Between Disgust and Pride: The Homosexual Subject During The Criminalization Of Homosexual Sex In Urban Colombia (1936-1980)
Other Scholarly Work
Valero, Hector Andres. (2023). Between Disgust and Pride: The Homosexual Subject During The Criminalization Of Homosexual Sex In Urban Colombia (1936-1980)
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Valero, Hector Andres. (2023). Between Disgust and Pride: The Homosexual Subject During The Criminalization Of Homosexual Sex In Urban Colombia (1936-1980)
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The history of homosexuality in Latin America has been traditionally discussed in connection to urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Despite primary sources are pervasively filled with emotional utterances, historians have not examined the role of emotions in the construction of the homosexual subject during the Latin American twentieth century. This dissertation aims to fill this void.
From a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective and by drawing from the conceptual tools from the field of the history of emotions, this dissertation examines the political consequences of the way in which legal, socio-clinical, and sensationalists discourses used emotional utterances when describing/producing the new homosexual subject. This dissertation concludes that despite their divergences, all these discourses ended up constructing bodies of knowledge—scientific, legal, and popular—that naturalized homosexuals’ inequal social relationships and marginal identity. At the same time, this dissertation found that while sensationalists discourses had more stability and were based on legal positivism, socio-clinical and legal discourses had an inverse development respecting one another.
This dissertation’s chronological focus examines the years between 1936 and 1980, when the Colombian Criminal Code outlawed homosexual practices between consenting adults. This work analyzes Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali—Colombia’s three most important cities at the time. Finally, this dissertation’s primary sources include legal manual, scientific articles, monographs of forensic medicine, sensationalist newspapers, and medical records.
Overall, this dissertation argues that emotions played a critical role in the formation of the homosexual subject. For scientific, legal, and popular sectors, it was impossible to produce and to understand ideas about homosexuality and homosexual men without implicitly or explicitly using emotions.
