Sexuality and biopower in Chile and Latin America

This essay analyzes how elite and subaltern efforts to regulate gender, sexuality, and family, helped define the class and race contours of the nation. It examines the Chilean nation building process, which has generally been conceptualized in class terms, alongside other countries, where there is a denser historiography on race, to demonstrate that national identities were constructed on a common, racialized, discursive terrain. The reformist and populist alliances that emerged throughout Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s drew from newer scientific discourses of race and eugenics but also reworked racialized colonial and nineteenthcentury articulations of gender and citizenship.