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

Recent studies on state formation and social control in Latin America have rightly emphasized the importance of gender as a dimension of social relations and cultural constructions. Yet not all attempts have been so successful at translating theoretical concerns into specific historical explanations of practices involving actors beyond the small groups that produced most discourse about social reform. All too frequently, analyses of the metaphors and obsessions in hygienists' discourse seem to become descriptions of reality itself. Compromised Positions, by contrast, grounds questions about gender in the study of a key phenomenon (prostitution) at the time and place of a successful experiment of state-building (postrevolutionary Mexico City).

Bliss presents the intersection of interests, morality, and medicalization that shaped state intervention and the business of prostitution itself. Regulated since the French intervention (1860s-1940), bordellos were "intensely sociable" places for men (p. 50), a profitable undertaking for madams and corrupt officials, and a headache for hygienists. This paradox—that punished female sexual behaviors coexisted with almost complete permissiveness toward male promiscuity—did not escape physicians. However, it was hard to translate into policy, even after strategies against widespread venereal diseases shifted with the 1910 revolution, adding to the positivist medicalization new concerns about the involvement of foreigners in the business, penalties against pimping, and rhetorical attempts to mold fatherhood. The revolution politicized concerns about morality and syphilis. "Redemption" became a key category for the state interactions with society (p. 5) that, as "revolution" itself, had multiple meanings and was fraught by "an inherent tension between the utopianism of reformism and the reliance of the reformers themselves on older ideas about gender and social class" (p. 17). The new public awareness of social problems sharpened the perception of a threatening "plague of promiscuity" (p. 105) while, paradoxically, new spaces and actors emerged in the city's nightlife. Members of the revolutionary political elite became influential consumers of, and investors in, prostitution. Cabarets attracted new crowds of men and women with their combination of dancing, alcohol consumption, and a fluid boundary between friendship and sexual favors offered by ficheras. Matronas lost ground to the competition of transgendered sex workers, minors, and entrepreneurial policemen. Tourists became clients, while vecinos opposed both dispersed locales and attempts to centralize them in working-class areas. New actors and broad changes in the class organization of urban space resulted in a "new political economy of vice" (p. 89).

Although sometimes eclipsed by regulatory discourses and economic interests, prostitutes themselves are the central actors in this story. Bliss taps into judicial, administrative, and correctional archives with a rare sensitivity for the interactions between social workers, young women, and interested third parties. She draws a clear image of the options faced by women entering the labor market: to endure exploitation from either patrons or from employers (in other words, having to balance autonomy and access to cash against protection from physical threats and extortion). Ultimately these women faced the difficult choices of life after "the life" (p. 199). Like other sectors of the postrevolutionary working class, prostitutes invoked nationalism and patriarchy, and even unionized in their quest for better conditions. Yet the stratification and spatial dispersion of the trade weakened their attempts (p. 200). Revolutionaries described them as "victims of ignorance and corruption" inherited from the Porfiriato (p. 81), and the regime eventually came to see the abolition of regulated prostitution as a step towards the emancipation of women and the regeneration of the population. In practice, the new penalization of contagion and the continuing negotiation of multiple interests around the business resulted in a compromise that preserved sexual exploitation and inequality, and undermined the discourse about social reform and the metaphor of a healthy social body.

This book will become a central point of reference for...