Abstract
This article analyzed the historical and relational conditions that made it possible for specific forms of masculinity, prestige, sociability, intimacy, and political proximity in Mexico to acquire relevance for an external rationality during the Second World War, taking Hilda Krüger’s trajectory as a point of observation. The study shifted away from the conventional femme fatale interpretation, based on the sequence of beauty, seduction, access, and information, toward an analysis of the mediations that gave political significance to bodies and relationships. Through a historical-genealogical and relational approach, espionage was examined as a problem of knowledge and interpretation; the prefigured world of masculinities, affectivities, and prestige was reconstructed; and the conditions through which recognition and trust could reduce distances and create possibilities of access were analyzed. Two analytical categories were proposed: imperial hermeneutics, to explain how an external rationality sought to recognize and interpret relationships it had not produced, and imperial politics of the body, to understand their potential strategic appropriation or reorientation. It was concluded that the possibility of intervention did not reside inherently in Krüger’s body, but in historically produced relationships whose utilization first required learning to recognize and interpret them.