Ciencia y contracultura: el movimiento de liberación homosexual y sus saberes

Resumen

Science and counterculture: the homosexual liberation movement and its knowledges

This text presents an analysis of the different scientific and humanistic knowledges that served as an ideological underpinning for the Mexican Homosexual Liberation Movement through the 1970s and 1980s; a movement that included the groups FHAR, OIKABETH and Lambda. More generally, this text situates the Mexican activists within an international framework in which we can observe recurrent global patterns that nevertheless coexisted with specific elements arising from Mexico’s unique situation. In that respect, this paper explores how the Cold War produced a normalizing and medicalizing project that expanded the psychiatric perspectives on normalcy developed during the Second World War by the American Army. However, the internationalization of these discourses also generated a multiplicity of critical perspectives that fed the numerous post-war countercultures. These countercultures were eventually able to modify those above-mentioned hegemonic discourses due to the new emphasis on human rights, as well as in the rebirth of Neomalthussian policies that found a natural ally in sexology. This text contributes to a better understanding of the history of science and its relationship with a broader cultural and social history.

Key words. Homosexual liberation movement, sexology, counterculture, Neomalthussianism, medicalization, psychiatry, human rights, civil rights.