Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City

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Penn State Press, Nov 1, 2010 - History

To illuminate the complex cultural foundations of state formation in modern Mexico, Compromised Positions explains how and why female prostitution became politicized in the context of revolutionary social reform between 1910 and 1940. Focusing on the public debates over legalized sexual commerce and the spread of sexually transmitted disease in the first half of the twentieth century, Katherine Bliss argues that political change was compromised time and again by reformers' own antiquated ideas about gender and class, by prostitutes' outrage over official attempts to undermine their livelihood, and by clients' unwillingness to forgo visiting brothels despite revolutionary campaigns to promote monogamy, sexual education, and awareness of the health risks associated with sexual promiscuity.

In the Mexican public's imagination, the prostitute symbolized the corruption of the old regime even as her redemption represented the new order's potential to dramatically alter gender relations through social policy. Using medical records, criminal case files, and letters from prostitutes and their patrons to public officials, Compromised Positions reveals how the contradictory revolutionary imperatives of individual freedom and public health clashed in the effort to eradicate prostitution and craft a model of morality suitable for leading Mexico into the modern era.

 

Contents

Prostitution Sexual Morality and Reformism in Revolutionary Mexico City
1
The Porfirians City of Pleasure Prostitutes Patrons and Sexual Propriety
23
Revolutionary Capital Warfare and the Changing Business of Sexual Commerce
63
The Science of Redemption Syphilis Sexual Promiscuity and Reformism
95
Evaluating the Cult of Masculinity Manliness Money and the Morality of Exchange
127
Testing the Limits of Tolerance The Place of Vice in a Revolutionary Metropolis
153
The End of the Road? Gender and the Politics of Abolition
185
The Unredeemed Revolution
207
Bibliography
217
Index
235
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About the author (2010)

Katherine Elaine Bliss is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts. She was a David E. Bell Fellow in 2000&–2001 at the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University where she currently holds membership.

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