A regulação política da sexualidade no âmbito da família por saberes e instituições médicas brasileiras : 1838-1940

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the political regulation of sexuality in the family sphere by knowledge and medical Brazilian institutions (1838-1940). It is guided by the interest in mapping continuities and discontinuities in the construction of objects, strategies and political tactics of intervention, directed toward hygienic and eugenic regulation of marriage and childhood sexuality. Inspired by Foucault, it falls within the field of history of knowledge and is subsidized by a heterogeneous set of documents (theses, journal articles, books, proceedings, etc.) mostly from the scope of medicine. It analyzes the establishment of a hygienic protection of marriage in nineteenth-century medical thought, focused on relocation of the pictures of wife and husband in the new configuration of family that began to take shape in Brazil, contrasting it with the regulation of Catholic sexual colonial morality. It then describes the hygienic visibility medicine will give children in the nineteenth century, specifically exploring the interest in the topic of masturbation, combining both the family, focusing on the mother figure, and the school in the call of caring for the child. On the basis of social contradictions presented themselves in the construction of national liberal project from the 1870s, it discusses the appropriation of the discourse of degeneration from the Brazilian medical-psychiatric knowledge, resulting in a reading of Brazilianness marked by sexual excess and degenerate condition of miscegenation, to consider the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the matrimonial eugenics project institutionalized in early twentieth century and takes as campaign tactics a mandatory premarital screening, combating consanguineous marriages, the control of venereal contagion and sexual counseling of couples. It analyzes the campaign of sexual education, whose claim to establish a sexual science in Brazil, of controversial legitimacy, whose horizon was enabling sexual prophylaxis that mitigated the production of crime, sexual perversions and nervous diseases, as well as family maladjustments, from the manufacture of a new object, namely, the sex of children, which will focus on a new pedagogy. In particular, it points the particular discursive dissemination of Freud's ideas among Brazilian hygienists about childhood sexuality. Finally, it signals the formation of the mental hygiene of the child as a new domain for psychiatry in Brazil, which took the intense circulation within the family as emotional anchor for a project of social normalization, still focused on eugenics, but now crossed by a psychology of adaptation.