A sack full of cunning: stigma, essentialism and disability in the representations of the offender in the Revista Criminal (1873)

Abstract

This article aims to inquire about the type of discourses and knowledge produced and reproduced by the Revista Criminal (1873) in relation to disability and criminality. Therefore, the case of Domingo Parodi, alias "Hunchback", placed in the section of "famous criminals" will be developed and recovered by Eduardo Gutiérrez, through pamphlets presented in La Patria Argentina (1880). Specifically, I am interested in reconstructing the connecting links between the reproduced images of crime and disability in terms of deficit and psychophysical abnormality of the offender, based on the marking of the traits and stigmas that he presents, and which will later on, become even more notorious  when Gutiérrez rescue the case and turn it into a newspaper serial. On this point, I argue as a hypothesis that the centrality of the Parodi case outlined in the Revista Criminal is due more to an essentialization of the difference around his physical appearance and the stigmatization of his deficit as an effect of evidence than to his criminal phenomenology - indisputably essentialized - expressed in their behavior. In conclusion, the magazine's images based on a grammar of the monstrous, placed the criminal subject as a being of a diverse nature, in the transition between a genealogy of the monstrous, whether legal- biological or legal-moral towards the concept of associated abnormality as degeneration and deviation of heterogeneous bodies