Lecturer in gender and social policy given award for groundbreaking book on transgender history
Dr Patricio Simonetto of the School of Sociology and Social Policy has been selected for the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies.
Congratluations to Dr Patricio Simonetto, Lecturer in Gender and Social Policy and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies for winning the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies!
The award was given by CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY, for Dr Simonetto’s book A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina.
The award, which honours the memory of Rivera, a transgender activist, is given for the best book or article to appear in transgender studies in 2024-2025.
Dr Simonetto’s monograph, A Body of One's Own. A Trans History of Argentina places the making of the trans body at the core of modern Argentine history. The monograph explores how the scientific and popular public portrayal of trans bodies was decisive in the making of the shifting notion of sex and its impact on gender policing.
Praise for A Body of One’s Own:
This is a book that deftly engages trans and travesti histories as central to Argentine statecraft and nation-building. Simonetto treats both his archival materials and his interlocutors with depth and care. He draws enthusiastically from a multitude of thinkers, including those working both inside and outside the space of the academy.
Future scholars of the history of gender and sexuality in Argentina will have to reckon with this work, and will be better for it . . . [A Body of One's Own] joins other recent US and international monographs in shaping a conversation about past lives and discourses ‘before trans’, which are both archivally grounded and theoretically innovative.
Dr Simonetto’s research engages with questions about how sexuality intersects with health, science, and social movements in Latin America. He explores questions around how sexuality reshaped notions of whiteness in Latin America, how the medical portrayal of LGTBQ+ and sex workers' bodies shaped notions of sex and sexuality, how LGTBQ+ movements produce social theory, and how queer and trans people create scientific knowledge and technologies.
The Center for LGBTQ Studies, the first university-based LGBTQ research centre in the United States, provides intellectual leadership in addressing issues that affect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals and other sexual and gender minorities.
