In this article, a historical analysis of Chilean intellectual production about homosexuality indicates the permanence of a medicalized paradigm, verifiable up to the present. The conceptualization and representation of such paradigm influences the collective imagination, explaining and legitimizing homophobia and difficulties in introducing reforms to grant rights to the LGBT community. Its immediate background is found in hygienist, modernizing programs in the early 20th Century. The medicalization of homosexuality in Chile can be divided in four periods: its implantation; the predominance of a psychoanalytic interpretation; hegemony of the phenomenological method; and, finally, medicalized apologetics. The latter coincides with the period of re-democratization, and the emergence of LGBT organized movements and LGBT rights.
Chile; homosexuality; medicalization