The Animality of Animalism: Animals/Humans in Spanish America’s Fin-de-Siècle Culture

Abstract

In this essay, I will analyze how “animalismo” became a crucial concept, intersecting the debates about race and gender which inspired the ideas of Spanish American intellectuals during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. I will start by explaining how this concept became associated with scientific debates related to Darwinian evolutionism, and how the derived ideas fueled a new gendered racial normativity that gave rise to a crisis by the 1900s. In the second part, I will analyze how race, gender and sexuality became intrinsically related to animalism, and the problems that the association between humans and animals posed for political ideas about the nation.