No império do amor monstruoso: a produção da diferença e da homossexualidade masculina e feminina no discurso médico brasileiro dos anos 1930

Abstract

This research analyzes the construction of representations about homosexuality (male and female) and the homosexual subject in Brazilian medico-legal discourses of the 1930s, based on meaning effects produced in statements from two books: A Inversão dos Sexos (1935) by the doctor from Bahia, Estácio de Lima and Homosexualismo e Endocrinologia (1938) by the doctor from Rio de Janeiro, Leonídio Ribeiro. The differences imposed on homosexuals and lesbians were also focused here, given the inequalities present in the social fabric of the period and the intersection of oppression markers, which ultimately made some lives more uninhabitable and abject than others. If an interpretative exaggeration and a certain moral terror led doctors to capture signs of “deviation” everywhere, to always be alert about the homosexual presence and the risk of contamination, this risk was signified in a more negative way in subjects of performativities incoherent gender and consolidated in the “vagrants” and black criminals. However, there were contestations, resistance and disobedience at all times. Our theoretical framework was constituted by the contributions of poststructuralist philosophy, feminist epistemologies (lesbo-feminism and black feminism), queer theory and the historiography of the family, women, inequalities of race, class and work. As a methodology, we used the concepts and premises of French discourse analysis (DA).