Dr Patricio Simonetto

Profile

I joined the School of Sociology and Social Policy in 2023. Before coming to Leeds, I was a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at the Institute of the Americas at the University College London and a full-time permanent researcher at the National Council of Science and Techniques of Argentina (CONICET). 

I completed my doctorate in Social Sciences and Humanities at the National University of Quilmes, Argentina. 

Responsibilities

• Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies,
• Director of Postgraduate Research Studies (DPGRS)

Research interests

I am an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of queer, trans, gender, and sexuality studies; social and cultural history; and the social study of health, science and body technologies. My scholarship explores the embodied everyday experiences of LGBTQ+ people and how they transform mainstream conceptions of citizenship; how LGBTQ+ people have crafted scientific knowledge, health practices and technologies; how LGBTQ+ people, sex workers and their clients have recreated and contested notions of gender, class, and whiteness; activists’ political thinking and community archival practices.

My interdisciplinary work combines archival research, oral history, ethnographic methods, and community-engaged work such as working with community archives.

My latest project analysed the making of trans* embodied experiences in Argentina. The resulting monograph A Body of One's Own. A Trans History of Argentina (University of Texas Press, 2024) received the Sylvia Rivera Award for the best book in trans studies and the Best Book in Social Sciences from the Latin American Studies Association (South Cone) in 2025. The book was recently named runner-up for the Social History Society Book Prize 2026 and is currently shortlisted for the British Sociological Association's Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize. With an innovative methodological design that combines archival research, oral histories, and work with community archives led by trans people, expanding on personal photography, this monograph focuses on trans people's everyday lives to challenge mainstream Argentine narratives of citizenship, democracy, nationhood, gender, and whiteness. This embodied history shows how trans people produced intergenerational knowledge, developed DIY technologies, and how their interactions with non-human agents (e.g., self-injected industrial silicone) shaped their personal lives and identity formation. As a whole, the work reconceptualised citizenship as an embodied living everyday experience.

My previous monograph Money isn't Everything. The Sale and Purchase of Sex in Argentina during the Twentieth Century (The University of North Carolina Press 2024) addresses the commercialisation of sexuality in Argentina. This project explores how Argentina's public debates about venereal diseases, also known as "white slavery", played a major role in redefining notions of whiteness, masculinity, and class.

My first project studied the radicalisation of homosexual liberation movements in Latin America and the Latinx diaspora in the US, which led to my first monograph, Entre la injuria y la revolución. El Frente de Liberación Homosexual en la Argentina (2017). I have contributed to the transnational study of LGBT+ movements by challenging Global North literature that has emphasised Stonewall as a turning point in queer politics. My research shows the role of South-South connections and local political cultures in the emergence of queer revolutionary political thinking. This research has been awarded the Carlos Monsiváis Prize by the Latin American Studies Association (2021).

I am currently developing several research projects:

1. Archiving, ageing, and LGBT+ communities
   I am researching the role of archiving in LGBT+ cultures, particularly in relation to more public queer and trans experiences of ageing. This project examines how archives contribute to identity formation, community building, and intergenerational knowledge transmission. It also explores collaborative approaches to writing history that actively involve the communities whose experiences are being documented. You can read my first article on this, co-authored with Yuri Fraccaroli that you can read here.
2. Trans health and DIY gender-affirming technologies
   Building on my monograph for A Body of One's Own, I continue to investigate trans health and the histories of do-it-yourself gender-affirming technologies. In 2025, I published an article on the role of liquid silicone injections in the embodied experiences of trans women in Argentina, proposing that injectable materials be understood as active agents shaping the embodied living conditions of trans women in Argentina. As part of this work, I collaborated with the Biblioteca y Museo Claudia Pía Baudracco to co-produce a trans health zine created by older trans women for younger generations.
3. Fat stigma, body size, and whiteness in Argentina
   In collaboration with Dr Cecilia Toussaint, I am researching the history of fat stigmatisation in Argentina, with particular attention to the relationship between body-size stigma and discourses around whiteness in the country. The first publication arising from this research is forthcoming in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2027).

Qualifications

• Doctor in Social Sciences and Humanities
• B.A. (Licenciado) in Social Communication
• FRHistS
• FHEA

Professional memberships

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• UKLAH - the United Kingdom Latin American History Association
• Latin American Studies Association

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies