Los ladrones vestidos de mujer de Juan José de Soiza Reilly: crónica periodística y positivismo en los primeros años del siglo XX

Abstract

In the Argentina of the early decades of the 20th century, positivism, which governed science and certain areas of literature and journalism, interpreted delinquency and homosexuality as consequences of disorder or imbalance in the health of the social body. This philosophical current established a correspondence between crime, illness, and immorality as infringements of the legal and sexual code of laws. We propose to consider positivism as a representational form and as a device of control and pathologization of gender-sexual otherness. To do this, we will analyze the ways in which positivist knowledge configures some texts of the journalist and writer Juan José de Soiza Reilly (1879-1959), who, in his prolific work, was interested, following this paradigm of scientific knowledge, in the world of crime and sexual dissidence. We will specifically address one of his articles, published on June 7, 1912, in the sixth issue of the magazine Fray Mocho, titled "Thieves Dressed as Women". We are particularly interested in this text because there, Soiza Reilly performs the act of transmuting the "medical case" and the "criminal case" into the format of journalistic chronicle, discursive genres very in vogue in Buenos Aires in the early decades of the 20th century.