Prof. Dr. Paulo Cruz Terra (Fluminense Federal University, Brazil) will be giving the lecture:
Class, Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Brazilian Labour History: the case of coercion on vagrancy from Abolition to the Post-Abolition Period
By analysing the case of coercion on vagrancy, Terra examines how class, gender, race, and sexuality were interconnected in Brazilian labour history – from Abolition in 1888 through the post-Abolition period, and up to the 1930s. While the history of labour in Brazil has long been written with a focus on men, primarily white men, this lecture builds on original research and an emerging body of studies that seek to present a broader picture.
Legislation on vagrancy in Brazil primarily required that a person lacking sufficient income to live a life of leisure provide proof of employment, a measure that criminalized poverty and coerced people into work. In the context of Abolition, new legal provisions were specifically employed to coerce the freed population, thereby imbuing the law with racialized significance. In the post-abolition era, in addition to the requirement to work, people also had to prove they had a fixed residence and that the work was not ‘offensive to morals and good customs’. In this sense, vagrancy began to be used to punish certain moral behaviours among the working class, primarily connected to women, but also to the sexually non-conforming population.
An important issue to understand is how the meaning of the term ‘vagrancy’ was shaped, with repercussions even in the present, where the male definition of a ‘vagrant’ is generally associated with those who do not work, while the female meaning relates to sexual conduct, shaping a particular lexicon of coercion. Understanding the repression of vagrancy through the lens of Brazilian Labour History allows us to challenge the tendency to view the transition from forced labour to free wage labour in linear terms, to recognize forms of coercion as a continuum, and to examine how labour coercion in Brazil was directly linked to the intersection of class, gender, race, and sexuality, affecting different groups in various ways.
Documentary film: “Vagrants, Vagabonds, Immoral”
This 23 minutes long documentary film, directed by Nina Tedesco and Paulo Terra (Brazil, 2025), asks:
What are the meanings of vagrancy throughout Brazilian history, at least since Abolition? Who was considered a vagrant? What are the possibilities of resistance to attempts at criminalization of vagrancy? The movie tries to answer these questions through an intersectional lens comprising class, gender, race, and sexualities, by engaging in a dialogue about these issues with four female activists: Neusa Maria Pereira, journalist and one of the founders of the Movimento Negro Unificado; Shirley Krenak, Indigenous activist of the Krenak people; Jovanna Baby, founder of the organized movement of transgender people in Brazil; and Nataraj Trinta, historian and organizer of the Slut Walk in Rio de Janeiro.
About the lecturer
Paulo Cruz Terra is an Associate Professor of Brazilian History at the Fluminense Federal University in Brazil. A member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, he is currently a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Germany, where he is developing a project on the relationship between labour, coercion, and vagrancy in Brazil and Mozambique.
Organiser
Labour and Democracy Hub at OsloMet and the AFI research group Labour, Democracy and Governance.
