in a complex and deep-rooted archipelago. My research focused on the articulation of the spaces of sex work, investigating their changes in relation to urban policies and the transformations of the city environment. Italy do not consider prostitution itself to be a crime while criminalising anyone taking advantage of it. At the same time, via spatial government (decrees, orders, and patrols) it thinks up escamotages to contain and control its visible features. These attempts can be ascribed to the set of measures that aim to achieve the chimeric concept of decorum, pursuing an idea of the city where both diversity and marginality are not seen. Prostitution is thus accused of offending public decency and order, and the more explicit and visible it is, the deeper the conflict it generates. Obviously, this kind of jurisdictions are double standard positions: they focus on the good citizen, without considering the interests of the population working in the practise of sex work. Politics of coercion, expressed or implied, do not induce profound changes in activity, but rather a shift towards more peripheral areas, and the corresponding adaptation of clients. The urban geography of sex workers is thus perpetually becoming, constantly pushing against the limits of its confinement and adopting tactics of mobility and resistance. In street sex work the transgression of sexualized bodies in the public space becomes explicit, and their insolent and "excessive" visibility is confined to the outside of the purified spaces of residency and consumption. Queer and gender studies turn therefore out to be interesting interpretation filters of a phenomenon that draws a moral geography: a geography that seems to reflect, once again, features of the heteronormativity and to deny the right to the city to certain categories of inhabitants. The physical presence of these bodies thus assumes a clear political significance. Through the lens of psychoanalysis, the measures inspired by the concept of decorum could be read as a collective removal of perturbing bodies. Freud theorised the mechanisms of removal: the psychic contents that are source of conflict, such as desires, impulses or representations that are unbearable for some reason, are removed from the conscious sphere and dormant in that of the unconscious. Despite this, they keep a trace, a weak and latent signal that brings back to light what have been removed, triggering a complex conflict. It is thus defined unheimlich, uncanny, the anguish and disorientation generated by what could remain hidden, and which instead has emerged. The contribution I would like to propose for Konesh issue intends to build a reflection on the removal of sex workers' bodies from the public space of Rome. Starting from some photos of the traces left by sex workers in the places they have crossed, for any reason (work, residence, leisure), the contribution wants to suggest how, despite the absence of the removed bodies, a faint trace of their passage continues to exist (and resist?), as a silent witness of a denied right to the city.