This presentation analyzes a set of public and educational policies oriented towards the care and preservation of the body, framed in the Campaign of Defense of the Race (1940), promoted by the radical government headed by Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1939-1941). Following the periodization proposed by Subercaseux (2016) regarding what he calls "staging of national historical time" (that is, collective and shared experiences of the time in which relations of priority, simultaneity and subsequentness operate by giving identity to those who inhabit any staging), we argue that in the Defense there are elements of two stages of predominant discursiveness: that of integration (ends of the nineteenth century until the first decades of the twentieth) and that of transformation (c.1930-c.1970). The first focuses on national cohesion and the second on the democratizing and emancipatory political change.

Based on the analysis of Defense regarding mentioned stages, our proposal aims to shed lights to the interaction between body and affection that is possible to find in the policies gathered under the Defense. Thus, following the perspectives of overcoming the binomial mind-body and adding to it the expectation of not reducing emotional phenomena only to their linguistic expressions, we follow the proposals of authors like Monica Scheer, who consider that affects and emotions materialize, in (and thus become historical and cultural), through the body, through "emotional practices" that end up constituting a habitus (in reference to Bourdieu). Thus, "constant repetition is required not only for the signification of feelings but also for their embodiment. Consequently, processes of materialisation are best treated with processes of sedimentation"(Pascal Eitler and Monica Scheer, quoted in Plamper, 2015: 137).