Good birth and good living. The (de)medicalizing key to sexual reform in the anarchist media of inter-war Spain

Abstract

Libertarian discourse questions bourgeois discourse and develops a sociocultural alternative that is often directly or indirectly related to science, medicine, health and disease (i.e. to biopower). The complex nature of libertarian thinking and biopower has led us to develop our analysis within a relational and eclectic theoretical–methodological framework that allows us to examine one of the devices of biopower – the process of medicalization. Many key explanatory traits of inter-war anarchist thinking may certainly be found in the process of medicalization, which was widely established in the early twentieth century, notwithstanding the fact that such processes have been marked by a wide variety of positions, some of which are alternative, such as those adopted to a large extent by the libertarian movement of that historical period. Thus, in this sense, our purpose is to analyse and understand to what extent discourses on the so-called 'sexual reform', as disseminated by the libertarian press in inter-war Spain, conditioned the processes of (de)medicalization; and also to what extent the latter conditioned discourses on sexual liberation.

Colonial scientific-medical documentary films and the legitimization of an ideal state in post-war Spain

“…Moreover, these distances are suitably conveyed by media communication practices. In our case, the analysis of the power relations related to the films studied by this paper is inevitably linked to precise medicalization (Ballard, Elston, 2005;Jiménez-Lucena, Molero-Mesa, 2011;Bonah, Laukötter, Cantor, 2011;Ostherr, 2013;Tabernero, Perdiguero, 2015) and propaganda strategies (MacKenzie, 1986;Lynch, 2000;Molero-Mesa, 2001;Jiménez-Lucena, Ruiz-Somavilla, Castellano-Guerrero, 2002;Medina-Doménech, Menéndez-Navarro, 2005;Boon, 2005;Perdiguero, Ballester, Castejón, 2007;Caprotti, 2009;Stanard, 2009;Kusiak, 2010).…”

“…In this sense, we also consider the role of film in the creation of diegetic techno-scientific prototypes pertaining to social, political, ideological and cultural structures (Kirby, 2008(Kirby, , 2010Jiménez-Lucena, 2011;Tabernero, Jiménez-Lucena, Molero-Mesa, 2012). Given the combined medical and colonial content of the films analyzed in this paper, we ponder the role of the mass media in relation to scientific-medical knowledge management in colonial contexts.…”