Which bodies for which techniques: from himenolatry to specialists in forensic sexology

• Grant number: 18/26728-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Effective date (Start): May 01, 2019
• Effective date (End): January 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz
• Grantee: Larissa Nadai
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 21/14367-0 - On the power of seeing and making visible female sexuality: intersections between American gynecology and Brazilian forensic sexology, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

This research project is intended to put under review the manuals of legal medicine and academic publications on forensic sexology, published between the years of 1900 and 1940. Immersed in broader anthropological studies of knowledge production and written artifacts, this research will pay close attention to concepts, theorizations and terminologies crystallized by these texts. The purpose is to pursue the resonances and effects that this important academic ballast had (and has) in examinations of carnal conjunction, as well as in researches developed by contemporary researchers on this subject. In seeking to explore the unusual centrality that a fine and unimportant membrane - the hymen - gained in this disciplinary field, I also take as object of analysis a dense technical and scientific production made by Afrânio Peixoto. Such choice responds to the more than two thousand seven hundred himens he inspected, which rendered him the great specialist in the rips, shapes and designs imposed on the membrane. In the making of such analytical and methodological options, I seek to unfold and continue the ethnographic findings of my doctoral thesis, which sought to explore how the medical and police knowledge simultaneously materialized vestiges and bodies - sexualized and sexualizable - through the production of reports and legal medical procedures. Aimed at a varied composition of personal, bureaucratic and non-plastic archives, and inspired by the reflections of Olívia Cunha (2004: 296), the objective is to analyze how "certain professional narratives" are forged through "an intense dialogue involving imagination and intellectual authority." In this sense, the place of specialist destined to Peixoto, but constructed through a vast production on forensic sexology published in Brazil, demands for this research a double ethnographic movement. On the one hand, I try to question who "has the power to make visible and...has the power to look" (KAPSALIS, 1997: 7) the female sexual organs as object of study. And, on the other hand, attentive to the different forms of materialization imposed on bodies by articulating different axes of differentiation - gender, sexuality, race, class, nationality - I ask which bodies and subjects were simultaneously taken as a platform for research and spectacle in the achievement of these knowledge practices.

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

LARISSA NADAI. Vasculhar pedaços, produzir papéis: sobre vestígios e técnicas de perícia. Cad. Pagu, n. 64, 2022-06-06. (18/26728-4)