Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires

This book is an attempt to integrate gender into Argentine political and economic history by examining the role and image of female prostitution in concepts of work, family, class and citizenship (1).

Guy's premise is that these categories are not distinct from one another, but in fact interrelate with and thereby shape one another. For example, "politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics" (1). What affects one piece of the puzzle of society affects all other pieces to various degrees. The issue of prostitution certainly has its appeal as a subject for social study (the author is a social historian), but on first glance it would appear to be a subject on the outskirts of social science. In fact, as Guy seeks to show and does show, prostitution, especially as an expression of gender roles, is intimately interconnected with many of the most fundamental social and political aspects of Argentine society from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century.

The issue of prostitution is shown by the author to be a dynamic one which is related to labor questions, gender problems, tourism, immigration, medicine, law, civil rights, and many other subjects weighing on the most basic matters of the nation. Most important, however, in Guy's book, is the relationship between prostitution and family, and the bridge that family serves betwe

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mprise the customer list of the prostitutes in the first place. The portrait Guy paints of the Argentine attempt to control prostitution, or even to eliminate entirely, is a futile and cruel one. The efforts to eliminate it were doomed in Argentina as they have been doomed in every country on the earth where women are forced into the occupation for economic reasons or through the brutality of men. The efforts to control were worse than the prostitution itself, for those efforts hurt far more than the prostitutes, including many married women who worked and who were indirectly punished by laws meant to control only prostitution. As a result, efforts to cure Argentina of its prostitution problem turned a group of socially, politically, and economically marginal women into the subjects of a volatile discourse that infused Argentine politics, economics, and culture with gender (4). The book's importance is first obviously rooted in its exploration of the history of Argentina, for an investigation of the evolution of prostitution over the century in question reveals far more about Argentina than merely its prostitution. Beyond that, in its gender focus, Guy's book demonstrates how male-dominated power structures in another so
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Approximate Word count = 1483
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)