ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Gendered Understandings of Health and Disease in the Press in Mexico, 1876-1911

• In Event: Public Health in the Americas

English Abstract

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, germs became part of Mexico's literate urban classes' cultural imagination. This paper analyses discourses surrounding health and disease in periodicals published in Mexico City during Porfirio Díaz’s regime (1876-1911). The incorporation of bacteriological ideas into understandings of disease occurred alongside sanitary reform, which, like in other Latin American countries, was embedded within a national project guided by ideas of progress and modernity. The press was a platform for hygienic knowledge to become more widely available, and where both men and women actively participated as writers, editors and readers. Sanitation content published in the press was consistently written in gendered language. By establishing bacteriology as an intrinsically masculine profession, the medical community sought to further legitimise its centrality in Mexican public and political life and set clear boundaries of intellectual authority. Through the exploration of gendered tropes, such as the use of martial analogies and languages in medicine and public health, I will show how ideas of health both shaped and were shaped by modern gender roles. Shifting perspectives from the male discourse to women’s voices is essential to understand women’s responses to the roles that were assigned to them. Their domestic role gave them the right and the responsibility to hygienic knowledge. Although women’s voices were often marginalised, they found spaces to rewrite medical knowledge in ways that were compatible with the feminine ideal and, at times, challenged conceptions of femininity. On one hand, these texts evidence women’s changing self-perceptions, on the other, they help us reassess the significance of their role in the assimilation of bacteriological knowledge into Mexico’s urban collective imaginary.

Author

• Labna Fernandez Erana, UCL