Referencia completa: Vázquez García, Francisco: “Breasts, Hair and Hormones: the Anatomy of Gender Difference in Spain, 1880-1940”, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 86 (2009), 5, (GLASGOW, GBR), pp. 627-652

This study seeks to make a contribution towards the analysis of the materiality – in terms of the body and its functions – of gendered and sexed difference as constructed by some Spanish scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It does not take those gendered or sex differences as given, as scientists often (but not always) did, but follows a number of scientific routes whereby these differences were articulated, awarded materiality and thus social significance. In this way, emphasis here is placed on the processes, both discursive and material, whereby sex difference was articulated. In order to illustrate how bodies were literally constructed with a view to founding sex differences in biology and, by implication and application in society, three ‘parts’ of the body are studied with respect to medical publications of the period. These three parts are the breasts, the hair and the hormones. Specialists examined minutely differences between men in women with respect to these three attributes and attempted to measure sex differences on the basis of the relative development of each in the sexes and their relative differentiation according to sex. It was only by means of this minute operation that an overall language of difference could be articulated. But this dichotomized world was not a stable one; doctors had to introduce and accept slippages between supposedly distinct gendered worlds and constantly had to shore up their ideas by having recourse to exceptions, unusual cases, pathologies and, at the end of the day, the acceptance that some supposed differences were actually shared by the sexes.

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