Introduction to The Sexual Question

Introduction Alberto talked about Golden Toes as much as anyone else in the section. No one suspected that he knew about Huatica and its environs only by hearsay, because he repeated anecdotes he had been told and invented all kinds of lurid stories. But he could not overcome a certain inner discontent. The more he talked about sexual adventures to his friends, who either laughed or shamelessly thrust their hands into their pockets, the more certain he was that he would never go to bed with a woman except in his dreams, and this depressed him so much that he swore he would go to Huatica Street on his very next pass, even if he had to steal twenty soles, even if he got syphilis. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Time of the Hero. For just under 30 years, between its creation in 1928 and its closure in 1956, the barrio rojo, or red-light district, around Huatica Street, originally known as 20 September Street, in La Victoria district, was the centre of brothel prostitution in the Peruvian capital, a place where many thousands of men, like Mario Vargas Llosa’s character Alberto and, indeed, Vargas Llosa himself, went in search of Golden Toes and others like her.1 The creation of Lima’s barrio rojo in 1928 was the culminating 1 As Vargas Llosa explains in his memoir, A Fish in the Water, Alberto’s experiences in Lima’s barrio rojo were based on his own: “The majority of the characters in my novel La ciudad y los perros [The Time of the Hero], written using memories of my years at Leoncio Prado as a basis, are very free, distorted versions of real models, while others are completely imaginary. But the elusive ‘Goldifeet’ is there as my memory preserves her; self-assured, attractive, vulgar, facing up to her humiliating job with indomitable good humor and giving me, on those Saturdays, for twenty soles, ten minutes of bliss.” Vargas Llosa, A Fish in the Water, p. 105. On Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros, see Aguirre, La ciudad y los perros. 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 2 The Sexual Question achievement of the promoters of regulation, the attempt to control the spread of venereal disease through the medical policing of female prostitutes. As they did in most of Latin America (and parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia) at this time, elites in Peru also argued that the regulation of prostitution was not only imperative from a moral and public health perspective; it was also the “modern” way to deal with prostitution and venereal disease, and particularly with syphilis, a disease that affected the health of the individual and, because of its presumed hereditary effects, the vitality of the nation as a whole. By the 1950s, however, few held such views. Lima’s red-light district was now seen as a source of moral and epidemiological danger. This book examines what both the creation and closure of Lima’s barrio rojo tells us about Peruvian society in the first half of the twentieth century. Although doctors and others had begun to put forward proposals to regulate prostitution in the mid-nineteenth century, little progress was made, in contrast to several other Latin American countries such as Mexico, Argentina, or Cuba, where regulation was introduced in the second half of the century. In the early twentieth century, however, Lima’s authorities finally introduced regulation. The implementation of regulation to manage prostitution in Lima reflected, and contributed to, two connected developments that characterized the so-called medicalization of Latin American societies, or the process whereby “biological and medical metaphors organized the way modern nations and states were imagined.”2 On the one hand, these societies were increasingly pathologized, i.e. perceived and represented by “experts,” particularly lawyers and doctors, but also increasingly social scientists, as fundamentally unhealthy, both physically and morally, if not fully degenerate, a condition often associated, in a period when European racial thought influenced Latin American elites’ views of themselves, to perceived national racial deficiencies.3 In Peru such a diagnosis was reinforced by explanations of Peru’s defeat in the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), which stressed the weakness of the Peruvian “race” and the treachery of the country’s elites. Although a minority of observers blamed defeat on the failure of elites to integrate the nation and to incorporate the Indian, others concluded that defeat in the war, and more generally Peru’s backwardness, were consequences of the country’s racial configuration and in 2 3 Cueto and Palmer, Medicine and Public Health in Latin America, p. 58. See, among others, Armus (ed.), Disease in the History of Modern Latin America; Hochman, di Liscia and Palmer (eds.), Patologías de la Patria. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 3 particular of the backward cultural and racial characteristics of its indigenous population.4 At the same time, the pathologization of Peruvian society nevertheless allowed for the possibility of regeneration and “civilization.” Particularly during the so-called Aristocratic Republic (1895–1919) and the “Oncenio” of President Augusto B. Leguía (1919–1930), elites argued that material progress, to be gained through a growing insertion into the world economy and the exploitation of the region’s natural resources, would enable national progress. In some countries, elites sought to redeem their populations through the racial “improvement” that, they believed, would result from the immigration of “superior” Europeans. In others, elites pursued a discursive revalorization of a national mestizo identity, even embracing, in name if not in deed, “racial democracy.”5 In all countries, elites sought, albeit often half-heartedly and with limited success, to re-mold their populations by developing projects of “improvement” in education, public health, housing, and labor policy, as well as through military conscription. In Peru, as elsewhere in Latin America, such projects were highly racialized. Once the promise of mass European migration as a source of national regeneration proved unworkable, elites split on whether the Indian was redeemable and could, once improved (i.e. once de-indianized), become an agent of progress for the nation.6 Such projects reflected a new (often racialized) understanding of “the social” and of the state and of how the latter might act upon the former. In the nineteenth century, Latin American elites typically viewed the city as the space of progress and the countryside as the space of backwardness. Particularly after the mid-nineteenth century, when many countries achieved greater political stability and began to experience faster economic growth, elites conceived of progress as irradiating from the civilized cities to the barbaric countryside, where both nature and the population, idle and untamed, were to be mastered and made productive through injections of capital (at first national, later increasingly transnational), technology and science (including medical science), and the 4 5 6 For the intellectual history of this period, see among others, Rochabrún, “Sociología y pensamiento social.” See, for example, Graham (ed.), The Idea of Race in Latin America; Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt (eds.), Race and Nation in Modern Latin America; Earle, The Return of the Native; Gotkowitz (ed.), Histories of Race and Racism; Foote and Goebel (eds.), Immigration and National Identities in Latin America. See Poole, Vision, Race and Modernity; de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos; Larson, Trials of Nation Making; Drinot, The Allure of Labor. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 4 The Sexual Question imposition of new regimes of free and, where necessary, coerced labor. In Cuba and Brazil, of course, such processes occurred in the context of, indeed were made possible by, slave labor systems. Networks of communication, railways and the telegraph first, automobiles, planes, the radio, and the telephone later, would link the modern space of the city with these new archipelagos of modernity, connecting the wealth produced in the “chimneys in the desert” with the cities that served as gateways to the world’s markets.7 However, by the late nineteenth century, problems arising from growing urbanization, class stratification, racial mixing, and contentious politics, as well as crime and disease, particularly epidemic disease, resulted in the growing perception that Latin America’s “ailing” cities too were in desperate need of “civilizing.”8 Peruvian elites conceived of Lima as whiter and therefore less pathologized than the rest of the country, and particularly the highlands and the Amazon.9 However, by the late nineteenth century, Lima too was deemed in need of “civilizing.” In his detailed study of the city of Lima and its population published in 1895, Joaquín Capelo, an engineer and politician, concluded that “Peru is today a sick man close to death,” but he believed that he and others like him could save the patient.10 Subject to contestation and less coherent than is sometimes assumed, the twinned pathologization and “improvement” of Lima in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its modernization perhaps, had a visible effect on the city.11 In a context of limited if symbolically significant industrialization, this twin process was imagined and implemented by a new cohort of hygienists, architects, engineers, urban planners, and property developers, with support from diverse governments, from oligarchic Civilistas (1895–1919) to the military regime of Manuel Odría (1948–1956). It resulted in an evident physical transformation of the city, which grew in size, from 1,292 hectares in 1908 to 2,037 hectares in 1931 to 5,630 hectares in 1940, and in population, from 140,884 7 8 9 10 11 Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert. See, for example, Pineo and Baer, Cities of Hope; Meade, “Civilizing” Rio; Rodríguez, Civilizing Argentina; Armus, The Ailing City. On the social and “racial” structure of nineteenth-century Lima, see Cosamalón Aguilar, El juego de las apariencias. Capelo, Sociología de Lima. Vol. 3, p. 333. Of course, attempts to sanitize the city were not entirely new. As Adam Warren and Jorge Lossio have shown, municipal authorities and doctors attempted to address Lima’s unsanitary conditions at different times in the colonial and early republican periods with varying levels of success. See Warren, Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru; and Lossio, Acequias y gallinazos. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 5 inhabitants in 1908 to 273,016 in 1931 to 645,172 in 1940.12 This was a transformation that combined the construction of new structures, such as boulevards and public buildings, as well as general transport, communications, and public health infrastructural development (from new hospitals to medical inspectors to sewage works) with the destruction of those structures, such as, most famously, the Callejón Otaiza (a street inhabited by Chinese immigrants destroyed by municipal authorities in 1909), which were considered to be sources of biological and moral infection.13 At the same time, but less evidently achieved, the process involved the “moral” transformation of the city’s inhabitants, as exemplified by the attempts of hygienists, or medical social reformers, and other experts to inculcate “civilized” values in the city’s population and to eradicate unsanitary practices and behaviors perceived as expressive of uncivilized traits.14 As in other cities in Latin America, this was a process that combined the encouragement of certain habits and practices, linked to leisure and sport for example, and the prohibition of others, such as gambling and alcohol consumption. The construction of this “city of hygienists,” as Mannarelli has called it, was a process informed by specific understandings of class, gender, and race, but also by more general concerns regarding public order, health, and morality.15 Although the population as a whole was deemed amenable to civilizing, different groups were subjected to different treatment. The intellectual architects of this process viewed the poor generally as sources of political threat, epidemiological danger, and immorality. However, in their campaigns to eradicate what they came to understand as social ills (criminality, alcoholism, gambling, vice, etc.), they typically targeted, through policies that sought ostensibly to address issues such as inadequate housing or poor nutrition, specific groups such as Chinese or Japanese men and women, 12 13 14 15 The period from 1940 to 1960, moreover, saw an exponential expansion of the city. By 1960 it had reached an extension of 20,612 hectares and a population of 1,845,910. See Calderón Cockburn, La ciudad ilegal, p. 65. See Rodríguez Pastor, “La Calle del Capón, el Callejón Otaiza y el Barrio Chino;” and Ramón Joffré, La muralla y los callejones; Ramón Joffré, “El guión de la cirugía urbana, 1850–1940.” See Cueto, El regreso de las epidemias; Parker, “Civilizing the City of Kings;” Mannarelli, Limpias y modernas; Muñoz Cabrejo, Diversiones públicas. See Mannarelli, Limpias y modernas, chapter 1. On public order, and attempts to address criminality, see Carlos Aguirre, The Criminals of Lima and their Worlds; and Huertas, “Imagining Criminality.” Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 6 The Sexual Question Afro-Peruvians, and, poor, usually non-white, women, such as market sellers and washerwomen, and, of course, prostitutes.16 In Lima as elsewhere, urban and social reformers and particularly medical doctors singled out prostitutes for particular attention. Prostitutes, as the perceived primary source of venereal disease, were thought to embody one of the main contributors to the unhealthy city, and therefore were central to the pathologization of Peru’s capital. In turn, as “fallen” women, they were considered to be one of the key groups in need of redemption or “civilization.” Gradually, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a medico-legal apparatus, part of a broader expanding “sanitary state” or “republic of health,” was put in place to oversee the registration of brothels and prostitutes, levy licenses, medically inspect prostitutes, impose fines when the regulations were flouted, and generally police prostitution in the city, a process that resulted, as part of a broader process of spatial reordering of prostitution that began in the 1900s, in the establishment of the barrio rojo in La Victoria in 1928.17 At the same time, treatment centers were set up where prostitutes, and their male clients, could be treated for their venereal ailments. By the 1950s, such centers existed in most major cities in the country as part of a national venereal disease program. During this period, moreover, venereal diseases, such as syphilis, gonorrhea and soft chancre, and their epidemiological and social consequences, became a major concern for Peru’s biomedical establishment, who helped shape public debate on prostitution and its public health impact. In 1956, however, Lima’s municipal authorities closed down the barrio rojo in La Victoria on the grounds that its existence did nothing to address either the social or epidemiological effects of prostitution and created other types of problems. “Even if he got syphilis,” Vargas Llosa’s character Alberto was willing to risk a visit to Huatica, a place that had been created as part of a strategy to control the spread of venereal disease. If the establishment of the barrio rojo in 1928 was the high point of regulation, its closure in 1956 was arguably the high point of abolitionism, a transnational movement inspired by Josephine Butler’s campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1860s Britain, that argued that regulation was not only ineffective from a public health perspective but 16 17 On the Chinese as a source of moral and biological corruption, see the discussion on Chinese eateries, or chifas, in Drinot, The Allure of Labor, chapter 5. On the idea of a sanitary state, see Cueto and Palmer, Medicine and Public Health in Latin America. On the republic of health, see Araya, República de la salud. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 7 also morally and politically wrong. In Peru, this campaign was led by a group of doctors, lawyers, and feminists, influenced by eugenic ideas, with limited success in the 1930s and 1940s. However, when the campaign was embraced, in the late 1940s, by “popular” newspapers that catered to an expanded public sphere, it finally gained traction. Like other Latin American countries, Peru too experienced a familiar cycle in the way it sought to address female prostitution, though it adopted regulation relatively late by regional standards, and, similarly switched to abolition much later than, say, Argentina or Cuba.18 Why regulation was adopted and why it was eventually seemingly abandoned, and what this tells us about the history of Lima and Peru more generally, is the subject of this book.    As Elizabeth Clement notes, “prostitution raises larger issues than just the treatment of the women involved, indicting patriarchy, the class structure, conditions caused by capitalism, and new understandings of the role of the state in people’s lives and health.”19 Although the narrative arc of this book follows the rise and decline of regulation and the apparent triumph of abolition as paradigms governing the management of prostitution, my goal is to explore a broader set of issues. In particular, I am interested in what the management of prostitution tells us about, in the very broadest sense, the interplay of sexuality, society, and the state in Peru in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more specifically what it can tell us about “the sexual question.” Like the social question, a term that came to encompass the (perceived) social issues that stood in the way of the flourishing of industrial society (in particular, the problems that arose as a consequence of the unequal distribution of the gains of industrial capitalism) and the solutions that were devised to address those problems, the sexual question refers to the sexual issues that stood in the way of the 18 19 In fact, in some ways, regulation was never fully abandoned. Today, women over 18 who pay a license and have a health certificate can work legally as prostitutes. Brothels regulated by the state continue to operate in the Peruvian capital. Most prostitution is illegal or clandestine both in Lima and elsewhere. Of late, the trafficking of women and children for sex work in parts of the Amazon has received growing attention from the press and campaigners. Clement, “Prostitution,” p. 219. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 8 The Sexual Question flourishing of the population and the solutions that were devised to address those problems.20 The sexual question, as turn-of-the-twentieth-century sexologists such as August Forel argued, “is of fundamental importance for humanity, whose happiness and well-being depend largely on the best solution of this important problem.” For Forel, “the fundamental axiom of the sexual question” was as follows: “With man, as with all living beings, the constant object of all sexual function, and consequently of sexual love, is the reproduction of the species.” Forel argued that sexual instinct and sentiment “had their roots in life itself.” However, social life had perverted instinct and sentiment. It had therefore become necessary to act upon human sexuality: “human society has guided them [instinct and sentiment] into false and pernicious ways. It is important to turn them from these in order to tranquilize and regulate their course by damming them up and canalizing them.”21 Experts concerned with the labor question sought to codify the biological, social, and political pathologies that resulted from industrialization in order to channel workers’ efforts away from militancy. Similarly, sexologists sought to codify sexual behavior in order to channel men and women away from sexual pathology. As Lucy Bland and Laura Doan have noted, sexologists like Forel were concerned with labeling bodies and desires (as normal or pathological), but they were equally concerned “with populations as an object of study and set about delineating the criteria for human and ‘racial’ betterment through the regulation of procreation and biological heredity.”22 Concretely, then, the sexual question evokes the ways in which sexuality became a political issue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a matter for government in the Foucauldian sense.23 As Foucault noted in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, published in 1976, from the eighteenth century, “the sexual conduct of the population was taken both as an object of analysis and as target of intervention [. . .] It was essential 20 21 22 23 I use here the term population in the sense given to it by Foucault in his governmentality lectures. See Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Forel, The Sexual Question, pp. 3–5. On the development of sexology in this period, see among, others, Bland and Doan, Sexology Uncensored; Waters, “Sexology;” Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones (eds.), A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960. See also Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life. Bland and Doan, “General Introduction,” p. 2. As Foucault states, “What can the end of government be? Certainly not just to govern, but to improve the condition of the population, to increase its wealth, its longevity, its health.” Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 105. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 9 that the state know what was happening with its citizens’ sex, and the use they made of it, but also that each individual be capable of controlling the use he made of it. Between the state and the individual, sex became an issue, and a public issue no less; a whole web of discourses, special knowledges, analyses and injunctions settled upon it.”24 Drawing inspiration from Foucault’s approach to the study of sexuality, while being attentive to the limitations of such an approach, historians such as María Emma Mannarelli, Lissell Quiroz, and Raúl Necochea have examined the sexual question in Peru in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the perspective of discourses on, and policies toward, motherhood and the construction of femininity, and the development of family planning policies.25 This study builds on such perspectives but focuses specifically on prostitution and venereal disease and their government. In particular, I explore how ideas about male and female sexuality informed attempts to govern prostitution and venereal disease. The regulation of prostitution, as a paradigm adopted by state actors to address the public order and public health effects of prostitution, reflected but also constructed understandings of normal and abnormal or desirable and undesirable male and female sexuality and of the role of the state in regulating sexuality and channeling it for the purposes of nation building and national progress. Scientific, and specifically medical, knowledge on venereal disease proved central to elite support for regulation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, since it served to identify prostitutes as the primary vector of venereal disease and male clients as its primary victim. Doctors believed that, because men found it difficult to marry, and because of the dangers posed by the lure of sexual perversions such as homosexuality and masturbation, it was imperative that prostitutes satisfy male sexual needs. It followed that prostitutes needed to be made safe for men. In turn, the shift away from regulation toward abolition, and the eventual closure of Lima’s barrio rojo that resulted from this shift, expressed different understandings of male and female sexuality, as well as new biomedical understandings of how venereal disease spread, understandings that shifted focus away from prostitutes as the main vector of contagion to the population as a whole. 24 25 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, p. 26. Mannarelli, Limpias y modernas; Necochea López, A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru; Quiroz, “Mettre au monde.” Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 10 The Sexual Question Historians who have studied prostitution in contexts as different as imperial Russia and colonial India or nineteenth-century Havana and twentieth-century London reach similar conclusions about the ways in which the government of prostitution and venereal disease both reflected and in turn shaped ideas about sexuality.26 Nevertheless, the Peruvian case is instructive because this general pattern is inflected in ways that reflect specifically local issues: elite anxieties about male sexuality, and the threat of homosexuality and masturbation, in the late nineteenth century, for example, were linked to broader anxieties about the nation’s “virility” in the aftermath of the War of the Pacific; perceived changes in female sexual mores in the 1920s, and the emergence of a transgressive sexuality linked to the “modern girl” and the flapper, were understood with reference to the allure as well as the threat of things European but also as expressive of the moral contagion produced by the visibility and proximity of female prostitution in the streets of Lima. More generally, elites understood the dangers of venereal disease in ways that reflected the specific racializations that shaped Peruvian society: they blamed Asian immigrants in the early twentieth century for the spread of venereal disease in Lima while a pathological indigenous sexuality came to be seen as an explanation for high rates of venereal disease infection in the midtwentieth century in the context of growing rural to urban migration and the expansion of public health services to the rest of the country. But the history of prostitution and venereal disease explored in this book was shaped not only by ideas but also by the actions of a range of social actors. In this sense, though, like many other scholars, I draw in this book on the work of Foucault, I share the view that one cannot write a history of sexuality as a “history without agents.” As Rita Felski notes, “what is missing from Foucault’s version [of the rise of sexual science] is any substantive account of the messy and complicated interaction, conflict and negotiation between the discourses of sexual science, other aspects of nineteenth-century culture and the experiential realities of human subjects.”27 Indeed, elite ideas about prostitution, and the policies that derived from them were subject to contestation, first and foremost, from the women who were the object of such policies. Women targeted as prostitutes sometimes rejected and sometimes tried to enforce the policies 26 27 See Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters; Tambe, Colonial Bombay; Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic; Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens. Felski, “Introduction,” p. 2. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 11 that sought to regulate prostitution. For some women, the majority, regulation created a regime that stigmatized their sexual behavior and marginalized them socially. For others, a minority, regulation created new opportunities for employment and to develop a new, and in some cases, lucrative identity. How prostitutes negotiated regulation is central to the history of prostitution I explore in this book. Although clearly central to the history of prostitution in Lima, prostitutes were only one of several social actors who intervened and shaped the history of prostitution. In this book, as in most studies of prostitution, the voices of male clients remain largely if not entirely elusive. In order to access these voices, albeit in a limited manner, I have turned to accounts that, taken together, form a sort of male collective memory of the history of Lima’s barrio rojo (see Chapter 6), which sheds light on how men experienced Lima’s sexual economy. But other sources I draw on, discussed in greater detail below, reveal the role played by numerous groups and individuals in shaping the history that I analyze, such as doctors and lawyers, as well as a small cohort of social scientists and social workers, who wrote on prostitution and venereal disease and sought to influence policy; municipal and state authorities, including policemen, who implemented policy; and individuals and interest groups, from senators to feminists, from landlords to anarchists, from journalists to the letterwriting public. These individuals and groups, all affected by policy toward prostitution, sought to enforce it, resist it or, as in the case of the individuals and groups who tried to repeal regulation and promote abolition, alter it.   This book builds on an extensive literature on the history of prostitution across the world.28 Taking their cue from pioneering studies by Alain Corbin and Judith Walkowitz on France and England respectively, historians have expanded the study of the history of prostitution to most parts of the world.29 The government of prostitution around the world was profoundly shaped by the measures implemented in early nineteenth28 29 This historiography is too extensive to list here. I reference it in different parts of the book. For useful, if now somewhat dated overviews of the literature, see Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in History;” and Guy, “Stigma, Pleasures and Dutiful Daughters.” A recent overview is provided in Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerker, and Heerma van Voss, “Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600s–2000s.” Corbin, Les filles de noce; Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 12 The Sexual Question century France, which consisted ostensibly of the registration of prostitutes, their subjection to regular medical inspections, and sometimes to forced hospitalization in so-called lock hospitals, the toleration of brothels, and, often, the enclosure of prostitution in segregated parts of cities. Although this model of regulation shared certain elements with early modern and medieval forms of prostitution management, it was perceived as new and effective in controlling the spread of venereal disease and was adopted and adapted around the world, including in Britain, where the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s introduced regulation to garrison towns and port cities. This legislation led to campaigns from feminists and social purity activists who critiqued the “double standard” inherent in regulation and spearheaded a movement to repeal the Acts. An abolitionist movement inspired by Josephine Butler’s campaigns, which borrowed heavily from the earlier anti-slavery campaigns, spread rapidly around the world, thanks to institutions such the International Abolitionist Federation. In the first half of the twentieth century, most countries that had previously implemented regulation now abolished it.30 Although it is primarily in discussion with studies on the history of prostitution, the book also seeks to contribute to three fields of scholarship: the history of gender and sexuality, the history of medicine and public health, and the history of the state.31 The history of gender and sexuality in Peru remains somewhat underdeveloped; most of the 30 31 Today, prostitution policy has expanded to a broader range of models or regimes, including legalization, decriminalization, prohibition, but also regulation and abolition. For a recent study, written by two sex workers, which explores different sex work regimes around the world, see Mac and Smith, Revolting Prostitutes. Scholarship on the history of prostitution in Peru is limited, but I have been fortunate to be able to draw on a few important studies. Lorraine Nencel’s Ethnography and Prostitution in Peru, as its title suggests, is a detailed ethnography of “women who prostitute” that focused on 1990s Lima. The book explores primarily these women’s gender identities. However, the book also contains an excellent overview of the history of prostitution in Peru based on careful archival research. This “historical narrative” of prostitution is, as far as I know, the first accurate account of the history I explore in this book, and although I go into more detail than Nencel does, I am clearly indebted for her pioneering work. Similarly, Roberto Prieto Sánchez’s Guía secreta is a detailed and well researched study of Lima’s locales of prostitution from the colonial period to the modern day. This study draws on several of the same sources that I have collated in Peruvian archives, though its approach is narrower, focused primarily on the history of brothels rather than prostitution more generally. Also worth mentioning is a short text by Katherine Roberts, which draws on a key source on prostitution in the early twentieth century, Pedro Dávalos y Lisson’s 1909 study, discussed in a later chapter, and oral history, and presents a fictional account of the life of a prostitute. See Roberts, “El caso de Rosario.” Also Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 13 scholarship focuses on the colonial and early republican periods.32 Still, I have drawn on these and other studies of gender and sexuality in Latin America and beyond, and in particular on their insights into the social construction of gendered identities and sexualities, to make sense of the history of prostitution in Peru and what it tells us about the history of sexuality in Peru.33 Regulation was intended to protect men, and, more generally, society, from the dangers of prostitution but also, and just as importantly, by enabling access to supposedly healthy prostitutes, from the lure of deviant male sexual practices, particularly homosexuality and masturbation. Similarly, regulation, and particularly the policy of isolating prostitutes away from the gaze of “decent people,” expressed anxieties about female sexuality; specifically, the fear that prostitutes might awaken a latent deviant, non-procreative, sexuality in women. In this sense, the regulation of prostitution should be understood as expressive of broader sexual anxieties. It was as an attempt, not a particularly successful attempt to be sure, to police both prostitutes and male and female sexuality. Prostitution, in this way, was central to the construction of normative masculinity and femininity in Peru. This book also draws on an ever-growing scholarship on the history of medicine and public health in Latin America.34 As Donna Guy notes, “state-regulated female prostitution was one of the first modern public 32 33 34 useful, though more focused on venereal disease, is Pasco and Nuñez Espinoza, “Medicina, prostitución y sífilis en Lima y Callao, 1910–1930.” For work on prostitution in an earlier period, see, for example, Macera, “Sexo y coloniaje;” Chuhue Huamán, “Plebe, prostitución y conducta sexual en el siglo XVIII.” See also, for a brief overview of prostitution from the sixteenth century onwards, Chuhue Huamán, “Images of Prostitution in Peruvian History.” Unfortunately, there is as yet no comparable study for colonial Peru to Nicole van Germeten’s detailed analysis of prostitution in colonial Mexico. See van Germeten, Profit and Passion. See Macera, “Sexo y coloniaje;” Mannarelli, Pecados públicos; Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens; Hunefeldt, Liberalism in the Bedroom; Stavig, “Political ‘Abomination’ and Private Reservation;” Christiansen, Disobedience, Slander, Seduction and Assault; Alegre Henderson, “Androginopolis.” Useful introductions to and overviews of this literature include, Balderston and Guy (eds.), Sex and Sexuality in Latin America; and French and Bliss (eds.), Gender, Sexuality and Power in Latin America since Independence. See also the special issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review, “Gender and Sexuality in Latin America,” 81:3–4 (2001). See, among others, Armus (ed.), Entre médicos y curanderos; Armus (ed.), Disease in the History of Modern Latin America; Hochman and Armus (eds.), Cuidar, controlar, curar; Hochman, di Liscia, and Palmer (eds.), Patologías de la Patria; Cueto and Palmer, Medicine and Public Health in Latin America. For the Peruvian case, see Cueto, Lossio and Pasco (eds.), El rastro de la salud en el Perú. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 14 The Sexual Question health campaigns.”35 Like much of that scholarship, I challenge the idea that the medicalization of prostitution and venereal disease was simply an elite top-down project. The study of the regulation of prostitution shows that medicalization was resisted, contested but also embraced, even coproduced, by different actors for a variety of reasons. Moreover, it was always precarious, limited not only by the availability of resources, but also by the evidence that it generated which challenged its basic assumptions, namely that regulating prostitution could reduce the spread of venereal disease.36 At the same time, I draw on recent attempts in this field to connect the history of medicine and public health, and more specifically, the history of sexual science, to global history.37 Although both regulation and abolition were global paradigms for managing prostitution that could be traced back to European origins, their implementation in Peru cannot be seen merely as transposition of European medical theory and practice. True, those who championed regulation or abolition stressed their Europeanness as a way to legitimate them as the modern way to address prostitution. However, they also sought to adapt and repurpose, through “unruly appropriations,” both paradigms in order to address what were considered specifically Peruvian concerns.38 Finally, this study draws on and contributes to the history of the state in Peru and Latin America. My approach intersects with several studies that have examined the gendered character of state formation in Latin America.39 I adopt here an approach to studying the state that moves beyond seeing the state merely as a paternal or patriarchal state acting upon society. Drawing on governmentality approaches, I find it more productive to understand state formation as a dynamic process, as constructed from above and from below, as co-produced. Regulation, as a state policy to manage prostitution, after all, was shaped as much by those who supported it intellectually and implemented it, as by the women whom it targeted, and indeed by the men whom it sought to 35 36 37 38 39 Guy, “Stigma, Pleasures and Dutiful Daughters,” p. 181. In reaching these conclusions, I draw on an extensive scholarship that examines the history of venereal disease in connection to the management of prostitution. See, in particular, Quétel, Le mal de Naples; Brandt, No Magic Bullet; Carrara, Tributo a Vênus; Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease; Davidson and Hall (eds.), Sex, Sin and Suffering. See Espinoza, “Globalizing the History of Disease, Medicine and Public Health in Latin America.” Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones (eds.), A Global History of Sexual Science, p. 3. See, by way of introduction to this extensive literature, Dore and Molyneux, Hidden Histories of Gender and State in Latin America. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 15 protect from venereal disease. In this sense, both the “growth” of the state, its expansion into areas of social life from which it was previously absent, but, just as importantly, the forms of power through which it manifests itself, whether “sovereign,” “disciplinary,” or “governmental,” to use Foucault’s terminology, need to be understood as resulting from the tactics and strategies of many actors who interacted with each other, including doctors and priests, prostitutes and male clients, pimps and police officers, feminists and state officials. Such an approach offers a useful framework to understand the evolution of state policy toward prostitution in Peru.      The book’s focus is shaped by the availability of certain types of sources and the unavailability of others. Back in the late 1990s, while working my way through the largely unorganized documents in the legajos (bundles) of the Lima Prefecture series held at the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), I was stopped in my tracks. I was looking for, and finding, police reports on union activities, confiscated Communist Party pamphlets, and lists of imprisoned APRA militants.40 But I soon found myself distracted, and fascinated, by a very different type of document. These documents were letters written by, or on behalf of, prostitutes and sent to the authorities, in particular to the Prefect of Lima. In these letters, the women typically complained that they had been ordered to move their brothel to different parts of the city, had been fined for flouting the regulations that had been imposed by the authorities, had been subjected to medical examinations, and that the police treated some prostitutes better than others. I knew that such documents were rare, even extremely rare. Although I should have been concentrating on the police reports on union activities, I began to take notes. This book grew out of that moment of archival indiscipline. These documents prompted questions that inform this book. First, and most obviously, who were these women? Why were they writing to the Prefect and what did this correspondence tell us about the relationship between these women and Lima’s political authorities? What motivated the authorities’ evident concern about the location of brothels or about 40 I used these sources in my doctoral dissertation and, later, in my book, The Allure of Labor. APRA, or Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana [American Popular Revolutionary Alliance], was Peru’s most important political party in the twentieth century. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 16 The Sexual Question the prostitutes’ medical examinations? Why did the women feel that the authorities treated some of them better than others and what might this tell us about conflicts among prostitutes? The letters held some clues. As I developed the project and began to read studies of the history of prostitution around the world, new questions emerged and I became convinced that this was a project worth pursuing. But, as I began to look for sources that might complement the study of the letters, I quickly realized that some sources that historians of prostitution in other countries had drawn on in their studies simply eluded me. For example, I was unable to locate any registers of prostitutes held by the authorities, a common practice around the world. Such registers might have given further information on the women who penned the letters to the authorities but might also have given me insight into how the authorities classified and sought to apprehend prostitution as an object of regulation. The potential sources that have eluded me are many. Unlike Julia Laite, who drew on Marthe Watt’s account in her study of prostitution in twentieth-century London, or Ruth Rosen, who draws on several accounts by madams and others, as well as the correspondence of Maimie Pinzer, I was unable to locate any autobiographies or similar documents written by prostitutes.41 Unlike Tiffany Sippial, who makes great use of La Cebolla in analyzing debates over Cuban prostitution, or Victoria Harris’s use of Der Pranger in her study of prostitution in Germany, I was unable to draw on periodicals written by prostitutes since, as far as I have been able to establish, none existed in Peru.42 Unlike Liat Kozma, who uses the documentation produced by the League of Nation’s Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children (CTW) in her study of prostitution in North Africa and the Levant, I was unable to draw on this rich material since the CTW’s researchers skipped Lima altogether when they visited Latin America in the 1930s.43 Unlike Christiana Schettini, Saheed Aderinto, Patricio Simonetto, or Lara Putnam, I am unable to draw extensively on court records in order to trace the policing of sexuality or explore kin networks among prostitutes, since court records, and specifically criminal cases, for the twentieth century are largely unavailable to researchers focusing primarily on Lima.44 Unlike 41 42 43 44 Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens; Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood. Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic; Harris, Selling Sex in the Reich. Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports. Criminal court records for Lima, held at the AGN, are only available until 1919, but are not properly catalogued. Records after 1919 are not available to researchers. See Schettini Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 17 Luise White, whose history of prostitution in colonial Nairobi drew on 70 oral interviews with former prostitutes, I am unable to draw on oral history methods, since locating former prostitutes who worked in Lima’s sex trade before the 1950s would have been extraordinarily difficult.45 The sources that do inform this study include, first and foremost, the correspondence received by the Prefect of Lima and the documentation of the Ministerio del Interior, which survives, if in a largely unorganized state, at the Archivo General de la Nación, and which includes letters from several relevant actors, including, most interestingly, prostitutes. In addition, I have drawn on medical and to a lesser extent legal journals, such as La Crónica Médica or La Gaceta Judicial, where physicians and lawyers discussed both prostitution and venereal disease in great detail, as well as several theses that students of Lima’s medicine faculty defended over the years. Moreover, the book draws on numerous periodicals, such as weeklies aimed at Lima’s well-to-do like Variedades and Mundial and mass media newspapers such as El Comercio, La Crónica, and La Prensa, which targeted an upper- and middle-class readership. I also rely on publications of specific groups, such as La Protesta, published by anarchists, or Fray K. Bezón, published by anti-clericals, or, for that matter, Catholic publications such as El Católico and El Amigo del Clero, as well as more “yellow press” outlets such as Última Hora and ¡Ya!, which started to appear in the late 1940s, and finally, official publications, such as ministerial reports. Most of these sources focus on prostitution in Lima, and this is reflected in the discussion I develop in the book, although where possible I have sought to extend the discussion to other parts of Peru.46 However, others will be better placed than me to explore 45 46 Pereira, “Que tenhas teu corpo;” Aderinto, When Sex Threatened the State; Simonetto, El dinero no es todo, Putnam The Company They Kept, pp. 98–101. White, The Comforts of Home. In this sense, my study replicates the tendency to focus on capital cities. For classic studies of prostitution in Latin American capitals, see Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires; Engel, Meretrizes e doutores; Caulfield, In Defense of Honor; Bliss, Compromised Positions; Góngora Escobedo, La prostitución en Santiago; McCreery, “‘This Life of Misery and Shame’;” Clark, Gender State and Medicine in Highland Ecuador, chapter 3. For exceptions, see Rago’s study of São Paulo, Putnam’s study of Limón in Costa Rica, Suárez’s study of Ponce in Puerto Rico; Mark Overmyer-Velázquez’s study of Oaxaca, French’s study of Chihuahua, Múgica’s study of Rosario, Bailón Vásquez’ study of the expansion of regulation to most Mexican states in the early twentieth century, and Simonetto’s study of rural Buenos Aires province. Rago, O prazeres da noite; Putnam, The Company they Kept; Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency; Overmyer-Velázquez, Visions of the Emerald City; French, “Prostitutes and Guardian Angels;” Múgica, La Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 18 The Sexual Question in greater detail the issues examined in this book in other major cities and in rural contexts.  The book is organized in six chapters. In Chapter 1, I examine the debates over the regulation of prostitution that took place in the nineteenth century. Drawing on medical and legal journals, and other sources, I examine the arguments that Peruvian doctors and lawyers put forward in favor of regulation as a paradigm for governing prostitution. These arguments closely echoed those that were put forward by doctors and lawyers in other countries and reprised in broad strokes the Augustinian tradition.47 But, as I show, they also reflected particularly Peruvian concerns in a manner that expresses the development of a specifically national medicine and the initial makings of a Peruvian sanitary state. Despite opposition to regulation from the Church, these arguments led to the formulation of concrete proposals for regulation, including, in 1878, a detailed “Reglamento” drafted by Dr José Cobián, which reprised the view expressed by many of his contemporaries that it was the responsibility of the authorities to oversee the management of prostitution in order to address its threat to public health, public order, and public morality. These views started to emerge in the context of Peru’s so called “age of guano” and the Pax Castillana, when revenues from exports of the fertilizer and the relative stability established by President Ramón Castilla created conditions in which a greater state role in society could be imagined. However, neither Cobián’s proposal nor several others drafted by doctors and political authorities, such as Lima’s prefect, Pedro Muñiz, in the 1880s and 1890s resulted in the implementation of regulation. Those opposed to such measures put forward several of the key arguments that abolitionists elsewhere in the world had similarly raised in their critiques of regulation, combining notions drawn from liberalism, 47 ciudad de las Venus impúdicas; Bailón Vásquez, Prostitución y lenocinio en México; and Simonetto, El dinero no es todo. As Thomas McGinn notes, St Agustine’s dictum, “Remove prostitutes from human societies and you will throw everything into confusion through lusts” has been used “to justify tolerance or regulation or some combination of the two” since the Middle Ages and in a variety of different national contexts. McGinn, The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World, pp. 95–96. On the Augustinian tradition in Spain and Catholic countries, see Guereña, Detrás de la cortina, pp. 189–194. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 19 feminism, and Christian thought: regulation, they argued, restricted the freedom of women and did nothing to halt the spread of venereal disease. Moreover, it made the state complicit in perverted male sexual practices. As this suggests, debates over prostitution and the implementation of regulation in Peru were part of global debates over the role of the state in shaping society and over the regulation of male and female sexuality. They reflect deep disagreements over the extent to which the state should seek to govern or shape the behavior, sexual or otherwise, of individuals and, increasingly, of the population as a whole. It was only in the early twentieth century, in the context of the deepening medicalization of Peruvian society, that regulation was finally implemented as part of a broader set of policies aimed at “improving” the population. In Chapter 2, I explore the implementation of regulation in Lima in the first few decades of the twentieth century. I begin by considering the political and intellectual context in which regulation was introduced. An increasingly public debate over prostitution, in which several groups intervened, is evident in this period. Freemasons, anarchists, anticlerical journalists, and feminists debated prostitution in ways that sometimes reproduced but more often challenged dominant medical and legal views over prostitution. Their views of prostitution, of its causes and its effects, reflected broader critiques of Peruvian society and expressed the political nature of debates over the sexual question. The implementation of regulation, then, occurred in a context in which dominant ideas over prostitution were contested in ways that broadened the debate over regulation beyond the medico-legal community. By contrast, doctors and experts such as Pedro Dávalos y Lisson, who was commissioned by the government to write a detailed study of prostitution in Lima, echoed the regulationist arguments of the nineteenth century. Although they did not entirely ignore other views on regulation, they continued to argue that prostitution was a necessary evil that had to be regulated by the state in order to reduce the risks that it posed. Promoters of regulation argued that it was difficult for men, and in particular upper- and middle-class men, about whom they seem to have been most concerned, to marry while young for various reasons. Prostitution therefore enabled these men to satisfy their sexual needs and reduced the risk that such men would be drawn to deviant sexual practices such as homosexuality and masturbation. These ideas, I argue, are key to understanding not only why regulation was implemented but also the form it took. The authorities used the powers to police prostitution in order to shape its character, closing down certain types of brothels while Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 20 The Sexual Question allowing the growth of others in order to create a medically policed form of prostitution that was safe for men. This process reflected class and racial prejudice: the authorities shut down brothels that catered primarily to the city’s working-class Afro-Peruvian community. By contrast, they allowed the proliferation of brothels, associated with a presumed influx of European prostitutes, that catered to upper- and middle-class men. This process was shaped by those directly involved in Lima’s sexual economy, both brothel keepers and prostitutes, who took advantage of regulation to influence, from below and in a limited manner, the character of prostitution in the city. In Chapter 3, I consider the context in which Lima’s barrio rojo was established in 1928. Regulation not only created registered prostitution. It also created clandestine prostitution; a category that covered any sort of sexual commerce not envisaged by regulation. The existence of clandestine prostitution, which developed its own urban geography, based in hotels, bars, dance halls, and on street corners, generated anxiety in the general public and undermined claims that the authorities charged with overseeing regulation could effectively govern prostitution. Complaints from registered prostitutes to the authorities about clandestine prostitutes suggest that regulation created diversification in Lima’s sexual economy, between women who occasionally sold sex but operated outside regulation, and women who increasingly viewed prostitution not only as their primary occupation but also arguably as an identity. In practice, however, the boundary between registered and clandestine prostitution was blurred and prostitutes often operated on both sides of the boundary. Contemporary observers critical of regulation viewed clandestine prostitution as evidence that prostitution could not be effectively contained within registered brothels as envisaged by regulation. The decision by Lima’s Prefect to establish a red-light district in La Victoria, a peripheral part of Lima (geographically and socially), was a response to growing pressure from Lima’s citizens who, particularly in the 1920s, complained of the danger that the proximity and visibility of prostitutes, both clandestine and registered, represented to decency and morality. Such complaints reveal a growing anxiety over the moral contagion that could result from the proximity of prostitutes, an anxiety that reflected broader fears about transgressive female behavior. Such fears, I suggest, are evident in how Peruvian commentators discussed two phenomena that became linked through a debate in the Peruvian press: so-called white slavery, or the forced traffic of women, and the modern girl or flapper. Peruvian commentators associated the boyish woman, as Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 21 she was known in Peru, and the behavior and fashions that were linked to her, with women’s increasing challenge to gender roles, but also with sexual behavior that was seen as little different to prostitution. The creation of the barrio rojo, and the enclosure of prostitutes in an out of the way place, responded therefore to the fear that prostitutes could awake latent transgressive sexual desires in women, and points to how regulation was also intended to police women’s sexuality. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the development of institutional capacities for the treatment of venereal disease. I focus particularly on a shift in discourse and approach in the government of prostitution and particularly venereal disease that started to take shape in the 1920s. Prior to this decade, doctors at the Asistencia Pública, the state agency charged with enforcing regulation, regarded the medical policing of prostitutes as the principal method to control the spread of venereal disease, which some doctors believed had reached epidemic proportions. But as the Asistencia Pública’s correspondence with the local authorities shows, it soon became evident that regulation did little to control the spread of venereal disease: prostitutes regularly and systematically evaded the medical policing to which they were supposed to be subject and the authorities had no real means to compel them to submit to medical examinations. By the late 1910s, the situation prompted doctors to publicly critique the system that had been implemented, which they blamed for contributing to the degeneration of the Peruvian population. The fact that doctors viewed venereal disease in highly racialized ways, specifically as spread by undesirable races (Asians and blacks) and as affecting desirable, if particularly vulnerable, races (whites), shaped such criticisms and gave them additional weight. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Asistencia Pública shifted its focus to sex education and an expansion of treatment facilities. This shift reflected the influence of approaches to governing venereal disease developed by military doctors. The shift also reflected the influence of abolitionist perspectives in the medical community and the growing acceptance that focusing solely on medically policing prostitutes would not contain the spread of venereal disease. Concerned with the quality and size of the population, doctors, and other experts such as criminologists and sociologists, argued for the need to encourage “responsible” sexual behavior among the population. In so doing, they started to question earlier assumptions about male sexuality and about prostitution as a necessary evil, while not fully abandoning regulation. This translated into a significant expansion in the number of venereal disease treatment centers and of social Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 22 The Sexual Question workers charged with ensuring that patients completed their treatment not only in Lima but also, by the 1940s, throughout the country. Significantly, the expansion of treatment centers coincided with a growing preoccupation among doctors about venereal disease among Peru’s indigenous population. As this suggests, although the approach to containing venereal disease had changed, it continued to be informed by racialized understandings of its impact on the population. Finally, in Chapter 6, I examine the context in which Lima’s red-light district was shut down in 1956. Key to this process was the growing influence of abolitionism in debates over prostitution. Buoyed by evidence that regulation, and the establishment of the barrio rojo in La Victoria, had done little to reduce the spread of venereal disease, an abolitionist movement began to campaign to repeal regulation in the 1930s. This movement brought together doctors, lawyers, and feminists who critiqued regulation on medical and moral terms and argued for the extension of sex education to the general population in order to bring about changes in sexual mores. Abolitionists drew many arguments and policy proposals from eugenics, including, most importantly, the introduction of a pre-nuptial test to prevent venereal contagion. The movement critiqued regulation in a manner that challenged assumptions about male sexuality, in particular the “double standard,” and the role of the regulationist state, which promoted, they argued, a lax sexuality. However, despite their embrace of feminist arguments against the doubled standard, abolitionists were guided by conservative sexual mores and sought, through their campaigns, to channel sexuality to procreative ends. If regulationists had been concerned with managing prostitution in order to protect men, abolitionists viewed the abolition of regulation as necessary to protect the population as a whole. Although abolitionism proved influential in the 1930s, during the socially conservative government of Manuel Prado (1939–1945), its influence weakened. In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, abolitionism returned with force as reflected in campaigns in popular newspapers such as ¡Ya! and Última Hora to close down Lima’s red-light district. These campaigns echoed abolitionist arguments and moved the debate over abolition from the pages of medical journals and elite circles, where it had largely focused in the 1930s, to a much more demotic arena. Although, with the advent of penicillin and the growing availability of condoms, the public health implications of venereal disease were diminished, the existence of the red-light district in what by that time had become a central part of the city (as a consequence of urban growth) Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001 Introduction 23 was an issue of great concern for Lima’s authorities and its citizens. By 1956, these campaigns, and growing support for the closure of Huatica from various civil society groups, convinced the authorities to take action. The closure of Lima’s red-light district in October 1956 was initially celebrated. Very quickly, however, the dispersal of prostitutes from La Victoria to various parts of the city generated new, and in some views, much greater, public order problems and new moral panics; an outcome, that in some ways, remains today. The book ends with a short epilogue/conclusion, which serves three purposes. First, it provides a discussion of the book’s contributions to the different fields of scholarship with which it is in dialogue: the history of gender and sexuality, the history of medicine and public health, and the history of the state in Peru. Of course, the history of prostitution in Peru is compelling in its own right. My goal, however, has been to study its history in order to gain insight into more general questions that are central to Peru’s twentieth-century history and more specifically to the history of state-society relations. Second, I consider in what ways this history can help us to reflect on current debates over prostitution in Peru, debates prompted by moral panics but also genuine public order and public health concerns over prostitution in cities and the rapid expansion of prostitution to service the extractive sector in rural contexts (particularly gold mining operations in the Peruvian Amazon). Finally, I consider the ways in which this history can inform current debates over patriarchy and male sexual privilege. The history of prostitution, and specifically of its management in ways that served to ensure a perceived male heterosexual “right to sex,” I argue, offers a useful historical framework that a new generation of Peruvian feminists and LGBT+ rights campaigners can draw on to question and challenge the dominant heteronormative sexual order in Peru.48 48 On the notion of a “right to sex,” see Srinivasan, “Does anyone have the right to sex?”. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.207.214.152, on 23 Dec 2020 at 12:50:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675659.001