Resumen de When the personal is public: anxious enquiries and expert answers on bodies in the advice columns of spanish and bengali magazines (1930-1948)

Sutanuka Banerjee, Isabel Jiménez Lucena

• This paper deals with the advice columns (problem pages), �Preguntas y Respuestas�, from Spanish magazine Estudio (1930-1937), and �Prescription� from Bengali magazine Nara-Naree (1940-1948), and analyzes the intersecting issues of morality and modernity, culture and science. The popularity of these columns highlights their instrumental role in inculcating and subverting the hegemonic ideology of society and that of the reading public through the written form of conversation between the advisor and the questioner. But these interactions are not free from ambiguities and paradoxes. The �grave� problems and expert advice further reflect socio-cultural inhibitions and examine the similarities and dissimilarities in consultations which are compared in the transnational setting. Textual analysis of advice columns exhibits how the magazines assessed the normative discourses on sexuality, and their comparative responses towards the complicated subjects explore respective cultural contexts. Thus, the circulation of instructions in these popular columns acted as a powerful vehicle in an interactive space which investigated different dynamics and dialectics of sexual education, and this paper seeks to understand the cultural and scientific coherences and cleavages that they encounter in this process. The negotiation of anxious queries and erudite lessons divulged sexual knowledge in the domain of popular culture and operated as a tool to measure the critical issues that require expert solicitations or specialized treatment. Both magazines proclaimed free transmission of sexual knowledge to establish a �new sexual morality�.