Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Biomedical Sciences in Twentieth Century Mexico

Abstract

Previous accounts on how homosexual identities developed in Mexico along the twentieth century have tended to exclude biomedical sciences as an important part of the background in which the modern homosexual subject came into existence. In this paper, I seek to remedy this lack of attention by examining the role these expertises played. More concretely, I offer an historiographic narrative in which homophobia was institutionalized through these disciplines, thus generating the conditions of possibility for the rising of homosexual identities. In general, I show how eugenics, legal medicine, and psy-expertises can be characterized as the venues responsible for the introduction and standardization of medical categories associated with this identity.