Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Paulo Drinot, "The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Description: Paulo Drinot’s The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s (Cambridge University Press, 2020), studies the interplay of sexuality, society, and the state in Peru in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drinot analyzes the rules and norms that governed prostitution and venereal disease in this period, and tracks how regulation of prostitution was implemented in the early twentieth century, and then seemingly abandoned in the 1950s. Drinot’s story foregrounds the many agents that intervened in this process: prostitutes––or sex workers as we may call them today––but also government officials, physicians, journalists, feminists, among others....