Review: Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900–1950s, by Natalie Lira

Abstract

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900–1950s, by Natalie Lira Natalie Lira. Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900–1950s. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. 284 pp. Paperback $29.95. Leslie Digdon Leslie Digdon LESLIE DIGDON is an assistant professor of history and engineering at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is the project lead of the Canadian Anti-eugenics Scholarship Hub (CRASH), and her research focuses on the intersections of eugenics, public health, and institutionalization in the early twentieth century. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (2): 107–109. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.107 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Leslie Digdon; Review: Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900–1950s, by Natalie Lira. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 107–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.107 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search In Laboratory of Deficiency, Natalie Lira explores the ways in which “racism, ableism, and classism” (23) were mobilized to construct both the problem of feeblemindedness and its supposed solution in Southern California in the first half of the twentieth century. Lira uses Pacific Colony, a public psychiatric hospital established in 1917, as a case study and has divided her text into thematic chapters that examine the institution’s creation and operation, as well as what it represented to the government, stakeholders, and those whom it targeted and incarcerated. Employing the lenses and frameworks of reproductive justice and critical disability studies, Lira makes important contributions to the historiographies of eugenics, institutionalization, race, and reproductive justice at both the regional and transnational levels. In so doing, she demonstrates the ways in which “diagnoses of feeblemindedness and practices of institutionalization used the language of medicine and science to naturalize existing social hierarchies and... You do not currently have access to this content.