American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of NationalismTraces the history of eugenics ideology in the United States and its ongoing presence in contemporary life. The Nazis may have given eugenics its negative connotations, but the practice--and the "science" that supports it--is still disturbingly alive in America in anti-immigration initiatives, the quest for a "gay gene, " and theories of collective intelligence. Tracing the historical roots and persistence of eugenics in the United States, Nancy Ordover explores the political and cultural climate that has endowed these campaigns with mass appeal and scientific legitimacy. American Eugenics demonstrates how biological theories of race, gender, and sexuality are crucially linked through a concern with regulating the "unfit." These links emerge in Ordover's examination of three separate but ultimately related American eugenics campaigns: early twentieth-century anti-immigration crusades; medical models and interventions imposed on (and sometimes embraced by) lesbians, gays, transgendered people, and bisexuals; and the compulsory sterilization of poor women and women of color. Throughout, her work reveals how constructed notions of race, gender, sexuality, and nation are put to ideological uses and how "faith in science" can undermine progressive social movements, drawing liberals and conservatives alike into eugenics-based discourse and policies. |
Contents
National Hygiene TwentiethCentury Immigration and the Eugenics Lobby | 1 |
ImagiNation | 3 |
Calculating Hysteria | 9 |
The Immigrant Within | 32 |
Scientific Racism and the Eugenic Endowment | 45 |
Indiscriminate Kindness and Maudlin Sentimentalism Fighting the Philanthropic Impulse | 51 |
The Abiding Panic | 54 |
Queer Anatomy One Hundred Years of Diagnosis Dissection and Political Strategy | 57 |
AIDS Backlash and the Myth of Liberatory Biologism | 119 |
Sterilization and Beyond The Liberal Appeal of the Technofix | 125 |
Liberal Loopholes | 127 |
Buck v Bell and Before | 133 |
Margaret Sanger and the Eugenic Compact | 137 |
Racism Eugenics and Liberal Accomplices after World War II | 159 |
Norplant and Beyond | 179 |
The Constant Consensus | 195 |
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advocates African-American American Eugenics Society anti-immigrant biological Birth Control Birth Control Review Carolina castration cited claims clinic Committee compulsory sterilization contraceptive Control Politics court crime criminal defective Depo-Provera disabled disease doctors Ellis eugenic sterilization eugenicists federal feeble-minded feminists Gamble gay gene gays and lesbians gender genetic genics girls groups Hamer Harry Laughlin Hartmann Health hereditary heterosexual History homosexuality hormone hospital human Ibid ideology Immigration implants insane issue Jewish Jews Journal of Heredity Journal of Orificial labor Laughlin legislation lesbians liberal Lydston Madison Grant male Margaret Sanger McCann Mehler mental Mexicans moral MSP-CDS MSP-SCC Negro Norplant organization Orificial Surgery percent perversion physical physicians Pioneer Fund poor population control Puerto queers quinacrine race racial Relf reported Reproductive Rights scientific racism Sexology Sexual Inversion sexual orientation social surgical tests tion treatment tubal ligation unfit United Ward welfare woman women wrote York