Was sex inflexible? aims to analyze the making of sex change in Argentina during the twentieth century. It refers to sex change as a category of historical analysis and considers its multiple layers. Firstly, it defines transgressions to the gender assigned at birth. It is used to recognise a set of medical, journalistic, legal, political and popular discourses that gave meaning to the movements from one gender to another. This is to say, it helps to make visible the conflictive languages with which  people have made sense to these fluid movements that made the notion of sex more flexible. At the same time, it shows how sex changed through time from being mostly based on clothing to bio-techonological procedures, by paying attention to the multiple and conflictive meanings. Secondly, though sex change is often restricted to medical procedures, this project uses it in a broader sense which encompasses multiple embodiment technologies and techniques. Likewise, it shows how notions of Sex change mediated the experiences of new gender materialization and the languages through which people who crossed gender boundaries understood their path and corporality. It also considers sex change as a concept re-shaped by these actions. Thirdly, it functions as a conceptual frontier that allows us to study practices beyond precarious sexual identities. It is a vector to study practices that did not always correspond with a stable identification or a period of history. Finally, it is a window into the heart of twentieth century gender architecture: sex. 

More concretely, Was sex inflexible? studies the making of trans*  bodies in Argentina during the twentieth century. Firstly, it researches the history of a wide repertoire of medical and social practices that includes clothing, cotton, self-injected hormones, cosmetic and “sex change” surgeries, prosthetics, document forging, self-injected silicone, among others. This project recognizes the daily production of knowledge with which people embodied their gender beyond social expectations, across institutions and community spaces. Secondly, it examines the transformations of the notion of sex and the development of the multiple meanings that doctors, patients, social movements, sexual dissidents, writers, journalists, and judges assigned to it. Thirdly, it establishes a connection between trans* embodiment practices and gender-normative technologies for cisgender men and women.

Was sex inflexible? is a project located at the Intitute of the Americas (University College London) and funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Programme. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie-Sklodowka Curie grant number 886496