Between leisure and medical discourse: The spa at the end-of-the-century Spanish culture

This paper examines the presence of the spa as a chronotope in fin de siècle Spanish literature, establishing the relationship performed in these spaces between medical discourses and modern leisure. The aim is to analyse how the commodification of medical discourses contributes to destabilize essential notions about illness, gender and sexuality. Moreover, these processes are related to a fin de siècle crisis marked precisely by the revision of the binary oppositions between health and sickness.