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,
• Deputy Director of Recruitment and Admissions,

Research interests

My scholarship explores the embodied everyday experiences of LGTB+ people and how they transform mainstream conceptions of citizenship, how have LGTB+ people crafted scientific knowledge and technologies, how have LGTB+ people, sex workers and their clients recreated and contested notions of gender, class, and whiteness; queer and trans movements' radical political thinking and archival community practices.

My scholarship has focused on three research projects.

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) was granted the Sylvia Rivera Award as the best book in trans studies and the Best Book in Social Sciences for the Latin American Studies Association (South Cone) in 2025. With an innovative methodological design combining archival research, oral histories and working alongside community archives led by trans people expanding on personal photography, this monograph focuses on trans people's everyday lives to challenge Argentine mainstream narratives of citizenship, democracy, nationhood, gender and whiteness. This embodied history shows how trans people produced intergenerational knowledge, developed DIY technologies and how their interaction with non-human agents (e.g. self-injected industrial silicone) shaped their personal life 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 [Between Injury and Revolution. The Frente de Liberación Homosexual in 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 recently awarded the Carlos Monsiváis Prize by the Latin American Studies Association (2021). 

I am currently developing research around the living embodied experiences of LGTBIQ+ public histories and memories. My project focuses on different forms of archival activism (particularly in archives, usually conceptualised as spaces of nation-state control) as memory spaces in which people co-produce personal narratives (e.g. from personal collections from elderly members as life narratives young users/volunteers' emotional attachment to specific objects), political, communal organisation and develops new relationships.

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