With all due respect,
i think to assume that no one here has read any history of Eugenics is
a big assumption. It's also a rather large assumption to delineate
Eugenics as a hermetically defined enterprise.
i admit not reading the texts that you point to - and will certainly
look them up (thanks for the recommendations!)- but CAE's text served
as a convenient link to a text available on the fly for the purpose of
the list - not a monolithic account of eugenics (there are plenty of
archives for that). Perhaps my response is one very rooted in a US
context, but the US is a context in which eugenics has historically had
some weight.
Maybe if Steve could elaborate on how these texts counter balance the
assertion of a second wave of eugenics?
But, i'm also not so sure why Osborn should be so quickly dismissed,
being that he had such a prominent impact on the American Eugenics
Society (among other aspects of domestic and foreign policy) and how
eugenics was conceived and conceptualized in the US. Hardly
representative of an insignificant source of power.
The conception of eugenics, by Osborn and others like Rockefeller, was
expanded to include spatial and environmental planning that continue
today, and operate in market and state apparatuses. Genetics controlled
by the creation of favorable or unfavorable conditions in which
rational people choose to or choose not to raise children. Geographer
Ruth Gilmore Wilson talks about "organized abandonment" as an implicit
policy in the US that approximates the same goals - goals that were
more than clearly evident in the Gulf coast events of Hurricane Katrina.
Again, the judges enforcing the use of Norplant in mothers charged with
child abuse or requesting welfare didn't consider themselves eugenicists.
i guess what i'm trying to communicate is that "eugenics" should not be
considered as a clearly delineated set of historical values, as even
the eugenics movement in its prime was divided by competing ideas. All
those fields don't need to be collapsed back into some turn of the
century program to understand how they come together in various
instances in ways that certainly resemble eugenics broadly, if not
carry out a very similar set of policies. But also to recognize that
not all such investigations and inquiries inevitably lead to eugenics
either. i don't care if it's called "eugenics" or not, but the policies
in place that i've described in a very simplified manner, as well as
what the more positive form of reproductive health (ART) enables,
certainly bear the historical weight of the histories of eugenics.
The reality of the situation is not so cut and dry as to say "what WAS
being engaged in within the field of eugenics". i mean, the
reproductive rights movement (via Sanger) was caught up in the eugenics
movement... do i think Planned Parenthood is a eugenicist organization?
no.
It seems as if Steve is dismissing the practice of positive eugenics as
ideological? Is not the technological selection of biology exactly this
- when that selection can't help but be ideological? Why does the
selection of biological traits in any way change the political
situation? If non-heterosexuality is proven to be biological does that
close off the argument of their rights? Both sides use its
"naturalness" to argue for inalienable rights on the one hand and it's
medical treatment on the other. While others ask why they can't change
their love interests without changing their access to rights - who
cares if it's biology or desire?
Since i mentioned Sekula earlier, i recently reread his older account
of the parallel rise of photographic evidence and statistics in "The
Body and the Archive" noticing his reading of the difference that can
occur within larger techno-social paradigms that doesn't require such
an easy collapse of any singular instance - the new methods of
statistics were used by both reformist and conservative forces arguing
the still lingering fight over nature or nurture. Most importantly,
neither side argued over the existence of (or place for) the "criminal".
best,
ryan
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