La antorcha de Cupido: eugenesia, biotipología y eugamia en Argentina, 1930-1970

Abstract

The goal of this work is to prove —through the legal analyse of matrimonial institution— the coercitivity that characterized to Argentine Eugenics and its reformulation «from the left to the right» from 1930, with the appointment of its more influential intellectuals to Biotipology. This «science» was systematized by the fascist Italian physician, Nicola Pende, and it was adopted, too, in the «Spain of Franco» by the military psychiatrist, Antonio Vallejo Nágera. That coercitivity was instrumented for legitimate classification, hierarchization and exclusion politics but it’s ignored, yet, by local historiography. It says that the catholic influence had a moderating function of «authoritarian » or «Anglo-Saxon» Eugenics. We’ll see, on the contrary, that the «Latin Eugenics» didn’t represent a soft modality of the politics of «betterment of race» orchestrated at the beginning of the XX century in the United States of America and in Germany, but it was the theoretical reason of a similar pseudoscientific delirium headed by Mussolini and quickly accepted in a country of South America.