Plebeian Masculinity and Sexual Comedy in Buenos Aires, 1880-1930

Plebeian Masculinity and Sexual Comedy in Buenos Aires, 1880–1930

In describing late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires, Argentine historians often invoke the category of "progress." Basing their analysis on the immense economic and urban growth of the period, scholars usually deploy this category without much nuance. While this growth wrought profound social transformations, to be sure, the historical research framed by a one-dimensional conception of progress has overlooked key aspects of the period. A major topic usually occluded is the living conditions and cultural traits of the urban lower strata. This essay deals with one aspect of that topic—plebeian masculinity and sexuality—and demonstrates how demography, the job market, and family structure shaped the emergence of spaces of male sociability. It was in these spaces that cultural negotiations of masculinity took place through competitions involving the male sexual capacity to subjugate others.

The recent historiography on gender and sexuality in Argentina—that is, since the end of dictatorship in 1983—has attempted to explore how the elite perceived plebeian Buenos Aires as a threat to the social order. Against the background of a growing literature on the social control of the poor at the turn of the century, various studies have explored the state's perceptions of gender and sexuality as well as its attempts to regulate them.¹ However, few of these studies have paid much attention to plebeian social and cultural life.² Scholars have tended either to ignore this topic altogether or to imply simply that the popular classes internalized elite norms.

This essay departs from existent historiography through an analysis of male plebeian sexuality in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires. In what follows, sexuality is analyzed in the context of the broader historical transformations of the period. I argue that plebeian sexuality was to an important degree independent of elite control and representation. Although the positivist intelligentsia represented plebeian sexuality as a pathological obstacle to national development, the state did not create institutions capable of affecting sexuality in significant ways until the 1930s, with the exception of its regulation of female prostitution.³

The sources that receive the most attention in the following analysis are drawn from the work of Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, a German anthropologist who came to Argentina in 1897. He was employed by the Museo de Ciencias Naturales at the Universidad de La Plata in the capital of the province of Buenos Aires. La Plata is located approximately thirty miles south of the city of Buenos Aires. During his time in the country, Lehmann-Nitsche published multiple studies, and he became a leading local scientist.⁴ His work reflected the interest of contemporary German intellectuals in the topic of "primitive sexuality." Lehmann-Nitsche was in contact with the renowned German sexologist Iwan Bloch and with a group of researchers who published the journal Anthropophyteia (a Greek word meaning "primitive human sexual instinct," what the Germans called Urtrieb).⁵ In order to explore the Urtrieb of the popular classes of the River Plate, Lehmann-Nitsche gathered an extensive collection of orally transmitted poems, riddles, tales, and sayings. This collection was published in 1923 in the city of Leipzig under the pseudonym of Victor Borde. The majority of the entries collected by Lehmann-Nitsche in the early 1900s were drawn from Buenos Aires. It is an extremely useful source for historians of the popular classes because Lehmann-Nitsche limited his work to a classification of literally transcribed plebeian expressions of sexuality. Yet historians have ignored this source despite its value for the exploration of plebeian representations, and, surprisingly, only book collectors and journalists have shown interest in Lehmann-Nitsche's text.

The book by Lehmann-Nitsche is useful not only because he transcribed orally transmitted expressions but also because of the nature of such oral material. The cultural expressions contained in it depended on...