The standard narrative that recounts the history of modern LGBTQ+ activism almost universally points to protests surrounding the 1969 New York City police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located in Greenwich Village, as the founding moment of a new international movement. Resistance to what had been a standard police practice of arbitrarily arresting gay, lesbian, and trans patrons of queer establishments marked a transition point from the moderate and somewhat defensive activities of what has been termed the homophile movement of the 1950s and early 1960s to more radical responses by the newly formed gay and lesbian liberation movement that challenged state repression and social stigmas with audacity and pride. The Christopher Street Parade that commemorated the “Stonewall Uprising” a year later, so the story goes, represents the emergence of this new movement that was quickly emulated in Europe and disseminated to other parts of the world.
Scholars of Argentine LGBTQ+ history have questioned this version of the past, which reenforces a notion that enlightened forward-thinking protagonists in the Global North inspired subsequent activism in countries of the Global South. To refute this problematic account, they have documented that prior to the Stonewall events, in 1968, former militants of the Argentine Communist Party and members of the Buenos Aires Post Office Workers’ Union formed the group known as Nuestro Mundo without any apparent direct influence from organizations in the United States or Europe. By 1971, six groups had founded the Frente de Liberación Homosexual de Argentina, which dissolved in 1975 as political polarization in the country and the consolidation of the far-right in the government of President Isabel Perón eliminated any possibility of activism on the eve of establishment of a brutal military regime (1976–83), which would be widely condemned for its human rights abuses. Since the return to democracy in 1983, the Argentine LGBTQ+ movement has made substantial advances, including obtaining the passage of the Equal Marriage Law in 2010 and the Gender Identity Law in 2012, which permits people to legally change their identities without an official medical or governmental approval process. In 2021, the Cupo Laboral Trans Law established a 1% quota for trans workers in civil service jobs, although those goals have yet to be fulfilled.
One of the notable characteristics of the Argentine movement has been the leading role that trans people have played in expanding sexual and gender rights in the country. In this regard, the book shifts the focus away from an examination of gay and lesbian activism to document how trans people constructed their own unique personas, found ways to transform their bodies in alignment with their gender identities, built support networks, and mobilized to demand basic civil and democratic rights. Since in-depth studies of trans people in Latin America, as well as social histories of lesbians, lag far behind academic production about gay men, Simonetto’s pioneering work on the topic will immediately become a reference point for scholars who wish to carry out similar studies in other countries of the region or beyond.
From the outset, the author defines “trans” as “an umbrella concept that includes diverse groups who define themselves as travesti, transsexual, and transgender …” (4–5), recognizing, however, many other terms employed to describe the corporeal experiences, languages, and practices of those who distanced themselves from the gender they were assigned at birth and created new ways to define their gender identities. The study examines the varied ways in which those who embodied gender beyond social expectations produced new knowledge, practices, and technologies in different spaces and social settings, while facing state repression and the controlling influences of medical and legal specialists who sought to impose normative gender behavior on trans people. The study also considers how international influences, such as trans performances of the Brazilian show Les Girls in Argentina or Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival celebrations, positively influenced popular attitudes toward trans people. Finally, the author considers the ways in which archives that contain documentation about trans people can both reinforce stereotypes and at the same time deconstruct them. These repositories can be extremely valuable if historians or social scientists read the material they hold against the grain and compare these sources with ones produced by trans people themselves. To his credit, while much of the focus of the book is on trans women, the author made a point of incorporating available documentation about trans men in response to a virtual absence in the literature.
The volume begins with a study of nonconforming gender expressions in early twentieth-century Argentina before medical specialists dominated the topic and prior to the state’s attempts to regiment and control queer public sociability in the 1930s. Chapter two examines the medicalization of gender transitions, and especially the notion that some felt that they were trapped in the body of the “wrong” gender, which could be corrected by medical intervention. The author then looks at international influences on the making of a travesti culture in Argentina in the 1960s, followed by a consideration of the ways in which male and female trans people acquired knowledge and developed homemade technologies to transform their bodies to conform to their gender identity. The final chapter documents how trans activists used politicized notions of gender to gain legal recognition while guaranteeing basic democratic rights, such as the freedom of movement and the right to wear the clothes and carry out the medical procedures they choose to embody their conceptions of themselves.
In recent years, the extreme right and fundamentalist religious organizations have criticized the movement in defense of trans rights throughout the world as a supposed threat to the traditional family. By nostalgically relying on conservative gender frameworks from the 1950s and 1960s, if not from before, these political actors both reinforce reactionary forms of the patriarchy and encourage moral panic about supposed threats to children who are allegedly endangered by the questioning of how gender is arbitrarily constructed. This volume is an important contribution toward the dismantling of the arguments and prejudices embedded in this worldview.
