Maud van den Berge
Donya Ahmadi & Patricia Schor
Race, Class, & Gender Intersectionality
14/12/2020
Categories of Humanness: The Aftermath of The U.S. Eugenics Movement
Abstract
This paper lays out the ways in which the American Eugenics Movement was
organized, and how ‘unfit human traits’ are produced through a eugenic lens. Looking at the
use of language that produces categories of ‘unfitness’ will provide the groundwork for
looking at how categories of ‘(un)fitness’ are constituted in society and how they’re still
institutionalized today and thus continue to produce a concept of humanness that excludes
and erases ‘the Other’. I will specifically look at how language is produced in these practices,
and how consequently people are put into certain categories through generalizing terms such
as ‘feeblemindedness’, ‘insanity’, and ‘pauperism’. According to eugenicists, these categories
are genetic traits that people pass on through ‘breeding’, but from a historically cultural
viewpoint, these categories are socially produced through hegemonic ideologies of gender,
race, class, ability, etc. This paper will examine how the categories of Humanness are
actualized through the practices of The Eugenics Movement, and how these categories are
still institutionalized today in the U.S.
Keywords: eugenics, Humanness, racism, intersectionality
(Fig. 1. Chart used at Kansas Free Fair describing "unfit human traits" and the importance of eugenic marriage,
1929, American Eugenics Society Records)
, “If ALL MARRIAGES were EUGENIC, we could BREED OUT most of this unfitness in
THREE GENERATIONS”.
This was the general slogan of the American Eugenics Society at the 1929 Kansas
Free Fair, overtly put on to the advertising pamphlet (Fig. 1). Together with other types of
signs addressing the benefits of ‘good breeding’ this array of text set the scene for the ‘Fitter
Family Contests’ (Fig. 2). The contest was euphemistically called, “Fitter Families for
Future Firesides'' and would test multiple families on their “social and medical history”
through “[examinations] by psychiatrists, psychometrics, physicians, nutritionists, nurses, and
dentists. They had their bodily fluids collected and analyzed, along with a “eugenic history”
of family members, including those not at the fair'' (Lovett 79). This scene provides the
‘stage’ for looking into how the terms and systematically chosen ‘traits of fitness’ used in
these contests produce subjects that are either included or fully dismissed as human in the
first place. Accordingly, this paper will attempt to answer the following question: How have
the categories of Humanness been actualized through the practices of the Eugenics
Movement, and how are these categories still institutionalized today?
(Fig. 2. Eugenic and Health Exhibit, Kansas Free Fair, 1929, American Eugenics Society Records.)
