“Inhabiting conflict and abandoning lukewarmness”

A brief whore genealogy from the Argentine interior

Abstract

This article develops a situated genealogy of the struggles for the recognition of sex work in Córdoba, Argentina, based on organizational experiences, testimonies, and documents produced between 2018 and 2022. It focuses on the Red por el Reconocimiento del Trabajo Sexual (RRTS) and the three national meetings that marked milestones in the articulation of the collective. We ask why, despite the mass expansion of feminist movements and the #Ni Una Menos (#NUM) uprising, the demands of sex workers continue to be marginalized, silenced, or criminalized.

The article analyzes the tensions between sex work and certain feminist perspectives, the persistence of punitive frameworks, and the specificity of Córdoba as a site of political dispute, memory, and alliances. At the same time, it questions the ability of (trans)feminisms to engage with these struggles and to broaden their understandings of violence and oppression. Córdoba emerges as a distinctive prism for observing how particular narratives are activated at specific moments, enabling or obstructing possible complicities.

Rather than providing closed answers, we propose inhabiting conflict and abandoning lukewarmness as political and vital practices, a minimal condition for imagining collective horizons that recognize sex work as work and its protagonists as full subjects of rights.