One of Juan Domingo Perón's first political moves was not a campaign for workers’ rights, a crusade for social justice or a struggle for union power. Appointed as minister of war by the nationalistic military coup that took power in Argentina on 4 June 1943, he wrote a letter to the president just 19 days later, demanding that the government install ‘casas de tolerancia’ (‘houses of tolerance’) near to military barracks. These brothels had been deemed illegal since 1937, but Perón expected that prostitutes working there would ‘solve the problems of sexual abstinence’.
It seemed that men needed heterosexual intercourse. Truly Argentine men in particular. A physical need, undeterred by rational thinking. In the wonderful El dinero no es todo, Patricio Simonetto analyses the anxieties that appear when defining a national identity not in the political struggles of the twentieth century, but in the more mundane space of buying and selling sex. Episodes like Perón's letter, buried in old official archives, provide the author with fruitful evidence of discourses and practices about sex and prostitution by a variety of characters. From judges to police officers, along with journalists, health professionals, international organisations and the military, what emerges is a milieu concerned with the slippery notion of ‘masculinity’, a cultural value around which racial and social hierarchies were built. The space broadly defined as prostitution, in which masculinity is permanently produced, did not refer only (and in some cases not even mostly) to prostitutes, but to multiple players, including traders, pimps, consumers and, more generally, anybody whose sexuality deviated from heteronormative established patterns.
The period analysed by Simonetto breaks through political chronologies and highlights a different and more cultural historical periodisation. It starts in the late 1920s, when the hopes of the openness to immigration gave way to fears about how those aliens (Arabs, Jews, Eastern Europeans) contaminated the national soul: from those fears emerged Law 12.331 in 1936, abolishing prostitution and the norms that regulated it and punishing the managers of the ‘houses of tolerance’ that Perón would try to reopen seven years later, also to keep the nation healthy. The book ends with the democratic restoration of 1983 when the country embraces the abolitionist spirit of Law 12.331 and during which the political and social liberalisation of the country also upholds some crucial patriarchal and heterosexual tropes of national identity.
El dinero no es todo comes at the right time to expand a vibrantly renewed field about the history of sexuality and the state in Latin America. Lionel Cantú's posthumously published historical and ethnographic The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men (New York University Press, 2009); Benjamin A. Cowan's Securing Sex (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) on Brazilian right-wing fearmongers and their crusade for traditional views of family and sexuality during the Cold War; and Paulo Drinot's The Sexual Question (Cambridge University Press, 2020) about the history of prostitution in Peru and the century's oscillation between regulation and abolition − they all ask very different questions around some core concerns. Most evident, perhaps, are the ways in which power's obsession with sex and sexuality becomes a locus for the production of visions of the world, political projects and social hierarchies. This fixation is more productive on the fringes of sexuality. There, the fight against ‘aberrant’ behaviours associated with specific groups animates the experimentation with ideas, laws, policies and technologies to restore health to the nation. In the case of Simonetto, the book also complements and expands the author's meticulous work on sexuality and political identities beyond the state. His previous book, Entre la injuria y la revolución (Universidad de Quilmes, 2017), analyses the history of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front, FLH) in Argentina, not only to expose the expected tensions between progressive politics and homophobic beliefs among the Left, but also to reveal the productive ways in which those tensions were confronted.
After an introduction presenting the main historical and conceptual ideas as well as the rare primary sources used in this research, El dinero no es todo moves in thematic order fitting around a chronological evolution for the following six chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the pimp and how his role raised anxieties about immigration in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly Jewish and Eastern European immigrants, and particularly in Buenos Aires. Analysing the Kinsie Reports commissioned by the League of Nations in 1924, Simonetto reveals that the many different activities and ties with prostitution were lumped together under the category of ‘pimp’. In Chapter 2, the author studies a trove of letters from military barracks demanding access to some form of regulated prostitution as a resource to preserve the health (and, repeatedly, the criollo race) of the nation. The sweeping changes brought by the rise of Peronism are the background against which different players – including Perón himself – seek to restore some notions of order and hierarchies in an image of heterosexual masculinity. If Chapter 2 focuses on clients, Chapters 3 and 4 turn the attention to suppliers, first by analysing police reports and judicial depositions on prostitutes and then by bringing to light a social map of prostitution in the province of Buenos Aires. As with pimps in Chapter 1, ‘prostitutes’ here emerges as a catch-all term under which society includes several different forms of sexual exchange between men and women from different backgrounds and with different interests, degrees of agency, and visions. Chapter 5 goes back to clients and how workers’ identity could be reinforced by buying sex. It includes one of the best subtitles I have seen in recent history books: ‘Biologically macho, socially disorganised and naturally consumers’. The last chapter studies how regulation at national and local levels, often outside the big cities, reinforced police power in relation to the sex trade, mostly during the 1960s and 1970s. Repressive power, however, was always porous, and women who offered sex found multiple spaces of negotiation in order to maintain their practices.
With an analysis of prostitution as a social phenomenon around which norms are reified, the book is an essential addition to any course on the history of sexuality. But the author's kaleidoscopic vision of this process makes this text also appealing to any class on Latin American social and cultural history. And it opens a comparative conversation with other books about the different ways in which the sex trade is a space for the production of meanings and ideas that have permeated societies in the region during the twentieth century.
