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"Eugenics Fiction."
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White Diaspora
This is the first book to analyze our suburban literary tradition. Tracing the suburb's emergence as a crucial setting and subject of the twentieth-century American novel, Catherine Jurca identifies a decidedly masculine obsession with the suburban home and a preoccupation with its alternative--the experience of spiritual and emotional dislocation that she terms \"homelessness.\" In the process, she challenges representations of white suburbia as prostrated by its own privileges.
In novels as disparate asTarzan(written by Tarzana, California, real-estate developer Edgar Rice Burroughs), Richard Wright'sNative Son, and recent fiction by John Updike and Richard Ford, Jurca finds an emphasis on the suburb under siege, a place where the fortunate tend to see themselves as powerless. From Babbitt to Rabbit, the suburban novel casts property owners living in communities of their choosing as dispossessed people. Material advantages become artifacts of oppression, and affluence is fraudulently identified as impoverishment. The fantasy of victimization reimagines white flight as a white diaspora.
Extending innovative trends in the study of nineteenth-century American culture, Jurca's analysis suggests that self-pity has played a constitutive role in white middle-class identity in the twentieth century. It breaks new ground in literary history and cultural studies, while telling the story of one of our most revered and reviled locations: \"the little suburban house at number one million and ten Volstead Avenue\" that Edith Wharton warned would ruin American life and letters.
eBook
Shutter Island
U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner, Chuck Aule, come to Shutter Island's Ashcliffe Hospital in search of an escaped mental patient, but uncover true wickedness as Ashcliffe's mysterious patient treatments propel them to the brink of insanity.
Book
Eugenics and genetic screening in television medical dramas
Medical dramas offer unique insights into the way popular media makes sense of genetic technology and the ethics of its applications. In this paper we evaluate the contrasting depictions in television medical dramas of reproductive genetic screening and eugenics—two medical themes that some commentators see as closely related. By conducting a content analysis of 32 episodes of doctor shows featuring eugenic and/or genetic screening themes, we put the medical drama landscape in conversation with bioethics scholarship and mark a significant divergence between the two. While the academic literature has been parsing the possible relationship between genetic screening and eugenics for over 50 years, doctor shows tend to champion genetic screening as a powerful tool for promoting individual reproductive choice and criticise eugenics as a socially unjust infringement of reproductive freedom. In doing so, medical dramas mark a subtle but important moral distinction between the population-level implications of eugenics and the highly personal, emotional impact of genetic screening.
Journal Article
This other Eden
From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a profoundly moving story of an island refuge, and a community of outcasts living on borrowed time. A novel inspired by the true story of the once racially integrated Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discovered an island where they could make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain there, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbors- a pair of sisters raising three Penobscot orphans; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their nocturnal brood; the prophetic Zachary Hand To God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who carves Biblical images in a hollow tree. Then comes the intrusion of \"civilization\"- eugenics-minded state officials determine to cleanse\" the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark. Full of lyricism and power, This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.
Book
Eugenics and Reproductive Technologies in Primo Levi’s Science Fiction: The Importance of the British Interwar Debate
This article examines Levi’s treatment of eugenics in “I sintetici” and “Procacciatori d’affari” from Vizio di forma. The study builds upon Francesco Cassata’s analysis, which established that Levi held complex and conflicting views on the topic. These views mirrored his strong belief in avoiding limitations on scientific research while also revealing his ethical concerns. To further understand this predicament, the study reads Levi’s stories against the debate on eugenics that took place in England in the 1920s-1930. This debate engaged scientists and writers who significantly influenced Levi beyond this subject, including the Huxley brothers and Bertrand Russell. In this intellectual milieu, science fiction emerged as a favoured genre for exploring the intricate facets of eugenics and its ethical ramifications. By undertaking a comparative analysis between these antecedents and Vizio di forma, this study investigates how and why Levi turned to science fiction to articulate his conflicting thoughts on eugenics.
Journal Article
Of better blood
In 1922, unwanted by her upperclass family, teenage polio survivor Rowan plays a born cripple in a state fair eugenics exhibit but soon learns how badly eugenics can go awry.
Book
Persistent Narratives: Intellectual Disability in Canadian Children’s Literature
Canadian children’s literature rarely depicts characters labelled with intellectual disabilities, yet when it does it often remains mired in stereotypes that recycle prevalent myths and misconceptions. Even as more recent literature attempts to push back against such stereotypes, it nevertheless predominantly remains caught in these dangerous representational repertoires. This article offers a brief history of Canadian literary depictions of intellectual disability and a critique of the Canadian publishing spheres. Through a critical analysis of Lorna Schultz Nicholson’s book Fragile Bones, we discuss the limits of representation of intellectual disability in children’s fiction. We also offer a critique of the ableist publishing climate in Canada and suggest that structural barriers prevent disabled writers from entering the literary marketplace on an equal playing field. These barriers to publishing lead to the vast underrepresentation of disabled authors and the misrepresentation of disability in general and intellectual disability in particular in Canadian children’s literature.
Journal Article
Her Body, Herland: Reproductive Health and Dis/topian Satire in Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This article discusses Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) as a work of medical fiction and partial sex education manual that engages in conversation with various Progressive-era reproductive health discourses, especially scientific sex education theory and the birth control movement. Sex education at the fin de siècle often drew upon biological texts rather than anatomical or medical texts as a way to teach reproductive health during a period of censorship under Comstock Law. Gilman's use of satire rescripts this popular comparative biology approach to sex education by using entomology rather than plant or animal biology. Through satirical inversion, parthenogenesis functions as a defense for female body autonomy—or “voluntary motherhood”—and access to birth control. Although Gilman was sincere in her feminist argument for basic reproductive rights, a feminist disability studies reading of satire in Herland reveals a eugenics approach that eliminates impaired or disabled bodies from utopia.
Journal Article
The Altered Shall Inherit the Earth: Biopower and the Disabled Body in Texhnolyze
The anime series Texhnolyze (2003) is set in the underground city of Lux, where the human body's ability to heal and repair itself has degraded. Those who wield power and can afford it have their amputated limbs replaced with advanced robotic prosthetics in a process known as texhnolyzation. The disabled body is many things in this world: a marker of class, a political cause, the locus of religious zealotry, and the symbol of humanity's decline. The disabled body within this text is deeply enmeshed in biopolitical systems that organize power. By examining the flow of power throughout the series among the three leading groups in the city, the medical and scientific discourse surrounding texhnolyzation, and the violent actions of the Class, the city's elite, I trace the operation of different forms of biopower and examine the series' relation to the disabled body and to the prosthetic technology of texhnolyzation. I argue that Texhnolyze resists ableist cultural and medical narratives as I examine how it engages with problematic representations of posthuman ideologies.
Journal Article