This paper discusses the concepts of borders and urbanities based on individuals and collectivities that circulate in the margins of cities and form the fabric of the so-called sex market; they may identify themselves but not necessarily as travestis and transsexual women.
Based on the circulation of transgender people in the margins of cities, this study is an attempt to understand the kind of urban models that emerge from these liminal experiences, which shift between spatial, physical and symbolic boundaries.
This investigation suggests the need to rethink the field of city anthropology in Brazil by taking as its basis the models of urban forms that allow for intersections between countryside and city, forest and metropolis, outskirts and downtown. On one hand, these are the places that public security and human rights policies include in the so-called routes of sexual exploitation and the trafficking in persons; on the other, they are spaces of resistance and of ample exchange networks that open up space for modes of existence excluded from traditional familiar models, hosting travestis , 1 transsexual women and gay men who engage in various activities, such as hair and beauty services, prostitution and other forms of paid sex.
Such regimes are detached from any city in itself and shaped by an urban network that comprehends small, medium and large-sized cities.
Nevertheless, they are first of all built from the circulation and occupation of the city dwellers. Such a universe involves a wide range of categories, definitions and classifications, some of which are mobile, others fixed. These categories - being or having been a travesti or a transsexual woman - depend chiefly on self-identification and community recognition from a group of sociability or political movement.
