Spaces in Conflict: Tensions about The Cohabitation Law Reform City of Buenos Aires, 2004

Abstract

The autonomy of The City of Buenos Aires, achieved in 1996, brought the creation of a Cohabitation Law, a system of rules that regulated the every-day-behavior of citizens. One of the complex issues in the debate was controlling public sex offers and dangerous persons of interest. The article problematizes the way in which class, gender, and race create arguments expressed by different actors (legislators, drag queens, civil society organizations, neighbors, etc.) to build spaces and to promote bodies and practices as (il)legitimate. In a country that sees itself as white due to its history, built from the State and Nation of European immigrants, is interesting how the racial elements that mark class differentiation appear in speeches. This article follows a quantitative analysis of a public hearing record of 2004, in which there was a debate to harden the Contravention Law. In this article, we will analyze the discourses inside the public hearing record from a content perspective. Our interests are on the issues that surface from the debate, linked with the racialization of social classes inside a society that relates legitimacy with whiteness, one that is not linked with a phenotype. The public hearing of the Contravention’s Law reform process gathered diversity and the city was represented as a cracked mirror.