Deviants. Tales of criminality and alienation in late 19th Century and early 20th Century Argentina.

DEBORA D´ANTONIO

UNIVERSITY OF TULANE, NEW ORLEANS

Simposio; Simposio Centenary of the Famous 41. Sexuality and Social Control in Latin America.; 2001

UNIVERSITY OF TULANE,

Towards the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century, Argentina deployed a series of novel production, regulation and social control policies. Their basic goal, with changes and mutations in between, was the definition of a modern citizenship in the formative context of the nation-state. Thus, the country began its writing through a plot of representations that would increasingly involve different spheres of social, economic and cultural life. In this paper, I will focus on an analysis of the effects of discourses and practices that  politicians, criminologists, judges and doctors awarded to gender identities and sexualities, in a time where  the motto “order and progress” still prevailed. A series of pandemics (plagues of the last quarter of the 19th Century) that were ghostly projected in the organic metaphor of an affected anatomy,[1] worked like a systematic, though imaginary threat, against the integrity of the nation-state. This problem supposed the quick articulation of a social orthopedics supported by "truth" discourses that provided it with scientific status, in the framework of positivism.The amalgam of senses that made possible this social orthopedics was a condition of possibility for an apparatus that legitimated the power “to determine, directly or indirectly [...] a man's freedom or confinement.”[2] In a culture where the process of state-building started early and was in constant transformation, the connivance of the medical and judicial establishments --for instance through expert’s reports--, originated a discourse and a practice that sought the definition of the confinement perimeter (prisons, asylums, hospitals, convents and institutions, among others), as well as its topography, thus turning decisive the emergence of a normalizing power. This is the context for the appearance in 1905 of the quarterly Revista Penitenciaria (Penitentiary Review) published in Buenos Aires. Due to its academic tone and how it illuminates the debates on the topic, it becomes a very valuable source of reference. Its extensive articles reflect on the positions assumed by those who establish these normative discourses. They establish parameters for the definition of crime, and discuss the implications of the penal code. The quarterly also debates about the institutional ways –patronage, social funds, etc.- to extend the confinement outside the prisons spaces. The jurisprudence derived of each case is analyzed, and allow us to explore some of the problematic fields discussed in this article (gender and crime, madness and crime, perversion, etc.). In sum, through its pages we can observe the construction of sex, gender, ethnicity or age, on the one hand, and on the other, the links between gender norms and criminality, or between the latter and the diverse forms of social oppression, as well as the differences and similarities between criminal and pathological. The Penitentiary Review also allows us to detect how the construction of this power involves a sector of embryonic development: the jailers. As part of the dispute between power spheres, the prison will deploy a greater level of autonomy  vis-à-vis the judicial and medical establishments.It is essential to point out that the articulation of the discourses in this publication is homogeneously masculine, where enunciation is defined through multiple exclusively heterosexual and heterosexist interventions. The Penitentiary Review explicit goal is to disclose the notions of the penitentiary science and contribute to the progress of the penal legislation, deploying its worldview through two or three fundamental diacritical axis. One of them is sexuality, permanently classifying normal and pathological, and separating healthy from degenerative subjects. Other axis of the story are organized around ethnicity or age.