Prostitution has been a privileged topic of the history of gender and sexuality. The global commercialisation of sexual services has been studied to understand the production of gender representations, working- and popular-class everyday life, and policy-making as attempts of modulation of erotic practices. From the classic approaches of women's history to the more recent studies of the experience of selling and purchasing sex, prostitution has been placed in the core of the making of modern sexualities.
The Sexual Question is a well-written, original and engaging book on the Peruvian history of prostitution. Based on extensive empirical work, this book is the first study in English of the Peruvian history of sexual commerce during the state regulation of brothels. With a unique and original approach to a diverse range of documentary sources, Paulo Drinot builds a historical narrative that promises to become a classic for those interested in the Latin American history of sexuality, medicine and state-building.
The Sexual Question shows the centrality of sexuality to understanding broader social, cultural and political phenomena. By placing heterosexual desire at the core of state- and nation-building, Drinot approaches the politicisation of sexuality in Peru. The book points out how ideas about human reproduction and male health were central to the Latin American elite's political imagination. This book highlights how the elite's obsession with the alleged improvement of the race as a milestone of national development transformed sexuality and prostitution into a public matter.
One of the most noteworthy contributions of this study is its temporal scope. Drinot's approach to the Peruvian regulation of prostitution is a remarkable example of how local forces can modulate and even reject expected global trends and shows the importance of Latin America to redefine global periodisations of the history of sexuality. While the local elites endorsed the global belief that regulation was an instrument of modernisation, they did not abandon it when other Latin American countries did so under the League of Nations recommendations. In this sense, the Peruvian experiment contrasts with other countries in which regulation was abolished earlier, such as Uruguay (1927), Chile (1931) and Argentina (1936).
The Sexual Question is based on both a strong theoretical and historiographical background. Drinot challenges the reductions of sexuality policing to a body of abstract ideas, to study the concrete practices, actors and policies that interacted in the everyday politicisation of sexuality. In contrast with other studies, it doesn't restrict its scope to cultural representations and discourses or to prostitutes’ lives. With a precise interconnection of multiple documentary sources, it connects the brothels with parliaments, magazines, doctors’ offices and military barracks. Drinot broadens the range of subjects who participated in sexual commerce as clients, doctors, lawyers, feminists, social workers, police officers, social reformers, anarchists and journalists, among others. In this sense, Drinot's effort to broaden our knowledge about the agents that interacted in sexual commerce also points out the everyday negotiation of sexual policies.
This book shows how prostitution and venereal diseases were both at the core of the process of medicalisation and modernisation of Peruvian society. First, Drinot shows how the focus on human reproduction and the concerns about venereal disease as a side effect of urban progress were primarily androcentric. The paradigm of regulation was based on a simple idea: the male right to access sexual services and the need to guarantee it without medical risks. This is why this book contributes to the study of clients and masculinity, usually under-studied. Second, it points out how venereal diseases, especially syphilis, catalysed a broader process of racialisation. Drinot analyses how elites represented Chinese migrants as infectious agents and portrayed Indigenous men as potentially infected subjects for their alleged innocence or immorality.
Drinot's book is also a methodological example of how to work with scarce documentary sources. By advocating ‘unruled navigation’ of the archives, Drinot deals with his lack of access to state prostitutes’ registration documents or trial records by visiting traditional documentary sources like newspaper and medical articles and shows the power of historical practice to accurately expand our imagination of people's everyday making of sexuality.
The Sexual Question challenges historical narratives that insist on the state as a perfect machine of domination and control. This monograph reveals how the persistent and often failed attempts to colonise the multiple spaces of social life show the alternative and usually contested ways of experiencing sexuality beyond the elite's dreams (and nightmares). The Sexual Question is an absorbing book and a unique contribution to the Latin American history of sexuality, medicine, health and state-building.
