Latin Eugenics and Sexual Knowledge in Italy, Spain, and Argentina

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Beccalossi
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Sexual Knowledge ◽  
Male Homosexuality ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Sexual Science ◽  
Latin Version

This chapter explores how a specific kind of sexology emerged and spread worldwide during the interwar period. Focusing on Italy, Spain, and Argentina, it shows how southern Europe and Latin America developed an active exchange of sexual knowledge. It first considers the strong internationalism of sexology and eugenics before discussing the views of a small sample of Latin eugenicists on sexuality in its relation to male homosexuality. It then describes how a Latin circuit that originated in Italy enabled the movement of shared scientific traditions such as biotypology, Lamarckianism, and criminal anthropology among medical communities associated with Latin eugenics. It also examines how criminal anthropology stood at the beginning of a particular “Latin” version of sexual science that incorporated insights from southern European endocrinology and eugenics, and thus could ultimately be put into the service of fascist Italy—for example, by the Italian scientist and eugenicist Nicola Pende.

Performing National Identity in the Interwar Period: The Sarrasani Circus in Germany and Latin America

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-201
Author(s):  
Sabine Hanke
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
National Image ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The University ◽  
First World

This article examines the production and promotion of popular entertainments by the German Sarrasani Circus during the interwar period and how they were used to establish specific national narratives in Germany and Latin America. Focusing particularly on its engagement of Lakota performers, it argues that the Circus acted as an active negotiator of national concerns within and beyond Germany’s borders, and presented the group as ‘familiar natives’ in order to appeal to local and national ideas of Germanness. At the same time, it shows that the performers pursued their own interests in becoming international and cosmopolitan performers, thereby challenging the assimilation forced upon their traditions and culture by institutions in the United States. Finally, it demonstrates how foreign propaganda built on the Circus’s national image in Latin America to restore Germany’s international relations after the First World War. Sabine Hanke is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Duisberg-Essen. Her research examines the German and British interwar circus. She was recently awarded her PhD in cultural history, from which this article has evolved, at the University of Sheffield. A chapter based on her research is scheduled for publication in Circus Histories and Theories, ed. Nisha P.R. and Melon Dilip (Oxford University Press).

Comintern Aesthetics in the Andes: The Indigenous Revolutionary

2021 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-473
Author(s):  
Anna Björk Einarsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
World System ◽  
Political Connections ◽  
Cesar Vallejo ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Andes ◽  
The Soviet Union

The fight against imperialism and racism was central to the Comintern's political and cultural program of the interwar period. Although the more immediate interests of the Soviet state would come to overshadow such causes, the cultural and political connections forged during this time influenced later forms of organizing. Throughout the interwar period (1918-39), the Soviet Union served as the core location of a newly formed world-system of socialist and communist radicalism. The origin of Latin American Marxism in the work of the Peruvian theorist and political organizer José Carlos Mariátegui, as well as the politically committed literature associated with the interwar communist left in the Andean region of Latin America, shows how literature and theory devoted to the indigenous revolutionary contributed to interwar Marxist debates. The interwar influence of Mariátegui and César Vallejo makes clear the importance of resisting attempts to drive a wedge between the two authors and the broader communist movement at the time.

Mexican Sexology and Male Homosexuality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan M. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Sex Reassignment Surgery ◽  
Sexual Deviance ◽  
Sex Reassignment ◽  
Male Homosexuality ◽  
Sexual Science ◽  
Murder Trial

This chapter examines the development of Mexican sexual science and its relationship to homosexuality during the period 1860–1957 by focusing on the murder trial of a merchant named Margarito. It first considers the sexological, criminological, and ideological genealogies that Margarito's case and similar cases brought to the fore before discussing sex reassignment surgery as a supposed “cure” for homosexuality and as a “solution” that demonstrated both the body's importance and the preeminence of modern science in restructuring that body to fit national aims and cultural sensibilities. It also describes the inherent eclecticism of Mexican sexology as a deliberate praxis that gave rise to a specific form of knowledge useful in disciplining sexual deviance. The chapter suggests that Margarito's case was a key example of the “Freudianization” and “Lombrosianization” of Mexican sexology as local jurists drew upon sexual science to selectively appeal to assumed universals.

Raza latina: immigration and decadence at the fin de siècle

2018 ◽  
pp. 29-56
Author(s):  
Michela Coletta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Progressive Degeneration ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
The Impact

This chapter explores the ways in which the incorporation of the notion of ‘Latinity’ was affected by changing representations of European civilisation. Through an analysis of the discourses that were created in the popular press, the key argument here is that shifting perceptions of the European immigrant deeply affected the debate on the Latin race: rather than being taken at face value, the possible implications of belonging to the cultural and political sphere of the Latin countries of Europe were long debated. More specifically, the chapter explores the idea of national degeneration in relation to responses to and perceptions of ‘Latin’ immigration at the turn of the century. The significant waves of immigration from Southern Europe fuelled discussions over the impact of a notion such as that of Latinity, which was becoming identified with ideas of progressive degeneration in the contemporary sociological literature. The civilising power of the immigrant was increasingly ambivalent as he was identified with a decadent civilisation whose values seemed to clash with nineteenth-century liberal ideals. So, contrary to the widely shared assumption that ‘Latin America’ was a uniform notion, this discussion shows the complex debates about Latinity and Anglo-Saxonness in each of the three national contexts.

Material Connections: German Schools, Things, and Soft Power in Argentina and Chile from the 1880s through the Interwar Period

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-549
Author(s):  
H. Glenn Penny
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Great Insight ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractFrom the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, the production and consumption of German things played critical roles in delineating and connecting a wide variety of German places in Latin America. Such places became ubiquitous in Chile and Argentina. They flourished because there was ample room in the German imagination for the multiplicity of German places and the cultural hybridity that accompanied them to extend beyond Imperial Germany's national boundaries and colonial possessions. They also flourished because host societies found virtue in having those German places in their states. This essay uses German schools in Argentina and Chile as a window into the emergence of such German places and the soft power that accompanied them. Scholars often overlook that power when they focus on colonial questions or formal and informal imperialism in Latin America. More than any other institution, German schools became sites where the production and consumption of German things were concentrated and multilayered, and where the consistencies and great varieties of Germanness that arrived and evolved in Latin America gained their clearest articulation. Because those schools were both centers of communities and nodes in a global pedagogical network that thrived during the interwar period, they provide us with great insight into a nexus of motivations that created German places in Latin America. Life around these schools also underscores the importance of studying immigrants and their things together.

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