In the first paper, "‘Born under...humane forgetfulness’: McClure’s, Twilight Sleep, and Early 20th-C Positive Eugenics" Heather Love and Jerika Sanderson explore the promotion of “positive eugenics” in McClure’s Magazine, an American monthly periodical from the early 1900s widely recognized as a proponent of “twilight sleep,” a method developed to alleviate pain during childbirth. During this time, medical interventions were linked to eugenics discourse; specifically, labor anesthetics were seen as a potential tool for encouraging upper-class, educated women to have more children. McClure’s often used visual material, such as photographs that exhibited healthy “twilight sleep babies,” to market the method to American audiences and to create associations between appearance, health, race, and medical technologies. Love and Sanderson cast these observations in light of more recent discussions of biopolitics and women’s reproductive rights to argue that issues of childbearing among American women were framed as political and economic responsibilities, rather than questions of individual health and personal interest.
Next, in “Nurturing White Supremacy: Eugenics, Baby Books, and the Birth of Pediatric Medicine,” Mary Gryctko argues that the rise of pediatrics relied on the conflation of eugenic and sentimental scripts. “Father of pediatrics” Abraham Jacobi framed eugenic population control as a type of care performed by both parents and nations, comparing “the watchfulness of human society over its members” to “the watchfulness of a parent over a child.” As pediatricians encouraged the adoption of medically standardized modes of feeding, caring for, and measuring the health of children, the “watchfulness” of parents over their children became a crucial tool in the eugenicist playbook. Gryctko analyzes turn-of-the-century US “baby books,” showing how these texts mirror the format of Francis Galton’s explicitly eugenicist Life History Albums (1884) and integrate Galton’s eugenicist impulses into sentimental scripts, insidiously suggesting that parenthood entailed molding one’s children into eugenically perfected citizens who met specific, medically managed markers of “normative” childhood.
Then, in “Disciplining Futures for the Feral Child,” Mary Zaborskis examines filmic representations of “Genie,” the pseudonym given to a child who was abused and isolated until she was rescued in 1970. At the time she was institutionalized, Genie was considered a modern-day feral child. Looking at how so-called feral children get taken up in the twentieth century alongside the emergence of developmental psychology, Zaborskis shows how such children served as testing grounds for social scientific theories of child development, language acquisition, attachment, socialization, enculturation, and the long-term effects of abuse and trauma. Their cases, like Genie’s, are canonical in psychology curricula today, continually redeployed to uphold ostensible universal theories of childhood and state-sanctioned modes of personhood and belonging. Zaborskis reveals how traumatized and abused children are the bedrock of universal theories of childhood in which feral children serve as racialized sexual objects in order to secure “universal” childhood as a white, able-bodied, bourgeois, asexual construction.
In the final paper, “Categories of Age Before Developmentalism,” Gabrielle Owen demonstrates how developmental models of childhood emerged in the nineteenth century primarily as fantasies of control and fantasies of white supremacy. These fantasies hinged on the false belief that development occurs as a process of improvement or decline rather than as observable (and value neutral) change over time. This particular logic of developmentalism—which transformed notions of time, history, and selfhood over the course of the nineteenth century—still permeates hierarchical deployments of age, race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability today. Owen turns to late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century parenting, health, and hygiene manuals to uncover conceptualizations of the child and childhood prior to sway of developmentalism, arguing that these alternative onto-epistemologies from the past have a synergistic potential alongside queer, trans, and critical race theories to impact our commitments to social justice and to rethink more ethical relationalities for beingness today.