Slavery in White and Black: Debates Over Sexual Labor in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro at the End of the Nineteenth Century

SCHETTINI PEREIRA, CRISTIANA

Universidad de Michigan, Ann Arbor

Conferencia; Conference The State of Gender and History Research in Latin America; 2005

Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Michigan

In this presentation, I propose a comparative approach of sexual labor debates and practices in South America, focusing on public debates over regulation of prostitution in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro around the 1870s. While prostitution was never state-regulated in Brazil’s imperial court as was the case in Argentina’s capital, my work is an attempt to highlight the international dynamics of prostitution policies, and examine such policies vis-à-vis ongoing local debates over labor relations and processes of nation building. I will also focus on some actual arrangements of sexual work in both cities by looking at criminal trials of corruption of minors in Buenos Aires as well as recent bibliography on freedom lawsuits of slave prostitutes in Rio de Janeiro. The comparative approach I propose is helpful to identify some of the specific meanings of international narratives of white slavery and traffic in women assumed in South America, as reflected in two of the most important cities in the continent. When seen in the light of existing sexual labor arrangements and practices of coercion that mostly affected native and black women, those narratives gained unexpected meanings closely related to ongoing labor conflicts, rather than to the actual presence of European prostitutes in both cities. After the 1870s, as specific national projects gained force in Argentina and Brazil, those meanings would be silenced. Casting a new light on them not only reveals the latent gender content in South American national projects, but also allows us to review, through the lens of gender, various historical configurations of forced labor practices and the alleged incompatibility between free and slave labor.