Eugenic Project Research Articles

Kinder als organisches Kapital des Staates: Aspekte einer Eugenisierung von Kindheit 1900–1938

Eugenics aimed at a rationalisation of sexuality and reproduction in order to prevent the birth of children with ‘hereditary diseases’ or ‘genetic defects’. Therefore in a project of scientifical ‘social engineering’ ideas of health, well-beeing, quality of life and fitness were combined with sentences concerning social recognition and respect. In this paper I will analyse which conceptions of childhood were produced by the eugenic discours in the medical establishment during the first three decades of the 20th century. Which ideals of childhood were beeing quicked by the eugenic project of ‘quality instead of quantity’ and which consequences followed from this for those children, who were and are not in accordance with this ideals? The data for the analysis are drawn from an examination of articles published in the Wiener klinische Wochenschrift, the leading medical journal in Austria between 1900 and 1938.

In Pursuit of Greater Hungary: Eugenic Ideas of Social and Biological Improvement, 1940–1941

In Pursuit of Greater Hungary: Eugenic Ideas of Social and Biological Improvement, 1940–1941

The Concept of the 'New Soviet Man' As a Eugenic Project: Eugenics in Soviet Russia after World War II

This article penetrates the idealistic, Marxist concept of the 'new Soviet man', linking it with the notion of eugenics. Departing from a reconstruction of the history and specificity of the eugenic movement in Russia since the late 19th century until the installation of Joseph Stalin as the only ruler of the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism paradigm of Soviet natural sciences is being evoked as a theoretical frame for Soviet-specific eugenic programme. Through referring to a number of chosen – both theoretical (classic Marxist works) and practical (chosen aspects of Soviet science and internal politics) – issues and cases, the concept of the 'new Soviet man' is being confronted with an original reading of eugenics, understood in neo-Lamarckian terms of direct shaping human beings through environmental conditions (comprehending the GULag system of labour camps, pseudo-medical experiments and other) and intergenerational transfer (through inheritance) of acquired traits.

A Whiter Shade of Pale

In 1922 the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology (SIRB) was founded in Uppsala, with the purpose being to survey and classify the Swedish people according to their race. To make this categorization, both measurements and visual analysis of bodies and faces were used and documented in charts and photographs. The data collected was then intended to make a foundation for a rational population policy aiming at improving the Nordic (Swedish) race. The charts registering body characteristics, the photographic collection brought together by the institute, and the images illustrating the published results all testify to the importance of visuality in this eugenic project: how people looked was crucial when classifying them into different race types. In this study the works of the institute are analysed to see in what way race was constructed through this visuality. The results show how the institute followed a scientific and pictorial rhetoric founded centuries earlier, in which the human species was organized in different subgroups according to their visual appearance. The results also show how race, with time, became more and more differentiated and that white, in the work of the SIRB, came in many shades.

Primórdios da natação competitiva feminina: do "páreo elegância" aos Jogos Olímpicos de Los Angeles

The objective of this study is to construct the historical narrative of the appearance of swimming competitions for women up to 1932. Two swimmers who actually participated in this process were interviewed: Blanche Pironnet, and Maria Lenk. Documents from other sources were also used in the process. The interpretation of the sources shows that at the beginning of the 20th century, swimming was a locus of symbolic power, which permitted elite women to conquer public space without much social resistance at the same time that they made it appropriate to state eugenic projects and became visible to a patriarchal and conservative society

Fighting Social Pathology: Criminology and Eugenics in Bulgaria, 1896–1939

AbstractThe article examines the measures for combating forms of social pathology, such as criminal behavior and medicalized moral disorders, which were debated in Bulgaria from the end of 19th century onwards. Hence, the regime of mental incapacity under Bulgarian criminal law and the professional discussions on the nature of crime and abnormality are explored. The analysis focuses on the influence of criminological concepts on Bulgarian psychiatric and legal discourses, as well as on their links to interwar eugenic projects. The engagement of Bulgarian intellectuals with criminological and eugenic policies is studied within a general process of adoption and adaptation of Western biopolitical models. The article addresses the conceptual specifics of the Bulgarian debates on social and mental pathology and their practical relevance.

The "Homing In" of Howard Camp: Hidden Roots in Joseph Bruchac's Hidden Roots

This article analyzes how Joseph Bruchac's novel Hidden Roots extends William Bevis' "Homing In" paradigm. The historical context of the 1950s and the Vermont eugenics project impact the protagonist's "homing in" as well as enlighten readers to this little-known historical period and its lasting impact on the Abenaki.

THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL CHOICE:RACIAL SELECTION AND REPROGENETICS

abstractServing as a commentary on Kelly Oliver's essay, “Enhancing Evolution: Whose Body? Whose Choice?” this essay picks up on its themes of mastery, choice, the man‐made, and the natural in order to further Oliver's critique of a particular liberal debate over the ethical permissibility of reprogenetics. The specific focus of the commentary is the hidden centrality of race to the reprogenetics debate, within which, I suggest, race serves as an implicit limit of acceptability in two important ways. First, on the societal level, an explicitly racial focus marks the point at which a eugenic project becomes immoral, such that it is the refusal to mention race that renders the new eugenics acceptable. Second, in the realm of personal reproductive “choice,” race is portrayed as that which is naturally transmitted rather than deliberately chosen and, thus, serves as a limit on what are considered morally correct or even viable personal reproductive choices. The effect of this limiting and its naturalization is to obscure both the ways in which race has always been policed in reproduction and the social consequences of that policing and, thereby, to uphold the status quo of social inequality.

Governmentality, Biopower, and the Debate over Genetic Enhancement

Although Foucault adamantly refused to make moral pronouncements or dictate moral principles or political programs to his readers, his work offers a number of tools and concepts that can help us develop our own ethical views and practices. One of these tools is genealogical analysis, and one of these concepts is "biopower." Specifically, this essay seeks to demonstrate that Foucault's concept of biopower and his genealogical method are valuable as we consider moral questions raised by genetic enhancement technologies. First, it examines contemporary debate over the development, marketing, and application of such technologies, suggesting that what passes for ethical deliberation is often little more than political maneuvering in a field where stakes are very high and public perceptions will play a crucial role in decisions about which technologies will be funded or disallowed. It goes on to argue that genuine ethical deliberation on these issues requires some serious investigation of their historical context. Accordingly, then, it takes up the oft-heard charge from critics that genetic enhancement technologies are continuous with twentieth-century eugenic projects or will usher in a new age of eugenics. Foucault explicitly links twentieth-century eugenics with the rise of biopower. Through review of some aspects of the twentieth-century eugenics movement alongside some of the rhetoric and claims of enhancement's modern-day proponents, the essay shows ways in which deployment of genetic enhancement technologies is and is not continuous with earlier deployments of biopower.

Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation. By Anna Marie Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 297p. $29.99

In her book, Anna Marie Smith meticulously analyzes the racial and gendered dimensions of the U.S. welfare state and the ways in which it punishes the unmarried and imposes hetero-normative standards on all types of poor families. Smith's aim is to “expand the disciplinary limits of feminist political theory” (p. 6) by drawing on case law, public policy, and social theory. She exposes highly undemocratic practices directed at poor women and men, as well as what amounts to a eugenic project seeking to limit poor people's reproduction. Significantly, individuals of color are targeted by the state for eugenic control and moral policing. In particular, Smith points out how welfare reform and the implementation of “paternafare”—a program that forces poor women to identify biological fathers so that the state can pursue these “deadbeat dads”—do not help the one group who even conservatives agree are “innocent”—children. Very rarely are any party's circumstances elevated by this system, and most often “payers” are forced into deeper poverty. Furthermore, the state's hetero-normative stance marginalizes lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals (LGBTs) in a legal system in which their rights are already deeply compromised.

Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State (review)

Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State (review)

Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State. Nancy L. Gallagher

<i>Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State</i>. Nancy L. Gallagher

Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State.

Eugenics -- the study of human racial progress through selective breeding -- frequently invokes images of social engineering, virulent racism, immigrant persecution, and Nazi genocide, but Vermont's little known adventure in eugenics shows the inherent adaptability of eugenics theory and methods to parochial social justice. Beginning with genealogies of Vermont's rural poor in the 1920s, and concluding in the 1930s with an expose of ethnic prejudice in Vermont's largest city, this story of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont explores the scope, limits, and changing interpretations of eugenics in America and offers a new approach to the history of progressive politics and social reform in New England. Inspired and directed by Zoology Professor Henry F. Perkins, the survey, through social research, political agitation, and education campaigns, infused eugenic agendas into progressive programs for child welfare, mental health, and rural community development. Breeding Better Vermonters examines social, ethnic, and religious tensions and reveals how population studies, theories of human heredity, and a rhetoric of altruism became subtle, yet powerful tools of social control and exclusion in a state whose motto was freedom and unity.

Discussion or Inquisition? The Case of Alain de Benoist

Abstract In many respects, Alain de Benoist is a political and intellectual turncoat. During the 1960s, his political culture revolved around radical anti-communism and a nationalism à la Charles Maurras (vying with a supra-national, post-national perspective). His “worldview,” centered on the “defense of the West,” was based on “scientific racism” (the theory of race revised by Mendelian genetics and a differential psychology of intelligence) and a eugenic project situated at the core of the “biopolitics” of the future. During the 1970s, he gradually broke with biologism and distanced himself from anti-communism — the dominant political thinking in various groups on the Right — to the point of characterizing liberalism and the US (the embodiment of consumer society) as the “main enemy.”

Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930

If innate male aggression and dominance are at the root of female oppression, then the feminist program would logically require either the extermination of the offending sex, or else a eugenics project to modify its character. If sexism is a by-product of capitalism's relentless appetite for profit, then sexism would wither away in the advent of a successful socialist revolution. If the world historical defeat of women occurred at the hands of an armed