Lues Venerea e as Roseiras Decaídas: biopoder e convenções de gênero e sexualidade em Jacobina-BA (1930-1960)

Abstract

The research aims at an analysis of the forms of operation of biopower in the city of Jacobina, Bahia, verifying the power strategies of the discourse of newspaper and radio, in biomedical politicies and judicial processes, which strove to build the gender and sexuality conventions. In addition, there are appropriations, reinterpretation and ambivalences present in the social practices of men and women from Jacobina, compared with the imposition of models of masculinity and femininity, and subsequent orders with social class. In a context of gold mining, there was the invisibility of syphilis - a common disease in that social environment - in death certificates, and a series of discursive productions on prostitutes - as icons of deviant sexuality - as a way to impose order and essentializing gender roles. The study dealt with several source of information about the daily, medical, and social life of citizens from Jacobina: the newspapers Vanguarda and O Lidador, with daily news about the city; the Municipal Code of Postures, bearer of rules of social behavior; oral reports, which provided an understanding of the actions of various actors involved in the context; lawsuits, in the perception of how prostitutes circulated in the urban space, articulated networks of solidarity and broke with moral standards; the theses of the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia, which showed ideas present in the academic area of the physicians in Jacobina; and medical reports, which contain information on the state's hospital system in the period studied, and the difficulties encountered in treating disease.