The feminine body as a metaphor of ungobernability in Porto Rican sanitarian discourses at the end of the 19th Century

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how bodies, particularly female bodies, were treated and objectified by hygiene and sanitarians discourses in Porto Rico, at the end of the 19th Century. The paper examines the tensions and troubles raised by physicians and intellectuals in their effort to eradicate some forms of knowledge that they considered to be an obstacle to expand the new science of medicine in a power-knowledge relation. The article focuses, particularly, on the way that feminine bodies were portrayed as ungovernable, connecting with their anxieties about ruling the Ireland.