American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.: Univ of Minnesota Pr. New. 2003. Hardcover. 0816635587 .*** FREE UPGRADE to Courier/Priority Shipping Upon Request *** - *** IN STOCK AND IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE FOR SHIPMENT - FLAWLESS COPY, PRISTINE, NEVER OPENED -- 297 pages; clean and crisp, tight and bright pages, with no writing or markings to the text. -- TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction * I National Hygiene: Twentieth-Century Immigration and the Eugenics Lobby * ImagiNation * Calculating Hysteria * The Immigrant Within * The Pioneer Fund: Scientific Racism and the Eugenic Endowment * "Indiscriminate Kindness" and "Maudlin Sentimentalism": Fighting the "Philanthropic" Impulse * The Abiding Panic * II Queer Anatomy: One Hundred Years of Diagnosis, Dissection, and Political Strategy Science as Savior * Delineating Deviance: Moral Imperatives, Hereditarian Hypotheses, and the Letter of the Law * Biological Apologists: Appeals and Miscalculations * Gender, Race, and the Strategy of Metaphor * Homosexuality and the Bio/Psych Merge: An Additive Model of Causation Theories * AIDS, Backlash, and the Myth of Liberatory Biologism * III Sterilization and Beyond: The Liberal Appeal of the Technofix * Liberal Loopholes * Buck v. Bell and Before * Margaret Sanger and the Eugenic Compact * Physical Fallout: Racism, Eugenics, and Liberal Accomplices after World War II * New Technologies, Old Politics: Norplant and Beyond * Disability and Eugenics: The Constant Consensus * Quinacrine, the Next Wave * Conclusion * Notes * Index. -- DESCRIPTION: 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. -- AUTHOR: Nancy Ordover is an independent scholar who lives in New York City. -- * * -- FS REVIEW: Did you know that Margaret Sanger, the liberal icon and advocate of reproductive rights was a racist eugenicist? Did you know that the principal advocates of racist eugenics in America prior to the Hitler era were leftists? Then you're probably unaware of the fact that Hitler was a socialist and that Nazi is an acronym for the National Socialist party. Some of this background is covered in Ordover's study, much of it not. Much of what is discussed is sheer nonsense, including the situating of mistreatment of America's homosexuals within the sphere of eugenics and the confusion of genetic research on mental qualities and eugenics and the persistent reference to eugenics as the "pseudoscience" of genetics. The fact is that if any enterprise that was ever in far-distant history conducted unscientifically deserves the permanent appelation pseudoscience, then we would have to conclude that science itself is pseudoscience. - Nonetheless, for the reader unfamiliar with the political history of eugenics, there is a certain amount of factual data of interest here even if it is tendentiously presented by a thoroughgoing advocate of a particular point of view and needs to be constantly disentangled from the book's distortions of fact and truth. Oldover might do well to heed Francis Bacon's counsel, "Reade not to Contradict, and Confute; Not to Beleeve and Take for granted; Nor to Finde Talke and Discourse; But to weigh and Consider. He might have been anticipating the present book when he wrote that "some Bookes are to be read onely in Parts." -- with a bonus offer-- .