This session revisits the concerns raised by the first iteration of “Eugenics and the Body,” at MLA 2021. Last year we felt it necessary to examine the legacy of eugenic thought in literature and culture when the Covid-19 pandemic surge had just initiated the rationing of healthcare resources and U.S. government officials suggested that we prioritize the economy over the elderly. We believe it is urgent to continue the conversation in our moment of biological panic as vaccine distribution sorts citizens into uneven categories of medical risk and eugenic ideas around the internal and external body permeate our dialogues and worlds.
Understanding eugenics as a science of racial perfection that centers reproduction, one that has circulated from Francis Galton’s late-Victorian writings into our present, we seek to understand its influence in political discourse, medical practice, and literary form. This year’s speakers consider the formative role of eugenics in perceptions of (non-)human embodiment across cultural, national, linguistic, and biological borders.
The presentations offer a range of inquiries into the eugenic imaginary in the cultural production of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They reveal how the science of human breeding shaped the boundaries of the human, non-human, and national body. Maren Linett explores how discourses of eugenic improvement employ comparisons to nonhuman animals. Ultimately concerned with the importance of differentiating between often-confounded ideologies, Linett uses examples from J.D. Bernal’s 1929 The World, the Flesh, and the Devil to contrast eugenics and transhumanism. She argues that eugenics insists on “the boundaries of the human” and glorifies the human body even as it calls for its improvement. Documenting another alternative to eugenic progress, Ewa Luczac’s presentation focuses on resistance to scientific desires for bodily perfection, placing two early Hollywood film comedies—His Name in the Papers (1916) and Wild and Wolly (1917)—within a larger framework of anti-eugenic satire that developed before WWII. At the height of eugenics’ dominance in the early twentieth century, anti-eugenic satires and transhumanist science writing challenged dominant modes of conceptualizing the national body in the U.S. and the U.K.
The remaining two presentations bring us from the heyday of eugenics to our contemporary moment, raising the specter of eugenics in the gothic form. Pedro Ponce identifies an anxiety in H.P. Lovecraft that is both “eugenic and aesthetic,” and argues that his work is a formal precursor of the “found footage” genre. For Ponce, Lovecraft’s texts labor to contain the weird and horrific within a pseudoscientific discourse that aspires to objective validity through fictional documentation. Finally, Pamela Thoma examines the role that resurgent contemporary neoliberal eugenics plays in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel Mexican Gothic, specifically the figures of the less than human, disposable, or “unfit mother” and the white supremacist neo-republican mother. Her presentation offers a twenty-first-century perspective on the connection between eugenics discourse and the literary gothic genre that Ponce’s contribution lays out. Drawing upon Moreno-Garcia’s unpublished thesis on Lovecraft, Thoma analyzes how eugenics discourse is dramatized as haunting presence or “fleshless things” through narratives of botanical embodiment and reproductive captivity. Together, the four presentations show how eugenics discourse “haunts” representations of the (non)human body and how certain representations resist this haunting.
The panel extends contemporary scholarly discussion on the politics of the body in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century media. The conversation we bring to the MLA builds upon the foundational works of Daniel Kevles and Nancy Leys Stepan on the subject of eugenics. Our contemporary critical interlocutors include Daylanne English and Kyla Schuller in literary studies. Ewa Barbara Luczak, who is presenting on our panel, has also published significant work on American literature and eugenics, and we are excited to have her speaking with us. Given the specific focus on the body, this panel is also in dialogue with scholars of disability in literature, such as Ato Quayson, Jay Dolmage, and Angela Smith, and literature and sexuality, such as Asha Nadkarni. This subject is strongly interdisciplinary, and as such it puts literary scholars in conversation with historians of science (Alexandra Stern), of economics (Thomas Leonard), and of art (Fabiola López-Durán), as well as with environmental studies scholars (Garland E. Allen).
We strongly believe these presentations will yield a productive conversation. Each presenter will speak for fifteen minutes, and we will allot the last fifteen minutes of the session for discussion. We look forward to hosting a compelling and timely discussion on “Eugenics and the Body” at the MLA 2022 Conference.