Miedo y gobierno en las ficciones masivas de entresiglos (América Latina, 1870-1930)

The purpose of this volume is to define the role of mass genres in the construction of a modern form of thought, particularly with regard to the approach of a biopolitical rationality in the construction and representation of Latin American societies. This paper aims to detect in the scientific curiosities of the "emerging" science fiction, in the horrors of the gothic and in the logics of the crime novel the dynamics of normalization of bodies and their classification practices between 1870 and 1930. Through the theoretical formulations of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and other authors, the idea is to demonstrate that the power of expression of the sovereign in the dominion over life, remains as a discourse overlapped in the modern biopolitical rationality in which life would be the center of government action. In the reading of an incipient affirmation of government practices, the periodization of the volume depends on the will to focus on the affirmation of a liberal elite in the different Latin American countries and, with it, on the use of mass genres to represent a society traversed by multiple concerns, represented through paranoid genres. Another theoretical tool, therefore, in addition to the idea that detective fiction, science fiction, etc. are still far from becoming counter-hegemonic discourses and, instead, serve the arbitration of a social class and an ideology, is that the mass genres are characterized by a paranoid construction of the social fabric. Thanks to the proposals and studies of Ricardo Piglia for the detective novel, David Punter for the gothic and Darko Suvin for science fiction, it is demonstrated that the "cognitive urgency" of these genres produces a demand for security, annihilation of the foreign body and fear of contamination that justifies classification, hierarchization and domination over certain social bodies. If the third chapter seeks to define the semblance of the social subjects who claim this same power over life (doctors, bourgeois, teachers, philosophers), the other chapters will gradually unravel the list of social fears that demand, in fiction, a biopolitical response. Firstly, the great panic of women's intrusion into male spaces; secondly, and as a counterpoint, women's vision of the politics of female bodies; thirdly, the justification of racist and eugenic ideas and the construction of a discursive apparatus for the monstrification of otherness. This approach assumes an extensive corpus -Juana Manuela Gorriti, Eduardo Holmberg, Francisco Calcagno, Clemente Palma, Blas Millán, among others- of which only the fundamental elements of fictionalization of body politics will be addressed in order to offer the broadest possible panorama of the diffusion of a political ideology and a rationality of threat in the Latin American liberal decades.