The body saturated with sexuality. Women in nineteenth-century Mexico's medical and novelistic discursive practice

Abstract

We want to analyze the discourse of the lettered class in 19^th-century Mexico in order to locate the statements about sexuality and morality that are disseminated in them. In this medical-literary corpus we notice the constitution of a feminine way of being, that is, we imagine how they could have influenced the formation of a subjectivity that assumes certain norms of behavior which, by being normalized, they reproduce said subjectivity. In the historical period that saw the emergence of biopower, new techniques of control and surveillance were invented in Western European societies, including sexual politics about individuals which were transmitted via medical and literary discourses. Mexican elites imported these technologies to apply them to the native population. We demonstrate that in Mexico the discursivity on the need to discipline and domesticate women is clearly laid out in order to consolidate the emergence of a female subject who, cut off from the enjoyment of sexual pleasure, could exercisefully a vital role as a responsible mother and reliable wife.

The methodological approach is linked to Michel Foucault´s method of analyzing discourses from an archaeological (analysis of statements) and genealogical (description of power relations) perspectives.