Necropolítica del himen naturalista: virginidad, excedentes de vida y poder soberano en Santa (1903), El hijo del Estado (1884) y El himen en México (1885)

Abstract

Abstract Sexual practices disassociated from the intimate family milieu and its reproductive futures were considered a betrayal against collective national wealth in fin-de-siècle Mexican Naturalism. One of the best-known scenes of the punishment for delitos de incontinencia (sexual incontinency) appears in Santa (1903), a representative urban novel by Federico Gamboa. Santa was perhaps the most widely read fiction about prostitution in early twentieth-century Latin America. At the same time, it had a moralistic agenda that combined medico-legal and religious discourse to stigmatize premarital sex. The novel was not only a literary rendition of sex trafficking in modern Mexico City, it was also a portrayal of the defamation endured by plebeian pregnant women, whose loss of virginity outside marriage left them exposed to sexual exploitation. With an emphasis on the scene of Santa’s miscarriage, this article analyzes the interruption of gestation as a punishment of a sovereign male narrator against the young woman’s premarital sex with her lover, the soldier Marcelino Beltrán. Likewise, I contextualize the novelist’s fixation with virginity and the hymen through a dialogue with a series of texts on obstetrics and legal medicine, which includes the medical treatise El hímen en México (1885) [The Hymen in Mexico] by the pharmacist Francisco A. Flores and the novel El hijo del Estado (1884) [The Son of the State] by Hilarión Frías y Soto.