Heirs of atavistic degeneration or victims of misery? Gender and racism in the cuban medical discourse on prostitution, 1902-1913

Abstract

Objective/Context: We will analyze the medical discourse on prostitution in Cuba, paying special attention to how a diagnosis of this phenomenon was constructed, which oscillated between racial and social explanations, sustained by gender distinctions and racism that survived the ravages caused by the wars of independence in the Cuban postcolonial context of the early twentieth century. Originality: In the article, we suggest that gender and “race” were categories of identity that did not refer to pre-existing or self-evident realities, but that, in the case of Cuba, emerged as sociocultural and discursive constructions that responded to the pressures of a new political order, forged between the last war for independence (1895-1898), the two military interventions by the United States on the Island (1898-1902 and 1906-1909) and the first years of republican life. Methodology: From an analysis of studies conducted by Cuban Physicians Dr. Ramón M. Alfonso and Dr. Matías Duque, key figures in the system that regulated prostitution between 1902 and 1914, we note the way in which historic, racial and social arguments were threaded together to express the anxieties surrounding prostitution (the women who practiced it and the world around them), in a society that privileged the mother, the wife, the daughter, and the white woman as a national prototype. Conclusions: We show that gender functioned as a historically situated form of differentiation thaht categorized prostitutes in relation to their distance from certain racially defined ideals of femininity and masculinity. Likewise, the racial and social explanations of prostitution were not self-excluding, in the same way that rejecting the “other”, their racial and gender differences, was not contradictory with its inclusion, albeit at the margins, in a nation that ideally would have to be white and heteronormative.