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Sex and mind: relations between medicine and psychiatry in the scientific elaboration of female mental and sexual inferiority. Study on the House of Orates of Santiago de Chile, 1890-1897

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No. 22 (2024): Diciembre
https://doi.org/10.5354/2735-7473.2024.77293

Abstract

Since the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, medical and psychiatric theories circulated in Chile that established the organic relationship between sex and mind, establishing the physiological and psychic inferiority of the female sex. This article seeks to identify how androcentric science, with the ability to classify and normalize behaviors through scientific gender biases, behaves as a form of epistemic violence that was used to define and classify female mental and sexual inferiority, impacting those. women considered abnormal or degenerate, but also as a disciplinary element for other women, thus ensuring a social and sexual order determined by heteropatriarchal gender norms. We will analyze from the perspective of gender and social history medical texts and institutional statistics of the Casa de Orates of Santiago de Chile,how these ideas were applied in diagnoses on women interned in that institution between 1890 and 1897.

Keywords:

Psychiatry, medicine, sexuality, women, epistemic violence

Author Biography

Ana Carolina Gálvez Comandini, Universidad Metropolitana de Cienicas de la Educación

Dra. en Historia, Académica del Departamento de Historia y Geografía, Facultad de Historia, Geografía y Letras, Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación

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How to Cite
Gálvez Comandini, A. C. (2025). Sex and mind: relations between medicine and psychiatry in the scientific elaboration of female mental and sexual inferiority. Study on the House of Orates of Santiago de Chile, 1890-1897. Revista Punto Género, (22), pp. 66–98. https://doi.org/10.5354/2735-7473.2024.77293
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Revista Punto Género
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales
Universidad de Chile
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