Oral Pleasures, Neighbors’ Tongues: Stories of Transgendering Avant la Lettre in Buenos Aires, 1902–30

In 1930 the popular Buenos Aires weekly cultural and political magazine Caras y Caretas included in its year-end summary of the most important stories portraits of two “mujeres-hombres,” or women-men, who had captured popular attention across newsmedia for several months. Raúl Luis Suárez, a Spanish-born customs agent, was discovered after death to have been born female but lived as a man for more than 20 years, with a divorced wife and at least one mistress. The media frenzy around this case spanned more and less respectable newspapers, whose reporters tracked down estranged family members and neighbors and harassed acquaintances, and climaxed in a gruesome autopsy performed as a public spectacle in which the body was dug up and displayed naked, decomposing two weeks after death. Orality resonates throughout this coverage, reflected in jokes and hypotheses from readers. Reporters dug up historical parallels and found other individuals in Buenos Aires who we might also consider transgendered, one already known to the press 25 years earlier as a “mujer-hombre,” having been arrested as an anarchist agitator. A comparison between the Buenos Aires news coverage of related stories in the first few years of the 20^th century with this salacious explosion in 1930 provides an intimate look at daily concerns around gender, sexuality, labor, and respectability. Different detailed versions of stories reflect debate between interlocutors over meanings and sanctions, proposing alternate solutions to disturbing ambiguities. The change over time from a picaresque to tragic tone reflects shifts in both elite discourses of criminology and sexology and mass anxieties linked to the emergence of the New Woman and other gender shifts in a period of increasing social and political repression.