MONOMANIA E HISTERIA MASCULINA NA BAHIA DO SÉCULO XIX

dissidências de sexualidade e gênero sob a psiquiatria

Abstract

The article examines how psychiatry in Bahia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, linked sexual and gender dissidences to the categories of monomania and male hysteria. To this end, final dissertations defended at the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia (FAMEB) between the 1850s and 1890s were analyzed, indicating the shift from a predominantly moral reproach to the interpretation of these behaviors as morbid predispositions endowed with hereditary and collective implications. It is further argued that, more than reproducing European theories, the authors at FAMEB mobilized the language of mental illnesses to naturalize social differences and reaffirm hierarchies in the context of the final decades of slavery and the immediate post-abolition period. The pathologization of sexuality thus formed part of a broader process of defining accepted standards of masculinity and of reorganizing the social order.