Entre el ocio y la feminización tropical: ciencia, élites y estado-nación en Latinoamérica, siglo XIX

Abstract

Foucault's thesis that modernity is characterized by forms of discipline that normalize and control individual conducts and subject positions does not hold for nineteenth-century Latin America. Although the region witnessed a painful and gradual strengthening of the state, it also witnessed the development of weak cultural systems to create national communities out of heterogeneous populations. This cultural debility of the élites can be partially explained by the international intellectual context in which they lived. A dominant Anglo and European view of the "tropics" as places that caused emasculation and sloth contributed to the creation of discurses within the emerging Latin- American states that emphasized rather than healed class and racial divisions. In fact gendered representations of the body of subaltern populations were at times useful to justify aggressive policies of colonization and forced labor systems.