Miradas torcidas: decadentismo, género y discurso médico en El monstruo (1915) de Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent

This paper explores the relationship between gaze and scientific discourse in the Spanish decadent movement, through the analysis of Antonio’s Hoyos y Vinent’s novel El monstruo (1915). First of all, this paper will examine the relationship between decadence, fin de siecle and crisis within a European framework. This paper will approach the fin de siecle literature from its relationship with power discourses and, above all, from the reappropriations that these narratives perform in relation to medical discourses. Moreover, this paper will analyze how the decadent gaze revises and subverts the concepts of truth established by medical discourses, and is related to gender, sickness and even the notion of Occident. Finally, Hoyos y Vinent’s novel will be examined, not only as a paradigmatic example of these cultural processes, but also as a text that offers a reading of the Spanish fin de siecle based on a wide array of shared anxieties.