La histeria y los espacios de reclusión en la Chimba de Santiago del Siglo XIX: El claustro del Buen Pastor
The configuration of female confinement spaces in La Chimba, in nineteenthcentury Santiago, reveals the early articulation of disciplinary dispositifs that preceded the medicalisation of female behaviour, generating tensions around the emergence of hysteria as a diagnosis at a time when it was begin...
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| Autores principales: | , |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
| Lenguaje: | español |
| Publicado: |
2026
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/oaiart?codigo=10782070 |
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| Sumario: | The configuration of female confinement spaces in La Chimba, in nineteenthcentury Santiago, reveals the early articulation of disciplinary dispositifs that preceded the medicalisation of female behaviour, generating tensions around the emergence of hysteria as a diagnosis at a time when it was beginning to be considered a social disease. From a Foucauldian perspective, it is argued that confinement practices characteristic of religious and conventual discipline –particularly in institutions such as the convent of the Sisters of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, in Santiago de Chile– constituted dispositifs of normalisation that anticipated the medicalisation of female conduct within psychiatric institutions. Before being interpreted as pathological, behaviours considered deviant were read through moral and spiritual frameworks, inscribed within an economy of punishment, penitence, and surveillance that therefore required an ad hoc architectural configuration. It should be recalled that the Congregation of the Good Shepherd arrived in Chile to assume responsibility for women’s prisons across the country. The first diagnosis of hysteria in Santiago, which found a precedent in cases such as that of Carmen Marín, known as “the possessed woman”, did not represent an epistemological rupture, but rather a continuity in technologies of power, now articulated through medical knowledge. La Chimba, a neighbourhood historically located on the margins of the formal city, operated as a heterotopia of deviation in which institutions dedicated to containing, correcting, and classifying the anomalous were concentrated, integrating religious discipline, medical knowledge, and hygienist urban rationality. The article proposes that hysteria functioned as a category that enabled the reinscription of pre-existing practices of control within a new regime of truth, contributing to the production of a social, moral, and spatial order in nineteenth-century Santiago. |
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