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Desire, TV, Panic, and Violence Surrounding the Transgendered in Argentina The Metamorphoses of 1998 Alejandro Modarelli Translated by Mariana Alcañiz T  that concerns us is . Presidential elections are coming up, and the current administration is beginning to withdraw from institutional power, a move that it assumes will last for a strategically short period. Now autonomous, the city of Buenos Aires has just been won by an opposition which represented itself as progressive , and has designs on the Argentine presidential palace in national elections. Within this political context, some social and cultural debates take place for the first time, some of which concern sexuality. First, the city-province’s new constitution made discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal. [. . .] Then, the city eliminated some police edicts that had been used as instruments of repression to take young people, transients, and beggars, and in a very deliberate manner, sexual divergents , into custody at police stations. The purpose was to check for a police record, and enabled the police to reach the quota of bureaucratic detentions the police chiefs demanded. The reality was that above all, by controlling zones of transit for homosexuals and the transgendered—or where prostitution and illegal gambling took place—police edicts generated illegal income in different police jurisdictions. There was no transgendered person in prostitution who did not leave a tithe at the customs office of the keepers of the order. They sometimes were made to leave an even higher 303 percentage, often facing violence, torture, and threats if payment was delayed or resisted . Territories of exchange were diversified: their variable location was negotiated through a criminal surveillance system that [. . .] was tolerated—at times even supported —by the administration in office. It must be made clear that, nevertheless, Buenos Aires’s gay and lesbian community had been enjoying considerable freedom to circulate and meet for years. The old edicts had modified their gay-lesbian target and focused on hunting down the transgendered . [. . .] In , a new Code of Coexistence in Buenos Aires came to replace the old regulations on misdemeanors, among them police edicts. Supposedly, the objective was to democratize interurban relationships, thus diminishing the submissive relationship between the so-called residents and the institutions of power. Promoted by the local government, neighborhood organizations began to form—which of course did not make city life any more democratic. The people who more fervently met for the debate on how to tackle coexistence were the very same for whom coexistence had always signified surveillance and exclusion. They immediately reported that the new code said nothing regarding the practice of prostitution (whether on the streets or indoors ), and as a result whatever was not explicitly forbidden was allowed. The truth is that with the implicit permission for the supply and demand of sex, both the pimps and their police-officer confidants were attacked for the money. It was around this issue that the transgendered appeared publicly at the center of a sociopolitical battle. The war also emerged as an issue in the electoral campaign. The discourse of panic and public security used by the federal government against its opponents in the city, and especially by those who were losing part of the booty, drove the residents of the red zones to focus their time and efforts against the marginalized populations. Some even formed combat groups. The transgendered, [. . .] who had previously been shifted around by the police’s strategy of distribution and segregation of spaces, were forced to deal with unsolicited overexposure. [. . .] The areas of sex trade constituted unstable territories, with the population of workers controlled by the police in terms of number, movement, and earnings. Spending some time in one area, they were suddenly pushed toward other corners or neighborhoods by patrolling police cars. Suddenly, the most exclusive of these areas, the bourgeois neighborhood PalermoViejo, became overpopulated by the police and the attention of the media. What had been a secretive, restricted, specific space for the supply and demand of sex became a gallery of noisy drivers-by and candid news cameras. For middle-class youths, it became an all-night party, cruising to view the multiplicity of monumental breasts and buttocks that were also being featured on television talk shows. Female prostitutes could not emulate the exorbitant bodies that technology had produced; they were minor characters in this urban drama. Additionally, for the common Argentine, they represented the traditional role of a 304 / Alejandro Modarelli [3.139.72.14] Project...

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