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Bodies, power, and diversity CHID 260

Bodies, power, and diversity CHID 260. Phillip Thurtle Comparative History of Ideas. Agenda. Introduce you to the term “biopower” building on Rahul Gairola’s presentation Give a historical example of how it operated-American eugenics movement

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Bodies, power, and diversity CHID 260

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  1. Bodies, power, and diversityCHID 260 Phillip Thurtle Comparative History of Ideas

  2. Agenda • Introduce you to the term “biopower” building on Rahul Gairola’s presentation • Give a historical example of how it operated-American eugenics movement • If there were a eugenics today, what would it look like?

  3. Types of oppression Interpersonal Institutional Biopower Developed by Michel Foucault in his later works History of Sexuality, 1976 The control of the social body through the regulation of the natural body Regulation of procreation, health, heredity, well being Often more subtle and more encompassing than other forms “Life has now . . . become an object of power” What might this look like?

  4. Eugenics • American and British innovation • Flourished 1880s to 1930s (1960s) • Imported by many countries • Nazi Germany, race hygiene • Not just race, “feebleminded,” unskilled labor, those living in isolated areas, etc. • Breed a better race

  5. To be well born-Francis Galton • Eugenics- well born-1883 • Popular and scientific movement early twentieth century • Before strict separation of “breeding” and “training” • Developed the notion of statistical regression

  6. Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development • “The moral and intellectual wealth of a nation largely consists in the multifarious variety of gifts of the men who compose it, and it would be the very reverse of improvement to make all its members assimilate to a common type. However, in every race of domesticated animals, and especially in the rapidly-changing race of man, there are elements, some ancestral and others the result of degeneration, that are of little or no value, or are positively harmful.” (2)

  7. Popular • From 1880-1930s (60s) • Magazines and books • State Fairs • Movies

  8. Kansas State Fair 1929

  9. Most images courtesy of the Eugenic Archives, http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/

  10. Policy

  11. Scientific

  12. Eugenics Record Office, Cold Spring Harbor

  13. Homo Sapiens 1900 Peter Cohen, 1998

  14. How do you spot a eugenicist? • Progressive, often liberal • Modern birth control • Often supported women’s rights • Often anti-war • In limited cases, even anti-racist

  15. How do we use the US eugenic movement to think about diversity? • Old “eugenics” still a threat • Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray, 1994 • Robert Clark Graham “genius sperm bank,” 1999 • Be careful of anybody telling you what your body is and what it can do • “we still do not know what a body can do” Spinoza

  16. Remember biopower? • What would a current “eugenics” look like? • Where on campus would you find a eugenicist?

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