A Review of A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina

A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina by Patricio Simonetto (Austin: University of Texas Press 2024)

This is, of course, a review of Simonetto’s book and not a treatise on the alarming resurgence of bald-faced authoritarianism in Argentina and worldwide. Nevertheless, he offers reflections for readers who may struggle to make sense of historical and present-day politics. He does so by illuminating the unexpected and often unarticulated relations between political regimes, scientific and medical authority, labor, culture and embodiment. Within this tangle, he places trans politics and knowledge front and center rather than at the margins, upending conventional wisdoms about citizenship, science and Argentine history itself. This is no small feat, and it is among the reasons that his book will surely resonate with academic and popular audiences alike. 

In his “trans history” of Argentina, Simonetto offers up a deceptively simple diagnosis: “political regimes are bodily experiences” (p. 180). Through this frame, he analyzes the malleability of sex, its frequently violent regulation, and the modes of evasion through which travestis and trans people have navigated life in Argentina since the turn of the 20th century.  

For those who are unfamiliar, “travesti” is a politically reclaimed term that circulates in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America and Mexico. Travestis—a term usually applied to and used by working-class, trans-feminine people— in Argentina do not generally refer to themselves using the language of “transgender,” though they ally politically with people who do.  

In my reading of Simonetto’s history, two interwoven strands came to the fore: the first, a story about nation-building and citizenship; and the second, a story about embodiment and experimentation.  

During my own fieldwork in Argentina, I became interested in some of the relationships—contentious as they sometimes were—between feminist and travesti/trans movements. Like Simonetto, I was interested in the centrality of their shared claims for bodily autonomy, and where these resonances produced partnerships or failed to do so. The campaign for free, safe and legal abortion was one site of shared struggle, as Simonetto points out in Chapters 4 and 5 (building on Argentine geographer Francisco Fernández Romero’s [2020] important work). He quotes late travesti activist Lohana Berkins as she recounts her sustained efforts to link feminist and travesti struggles, which she understood to be connected by their mutual “claim to ownership of the body” (173). 

Where I was interested in tracing such claims to follow shared expansive political desires, Simonetto trains his attention on the seemingly smaller-scale elements of embodiment. As he notes as the outset, the book is “not a political but an embodied history…about the small struggles for freedom—with the risks and tragedies that accompany every experiment” (21). With this in mind, Berkins’ bridge-building is not only about fashioning coalition, but also about a very specific shared history of bodily restriction. As Simonetto reminds readers in Chapter 2, in 1944, the Argentinian nation banned sterilizing medical treatments—a prohibition that was extended in 1967 by the Onganía dictatorship to include surgeries to change sex. This made both gonads and genitals, as Simonetto puts it bluntly, a “state-owned good” (100).  

From Ongonía to Berkins, these historical links serve to remind readers that the intimate workings of bodies are far from incidental when it comes to nation-building, social exclusion and grassroots mobilization. And as Simonetto makes clear, trans people and travestis weren’t the only ones to find themselves and their bodies at the center of criminalizing and pathologizing regimes. Rather, the limits on what travestis and trans people could do with their bodies in large part defined how notions of Argentine citizenship rested on the nation’s collective sovereignty over the bodies of its subjects. In other words, even though some people moved with much more freedom than others, anxieties about sex’s capacity to change meant that nobody could truly own their body.  

When I arrived in Buenos Aires for the first time in 2015, I was contacted by a U.S.-based reporter who was writing a piece about the passage of the Gender Identity Law. I suggested that he speak with Berkins and others involved in the coalition that drafted the bill, but not before hearing his pitch. He was interested, he said, in writing about how far Argentina had progressed since the transition to democracy, first with the passage of gay marriage and now with trans inclusion.  

As Simonetto’s last chapter makes clear, though, this story about the arc of liberal progress collapses under the weight of persistent violence. Police play an outsized role in doling this out, both before and after the end of the Videla dictatorship and the Dirty War—a point that U.S Latin Americanist Cole Rizki (2020) has also made. Across the full historical span of the book, police are ever-present as regulators of public space, sources of physical and sexual violence, and primary enforcers of what Canadian historian Jules Gill-Peterson calls the “cis state.” She contends that the cis state is what regulates citizenship through the alignment of legal sex, gendered appearance and anatomy, all the while producing criminality and public exclusion through their perceived misalignment. As Simonetto emphasizes, though, formal policing was only one part of this enforcement—state-sanctioned violence arrived alongside violence from johns and partners, media vilification and strict medical regulation of body modification. Violence, in other words, very much had (and has) a gender. 

Simonetto makes excellent use of archives—both university and community-based—to show how this gendered violence emerges from a long history of Black and Indigenous erasure, whitening projects and elite concerns about poverty, disease and immigration. Chapter 1 sets the historical stage, tracing the collusion of policing and medicine to narrate Indigenous subjects outside of citizenship. Through these archives, he shows Argentinian nation-building as fixated on growing population while ceaselessly narrowing its terms of membership. It is this very sense of enclosure, Simonetto insinuates, that produces the grounds for the forms of experimentation that he also highlights.  

Indeed, “experimentation” becomes a touchstone concept for the text. Simonetto refers to bodies as “living laboratories.” In the book’s introduction, he describes this in a dual sense. In one regard, it refers to the ways that the “cis state” established itself by working on and against trans people and travestis. In another sense, it elicits the techniques through which trans people and travestis tried things with bodies—their own and each other’s—to find the means of embodiment that worked for them in conditions of strict restriction and criminalization of care.  

The book’s third and fourth chapter tell the story of the ways trans people and travestis developed aesthetic culture and then experimented with informal means of gender-affirming care. Here, the materiality of the body remains central, alongside the substances and practices of altered embodiment (synthetic hormones, silicone, prosthetics, surgeries, the aesthetics of presentation). While Chapter 4 certainly foregrounds bodily autonomy from within conditions of wild constraint, it doesn’t express the breathless wonder that sometimes characterizes trans analyses of DIY transition and the infinite capacity that certain bodies may have for self-directed change. Rather, it takes a more sobering stance: trans people and travestis experimented on themselves because they had to. Regret was a danger, and so were unchosen outcomes, including death. But in work and in life, their bodies required changing—and as such, they were inventing and finding the tools with which to manifest those changes. These experiments came at a cost: community knowledge about what to do often came after something had gone wrong for someone else. It was also through this on-the-ground knowledge that institutionalized science and medicine learned new things—and then, in a sense, monopolized them.  

In closing, this is a book that deftly engages trans and travesti histories as central to Argentine statecraft and nation-building. Simonetto treats both his archival materials and his interlocutors with depth and care. He draws enthusiastically from a multitude of thinkers, including those working both inside and outside the space of the academy. His collaborative and community-centered approach shines through, not only in his multiple references to shared reflections with collaborator Marce Butierrez, but also in his efforts to center community archives and sources of theoretical knowledge.  

Of course, my only regret is not having had the chance to read this book before completing my own. Simonetto’s impressively far-ranging historical analysis taught me new things and significantly deepened my understanding of other things I thought I already knew. There were a few places where I wanted a bit more—for example, there seemed to be opportunities to expand his Marxist analysis of “living machines” and its broad relevance to labor well beyond the single chapter in which it appears. Nevertheless, I found the text both moving and edifying. And despite the troubling perpetuity of violence it traces over the whole of the 20th century and beyond, the fact of trans and travesti tenacity also persists. As insufficient as that may be, it does provide some encouragement in navigating these trying times. 

Christoph Hanssmann is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at University of California, Davis. He is the author of Care without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists are Changing Medicine (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).