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Patricio Simonetto’s new book Money Isn't Everything
21 May 2024
Congratulations to Patricio Simonetto, a former Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at the UCL Institute of the Americas, on his new his new book.
Just a few years before becoming President, Juan Domingo Perón penned a letter demanding the reopening of government sponsored brothels near military bases. This, he believed, was a necessary preventative for homosexuality. His letter exemplified the then widespread panic over sexual deviance that came just a few years after a panic surrounding immigrant sexualities led to the criminalization of prostitution. In this book, available for the first time in English, Patricio Simonetto captures the anxiety, regulation, and tolerance of sex work that has defined Argentina's heterosexual and patriarchal national identity.
Consulting judicial papers, prison archives, and secret police reports, Simonetto illustrates the state's authoritarian, violent, and moralistic interventions against dissident sexualities and how they transcended political shifts across liberal and military governments. He narrates the life stories of those who offered, exploited, or were consumers of sex work and draws connections between sex work, government policy, and Argentina's economy. This impressive study provides a lens into the ever-shifting constructions of heteronormative masculinities that produced political agendas and social hierarchies that continue to influence Argentina today.
This is a translation of a book originally published in Spanish (based on Patricio’s PhD, examined by Paulo Drinot) and won a translation grant from Duke/UNC presses.