Monstrous and Virile Animals: A Feminist Reading of Archives that Express Disgust of Tram fare Collectors (Santiago, 19th-20th Centuries)

Abstract

This paper proposes to analyze insults aimed at tramway fare collectors in the satirical press: which was a popular subject at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century in Chile. To the gender-class analysis already offered by Prudant (2014), we add other sources and propose another feminist analysis conceptually anchored in affects and intersectionality to question the use of the figures of monstrous and virile animals in the construction of gender and race. We conclude by considering this corpus as an archive of disgust, whose main performative effect was to fabricate an "intersectional police" of good and bad femininities of the nation.