“O médico disse que estou magrinho”: alimentação na infância como uma prática educativa na Paraíba (1918 a 1937).

Abstract

The objective of this study was to analyze how advertisements of infant feeding, which circulated in magazines and newspapers in the state of Paraíba, between 1918 and 1937 of the 20th century, disseminated educational practices for feeding children. In order to construct this historiographical operation, we had dialogues with the history of Brazil in the period of the First Republic when there was the national movement of state intervention in the sanitary movement on the sertões region and in the urban areas aiming the health directed towards the construction of the national identity that also had impact in Paraíba with an ideal of having a healthy and robust people as symbols of progress and civilization. We problematize medical practices with food prescriptions, the role of the mother, the 'social mission' of motherhood, and the discourses of eugenics and hygiene in the Neolamarckian perspective explained by Stepan that transformed the child as the target of biological and political discourses around your health. The ads were interpreted by the plots of Cultural History with the methodology of the discourse analysis by the prism of Michel Foucault, through the devices of governmentality, biopolitics and biopower. The representative aspects of children's images were interpreted by the prism of Roger Chartier. We used as sources the periodicals The Union and the New Era. With these theoretical perspectives, we identify the advertising strategies with the eugenic policy to sell the products and the influences of the public policies around the 'new' educational practices of the mothers feeding the children preparing them to be 'future of the Homeland'.