Description:

Talk title: Lunfardos: Dramaturgy and the Futures of Procreation
in Conservative Argentina, 1880-1930

Argentine dramaturgy functioned at the dawn of the twentieth century as a locus of distribution and popularization of the expert knowledges of psychiatry and criminology, legal medicine and psychology grouped in Argentina under the rubric of social medicine. As a dramaturgy at the margins (teatro orillero) it sought to populate the stage with monstrous representations of criminalized figures defined in the popular slang as lunfardos. Such figure that applied mainly to the migrant, the sex worker, and the beggar was deemed dangerous for the national moral fabric and not only expressed the deteriorations of national consent in fin-de-siècle literary culture but also fears over the potential disintegration of the species, that is, over the futures of procreation. Dramatic texts such as ¡Al campo! (1902) by Nicolás Granada, Yerba Mala (1908) by José Eneas Riú, Gracia plena (1919) and Los dopados (1922) by Alberto Weisbach formulated a grammar of the lunfardo’s body to classify it, control it, and justify its social exclusion. This presentation argues that the lunfardo became the ultimate specter to be exorcized from this genre of dramaturgy. The texts projected a deep discomfort with the possible disintegration of criollo bodies, key instruments for the maintenance of new political and biological alliances between the landed elite and the submissive gauchos who were by then now disciplined and adapted to the new standards of capitalist production in Conservative Argentina (1880-1930).

**Talk will be in Spanish**