Buenos Aires, between Eros and Thanatos. Prostitution as dysgenic threat (1930-1955)

This paper explores the medical-legal discourse around female prostitution that was articulated in Buenos Aires during the first decades of the 20th century. It focuses on the use of different ideological resources and on the policies and laws that were introduced to gain control over the sex trade and describes parallelisms between prostitution, disease and crime. In fact, the capital of Argentina was internationally known as a centre of prostitution and white slave trafficking, and Jewish participation in these activities allowed the consolidation of xenophobic theories. Medicine and law, among other disciplines, made important inputs into a simplified approach to this problem.