Enfermedad Y Autoritarismo
Resumen del Libro
This work explores the relationships between disease and power. Specifically, within the framework of biopolitics, it focuses on how authoritarian regimes in Mexico, Spain, and Cuba separated classes of individuals from the rest of the society by labeling them as diseased. Through an analysis of short stories and novels of the 20th and 21st centuries, I suggest that these literary works challenge such marginalization by questioning what it means to be classified as ill. I analyze texts from Federico Gamboas Santa (1903) and Camilo José Celas Pabellón de Reposo (1943) to Ronaldo Menéndezs Las bestias (2006), among others. In doing so, this work proposes a transatlantic reading of the relationship between authoritarian power and medical authority in literature. This study is theoretically grounded, on the one hand, in the work of philosophers and thinkers who have examined the concept of biopolitics, such as Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito. On the other, it is informed by the research of anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and cultural critics from the emerging subdiscipline of rhetoric of health and medicine.
