The Sexual Question A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s–1950s Cambridge Latin American Studies Series

The creation of Lima's red light district in 1928 marked the culminating achievement of the promoters of regulation who sought to control the spread of venereal disease by medically policing female prostitutes. Its closure in 1956 was arguably the high point of abolitionism, a transnational movement originating in the 1860s that advocated that regulation was not only ineffective from a public health perspective, but also morally wrong. The Sexual Question charts this cyclic process of regulation and abolition in Peru, uncovering the ideas, policies, and actors shaping the debates on prostitution in Lima and beyond. The history of prostitution, Paulo Drinot shows, sheds light on the interplay of gender and sexuality, medicine and public health, and nation-building and state formation in Peru. With its compelling historical lens, this landmark study offers readers an engaging narrative, and new perspectives on Latin American studies, social policy, and Peruvian history.

1. Regulating prostitution; 2. Protecting men; 3. Policing women; 4. Medicalizing sin; 5. Combating venereal disease; 6. Abolishing vice.

Paulo Drinot is Associate Professor of Latin American history at University College London. He is the author of The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State (2011); editor of Che's Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America (2010), Peru in Theory (2014), and La Patria Nueva (2018); and co-editor of Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia (2005), The Great Depression in Latin America (2014), Comics and Memory in Latin America (2017), and The Peculiar Revolution: Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment under Military Rule (2017).