“Walking Around Naked Sets Back our Struggle”: Travesti Activism, Repression, and Public Space in Buenos Aires (1994–1998)

Abstract

In this article, I revisit a brutal police raid targeting travesti sex workers and the subsequent protest of travestis and their allies in front of a Buenos Aires police station in 1996. In a close reading of the event, I propose to analyse it as a dispute over access to public space and citizenship. The figure of “Scandal” as included in the so-called Police Edicts was the bureaucratic safeguard used by police throughout Argentina to imprison, extort, and even kill travestis. I show how its vague description as referring to “forms of acting obscenely” (“formas de actuación obscena”) entrusted the police institution with its (re)actualised interpretation, constantly adapting it to the new “dangerous” new social subjects of record. The nascent travesti activism would claim access to public space by attempting to distance itself from “acting obscenely” through the use of “unisex” clothing – or, as the activists called it, “the dress-code strategy”. In this way, they would expose the arbitrariness of the arrests they were being subjected to. However, these normativising attempts also opened up a tension with the demands of clients of street prostitution who would continue to seek out the onscenification of spectacular iterations of femininity, as well as those of many travestis who, living under conditions of constant repression and precariousness, were experiencing joy in constituting themselves as the very wonder women their clients fantasised about.