A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires

SCHETTINI CRISTIANA

Selling Sex in the City: a Global History of Prostitution

Brill

Lugar: Leiden; Año: 2017; p. 357 - 385

The history of sexual work in Buenos Aires is a good case for an analysis of the historical construction of certain legal frameworks and the meanings they acquire in the lives of different individuals. Between both extremes, that of the regulatory action, which assumes the existence of self-determined women, free from any coercion, and that of abolitionism, which tends to see all prostitutes through the prism of victimization (in as far as prostitution is always seen as a form of violence against women), the women who have been involved in prostitution in Buenos Aires have shed light,through their livelihood strategies, on the contradictions, borders, and gaps in the diverse forms of the organization of sexual commerce over the last century.