Research

My book project is entitled Erotic Villains: Melodrama and the Twilight of Reproduction in Belle Époque Latin America. This study examines how the Hispanic elites associated optimal reproduction with biopolitical futures in their novels, medical publications, clinical photography, crónicas, and plays. The book argues that a series of literary and non-literary texts recurred to melodramatic tropes about home, nation, and desire to depict two models of sexuality: reproductive sex was associated with virtue, heroism, and fecundity, on the one hand, and ‘deviant’ sex was related to decadence, villainy, and mortality, on the other. At a pivotal moment in the history of modern class formations and racial conflicts in the region, the fin-de-siècle melodrama defined marriage and reproduction as the upper classes’ survival duties due to a fear of being outnumbered by minority groups in the twentieth century. Key voices include those of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Benjamín de Céspedes, Luis M. Dardé, Federico Gamboa, José Enrique Rodó, Aluísio Azevedo, Nicolás Granada, Francisco de Veyga, and José Ingenieros, among other positivists of the turn of the century. This research demonstrates how melodrama became essential for proto-eugenic ideologies that empowered the Hispanic elites while stigmatizing a broad range of non-normative identities: the queer, the southern European immigrant, the indigenous, the neurodivergent, the mestizo, and the Afro-descendant. I show that melodrama was not only a popular genre to entertain the emerging reading public— as has been highlighted by most scholarly approaches—but also a discursive channel to distribute an array of public health policies, influencing hygiene, sanitation, and reproductive health. The book’s contributions extend beyond the field of Hispanic Studies, as the symbiosis between popular culture and racial science was later re-imagined in Europe and the Americas, becoming a definitive aspect of state-sponsored eugenics in the twentieth century.