scholarly journals The Degenerating Sex: Female Sterilisation, Medical Authority and Racial Purity in Catholic Brazil

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-194
Author(s):  
Cassia Roth

This article examines female sterilisation practices in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It argues that the medical profession, particularly obstetricians and psychiatrists, used debates over the issue to solidify its moral and political standing during two political moments of Brazilian history: when the Brazilian government separated church and state in the 1890s and when Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian regime of the late 1930s renewed alliances with the Catholic church. Shifting notions of gender, race, and heredity further shaped these debates. In the late nineteenth century, a unified medical profession believed that female sterilisation caused psychiatric degeneration in women. By the 1930s, however, the arrival of eugenics caused a divergence amongst physicians. Psychiatrists began supporting eugenic sterilisation to prevent degeneration – both psychiatric and racial. Obstetricians, while arguing that sterilisation no longer caused mental disturbances in women, rejected it as a eugenic practice in regard to race. For obstetricians, the separation of sex from motherhood was more dangerous than any racial ‘impurities’, both phenotypical and psychiatric. At the same time, a revitalised Brazilian Catholic church rejected eugenics and sterilisation point blank, and its renewed ties with the Vargas regime blocked the medical implementation of any eugenic sterilisation laws. Brazilian women, nonetheless, continued to access the procedure, regardless of the surrounding legal and medical proscriptions.

2021 ◽  
pp. 292-304
Author(s):  
Jennifer Walker

Taking the 1903 death of Pope Leo XIII as its starting point, the conclusion extends beyond the legal separation of Church and State (1905) in order to trace the ways in which the processes of transformation that were set in motion during the late nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth century. Pierre Nora’s concept of the lieu de memoire illuminates the numerous ways that the sites of Catholic and French memory that the book explores—whether as opera, popular theatre, or concert—found an extraordinary ally in the Republic as it collectively harnessed the power of memory. From its “origin” in the French medieval era, to its transformations throughout the fin-de-siècle, to the response to the devastating fire at Notre-Dame in 2019, the Catholic Church provided (and continues to provide) a new mode of expression for the French Republic. In effect, the success of the twentieth-century renouveau catholique was set in motion by its nineteenth-century forbear: the path was paved by the Republic’s musical Ralliement and the memorialization of its Catholic past as a fundamental cornerstone of its modern existence.


1979 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Roth Walsh

For well over a century, women have sought acceptance in the medical profession. The first breakthrough in this effort, in the late nineteenth century, resulted in a "golden age": women then accounted for up to half of some medical school graduating classes. These early successes were not followed by subsequent gains. The twentieth century became a period of stagnation for women physicians with respect to both their number and their power. Against the background of this earlier history, this article analyzes contemporary efforts to empower women as physicians.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pamela Hyde

<p>This thesis is a socio-historical study of cervical cancer from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. It explores the ways in which discourses have constituted knowledge, social practices and subjectivities in relation to cervical cancer. It also explores the ways in which power has operated on the bodies of New Zealand women. In doing so it criticises orthodox histories of medicine, problematises the knowledge claims of medicine and argues for a sociological account of medical knowledge. In this thesis discourses on cervical cancer have been subjected to a feminist-Foucauldian analysis which reveals their historical specificity and their social location. The gendered bodies of women are placed at the centre of this analysis. This thesis challenges constructionist accounts of medicine which do not pay sufficient attention to the role of gender relations in the construction of bodies. This thesis also develops against feminist theorists a view of women as actively constituting their bodies by responding to and challenging medical discourses whilst at the same time being shaped by these discourses. In this study, cervical cancer is subjected to a sociological analysis which problematises its existence as an unalloyed biological phenomenon. It is argued that women's bodies have been the contested sites for knowledge/power and that the cervix and its diseases have been constituted as variable medical artifacts throughout specific historical periods from the 1890s to the 1990s. The study also shows however, the ways in which women have been active participants in the disciplining of their bodies. In this thesis, the medical profession, state actors and feminists are shown to interact in an interweave of power. In doing so the socially negotiated status of medical knowledge of cervical cancer is revealed.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pamela Hyde

<p>This thesis is a socio-historical study of cervical cancer from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. It explores the ways in which discourses have constituted knowledge, social practices and subjectivities in relation to cervical cancer. It also explores the ways in which power has operated on the bodies of New Zealand women. In doing so it criticises orthodox histories of medicine, problematises the knowledge claims of medicine and argues for a sociological account of medical knowledge. In this thesis discourses on cervical cancer have been subjected to a feminist-Foucauldian analysis which reveals their historical specificity and their social location. The gendered bodies of women are placed at the centre of this analysis. This thesis challenges constructionist accounts of medicine which do not pay sufficient attention to the role of gender relations in the construction of bodies. This thesis also develops against feminist theorists a view of women as actively constituting their bodies by responding to and challenging medical discourses whilst at the same time being shaped by these discourses. In this study, cervical cancer is subjected to a sociological analysis which problematises its existence as an unalloyed biological phenomenon. It is argued that women's bodies have been the contested sites for knowledge/power and that the cervix and its diseases have been constituted as variable medical artifacts throughout specific historical periods from the 1890s to the 1990s. The study also shows however, the ways in which women have been active participants in the disciplining of their bodies. In this thesis, the medical profession, state actors and feminists are shown to interact in an interweave of power. In doing so the socially negotiated status of medical knowledge of cervical cancer is revealed.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ailie Posillico

With a focus on the archives of Gemma Galgani (1878–1903), lay Italian Catholic mystic, stigmatic, and first saint of the twentieth century, the current article highlights the ways in which Gemma cultivated relationships with the hierarchy, specifically through writing, which challenged the ‘traditional,’ clerically approved models of late nineteenth-century Catholic sanctity. With attention to Gemma’s writing, a saint who has otherwise been portrayed by her hagiographer as fitting neatly into the strictures of Italian Catholicism of her time, we see rhetoric that contests the assumption that submission is a necessary component of ‘piety.’ Attending to Gemma’s letters sent to her spiritual advisor, the current study underscores the ways in which we may understand Gemma as more than the quiet, humble, and wounded body for which she has been canonized. Gemma as author, as writing body, as I will show, weaves for herself an alternative system of agency that co-exists with – while at the same time reimagines – the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.


2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Johnson

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw the drum kit emerge as an assemblage of musical instruments that was central to much new music of the time and especially to the rise of jazz. This article is a study of Chinese drums in the making of the drum kit. The notions of localization and exoticism are applied as conceptual tools for interpreting the place of Chinese drums in the early drum kit. Why were distinctly Chinese drums used in the early drum kit? How did the Chinese drums shape the future of the drum kit? The drum kit has been at the heart of most popular music throughout the twentieth century to the present day, and, as such, this article will be beneficial to educators, practitioners and scholars of popular music education.


2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Agostoni

This article explores why alongside sanitary legislation and public health works, Mexican physicians of the late nineteenth century attempted to transform the habits, customs and day to day activities of the population. It stresses the importance that the teaching of the principles of private and public hygiene had for the future of the country, how this education was to be carried out, and why some members of the medical profession believed that the hygienic education of mothers/women was an unavoidable requirement for the progress of the nation. Este artíículo analiza por quéé durante las déécadas finales del siglo diecinueve, el gremio méédico mexicano consideraba que era absolutamente indispensable que los habitantes del paíís, y en particular las mujeres de la capital, contaran con una cultura de la higiene. No sóólo era fundamental sanear y ordenar a la ciudad de Mééxico mediante obras de infraestructura sanitaria, y emitir leyes que regularan la salubridad de la nacióón, sino que era igualmente importante, y quizáás máás urgente, que los habitantes transformaran sus háábitos y costumbres de acuerdo con lo establecido por la higiene púública y privada. Asimismo, el artíículo examina los méétodos mediante los cuales se procuróó crear una cultura de la higiene, y por quéé la madre de familia fue considerada como una aliada imprescindible para la empresa de los higienistas.


Author(s):  
Melissa Van Drie

This article presents a historical and theoretical reflection of the théâtrophone, a late nine- teenth-century telephone broadcast service that allowed users at a distance to listen in live to local theatre performances (spoken theatre, opera and musical concerts). Often cited as the first binaural experience in 1881, the théâtrophone’s much longer history as a subscription service, which operated in Paris from 1889 through the mid-1930s, is relatively unknown. This article considers what hearing through a théâtrophone meant to nineteenth- and twentieth- century users beyond its initial 1881 prototype. To hear through the théâtrophone means adopting a methodology mirroring the artefact itself: moving between social, professional, artistic, sensory registers. In doing so, the ways in which the théâtrophone was attuned to dis- course and practice emerge, as do more subtle processes involved in new nineteenth-century constructs of hearing and listening. Precisely the théâtrophone’s development is examined in relation to its particular social context: its installation on the spectacular Parisian boulevards and its relation to fin de siècle theatre culture. The article first investigates how theatrophonic listening was accorded to existent practices of theatre-going. Second, the article explores the more radical propositions of the théâtrophone in relation to important aesthetic and prac- tical changes occurring simultaneously in theatre culture. The théâtrophone’s virtual sonic experience multiplied the forms of a performance and its modalities of creation and recep- tion. Through accounts of ‘listening in’ the aspects of the new sonically constructed space are described, as are postures of early mediatised listening. The article posits that new modalities of listening are articulated through the théâtrophone, with certain users, including Proust, defining it as a monitoring and creative tool. In this capacity, ‘theatrophonic’ listening contrib- uted to the development of a refined ear, capable of detecting sonic nuance, which was central to artistic sensibilities at the time. 


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