Varones y degenerados: The construction of masculinity in the Spanish nineteenth-century social hygiene movement and in three realist novels by Benito Perez Galdos

The disciplinarian tactics of the social hygiene movement of mid- to late nineteenth-century Spain represented an attempt by medical practitioners and social hygienists to construct male sexuality by making the body the "natural" site of gender differences. Men's bodies were generally the point of reference of "health" and "healthiness" in the social hygienic discourse. The aim of this dissertation is to show a slippage between the social hygienic discourse which specifically held men as models of health and physiology, and the language of the sex and marriage manuals which constructed men's sexuality as problematic. The "healthy" male body is identified in social hygienist texts by what is not "healthy," in other words, by a reverse discourse which specifies and demarcates "perverse" sexualities and "unhealthy" bodies, in order to situate "normal" male sexuality and "healthy" male bodies.;The first half of the dissertation analyzes several nineteenth-century social hygienic texts and popular sex manuals, including those of Pedro Felipe Monlau and Amancio Peratoner. These texts prescribed norms and behaviors for "healthy" living and "normal" sexuality. They are grouped under four categories which are seen to be problematic for male sexuality: heteronormativity, masturbation, prostitution, and hermaphrodism. By analyzing some social hygienic texts and the assumptions governing male bodies and sexuality, the dissertation shows the ways in which these discourses constructed male sexuality.;The second half of the dissertation studies three realist novels by Benito Perez Galdos that present problematical male characters in order to study the construction of hegemonic and alternative masculinities in light of social hygienic discourses about the male body. Each of the novels studied, Lo prohibido, Fortunata y Jacinta, and El amigo Manso, has what has been generally described by critics as an ineffectual or effeminate male protagonist. The construction of masculinity in these novels is traced to the representation of the male body and male sexuality in the social hygienist discourse. The conclusion argues that the representation of these ineffectual or effeminate male characters in the realist novel is also representative of Spain's uneven modernization.