Eugenics in Buenos Aires: Discourses, practices, and historiography

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, a series of studies underscored the overwhelming presence of positive eugenics in modern Argentina. These works emphasized the marginal role which discourse on eugenics took on violent methods for selection. In recent years, this point of view has shifted, emphasizing the conceptual viscosity of eugenics as well as the presence of negative eugenic discourses. This paper discusses these historiographic trends, and also dwells on the narratives that those perspectives articulated in relation to the question of sterilization and regulation of marriage of those who had tuberculosis in Buenos Aires during the first half of the twentieth century. This example stresses the need to examine discourse as well as practices in understanding and making sense of the past.