Eugenics, Race, and Disability: Anglo-American Perspectives, Past and Present 1500-SDN-SWDL-ERAD
This seminar examines the historical development and the presence of eugenic discourse in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Conceived in the 1880s by Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Sir Charles Darwin, as the science of "human racial betterment," eugenics ascended to become the defining ur-science of the first four decades of the 20th century. In doing so, it largely impacted the development of the emerging "sciences of man," including psychology, medical science, sociology, economics, and anthropology. Embraced with equal fervor by prominent scientists such as David Star Jordan, the first president of Stanford University and mainstream politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, the president of the US, eugenics was heralded as a visionary science of the future capable of engineering a perfected society. Its ideological dominance manifested itself in significant legislative and social decisions of the era, driving the passage of the restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, fueling the implementation of state-sanctioned US sterilization decrees, and frequently shaping the philosophical roots of the early American conservation movement.
As it solidified into a dominant scientific paradigm, eugenics expanded far beyond the realms of policy and medical research to permeate the cultural landscape. This course will explore how the arts actively interiorized or fought against eugenically motivated discourses of social and racial improvement, as well as their corollaries: the dread of social and racial degeneration and an acute fear of mental and physical disability. By reviewing foundational eugenic literature from the second half of the 19th century through the mid-20th century, we will analyze how these anxieties were reflected in and propagated by the film and literature of the time. The seminar hopes to generate critical discussions around several core themes, including the construction of eugenic utopias in science and popular culture, the representation and marginalization of disability, the conflation of disability and race, and the complex historical seduction of the early feminist and progressive movement by eugenic theories of bodily and mental perfectionism.
Course coordinators
Type of course
Assessment criteria
Two presentations in the class and short "response papers" on selected cultural texts are required. Retake assessment: same as above. Two absences allowed.
Bibliography
● Literatura (Assigned readings)
Francis Galton, "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims”; “Eugenics as a Factor in Religion”; “The Comparative Worth of Different Races” from Hereditary Genius;
Charles Darwin, from The Descent of Man
Charles Davenport, “Geography in Relation to Eugenics”
Lothrop Stoddard, “The Burden of Civilization”; “The Iron Law of Inequality” in The Revolt Against Civilization;
Stephen Jay Gould from The Mismeasure of Man
Nicholas Agar from Liberal Eugenics, In Defense of Human Enhancement
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Jack London, People of the Abyss
Ernest Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
George Schuyler, Black No More
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Filmografia (Filmography):
Charlie Chaplin's The Cure and The Immigrant (1917)
Frankenstein (1931) or Dracula (1931)
Tomorrow's Children (1934)
Gattaca (1997)
Wybrana Bibliografia (Selected Bibliography)
1. D. J. Kevles (1985) In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
2. D. K. Pickens (1968) Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press).
3. E. Black (2003) War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press).
4. S. Currell and C. Codgell (ed.) (2006) Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press).
5. M. S. Pernick (1996) The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
6. A. M. Stern (2005) Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press).
7. H. Bruinius (2006) Better for all the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
8. P. A. Lombardo (ed.) (2011) From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
9. E. B. Luczak (2015) Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
10. E. B. Luczak (2023) Mocking Eugenics (New York: Routledge).
11. S. J. Gould (1996)The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton&Co).