Sex, Race, and Science
Sex, Race, and Science

Author: Edward J. Larson

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 1996-10-11

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780801855115

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In the first book to explore the theory and practice of eugenics in the American South, Edward Larson shows how the quest for "strong bloodlines" expressed itself in specific state laws and public policies from the Progressive Era through World War II. Presenting new evidence of race-based and gender-based eugenic practices in the past, Larson also explores issues that remain controversial today - including state control over sexuality and reproduction, the rights of disabled persons and of ethnic minorities, and the moral and legal questions raised by new discoveries in genetics and medicine. Larson shows how the seemingly broad-based eugenics movement was in fact a series of distinct campaigns for legislation at the state level - campaigns that could often be traced to the efforts of a small group of determined individuals. Explaining how these efforts shaped state policies, he places them within a broader cultural context by describing the workings of Southern state legislatures, the role played by such organizations as women's clubs, and the distinctly Southern cultural forces that helped or hindered the implementation of eugenic reforms.

Reproducing Empire
Reproducing Empire

Author: Laura Briggs

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-01-20

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780520936317

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Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization. Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism. Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.

Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s-1890s
Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s-1890s

Author: Gregory D. Smithers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-02-01

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13: 1135856958

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This book combines transnational history with the comparative analysis of racial formation and reproductive sexuality in the settler colonial spaces of the United States and British Australia. Specifically, the book places "whiteness," and the changing definition of what it meant to be white in nineteenth-century America and Australia, at the center of our historical understanding of racial and sexual identities. In both the United States and Australia, "whiteness" was defined in opposition to the imagined cultural and biological inferiority of the "Indian," "Negro," and "Aboriginal savage." Moreover, Euro-Americans and Euro-Australians shared a common belief that "whiteness" was synonymous with the extension of settler colonial civilization. Despite this, two very different understandings of "whiteness" emerged in the nineteenth century. The book therefore asks why these different racial understandings of "whiteness" – and the quest to create culturally and racially homogeneous settler civilizations – developed in the United States and Australia.

Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780-1940
Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780-1940

Author: Gregory D. Smithers

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 541

ISBN-13: 1496200985

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"Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780-1940, Revised Edition is a sociohistorical tour de force that examines the entwined formation of racial theory and sexual constructs within settler colonialism in the United States and Australia from the Age of Revolution to the Great Depression. Gregory D. Smithers historicizes the dissemination and application of scientific and social-scientific ideas within the process of nation building in two countries with large Indigenous populations and shows how intellectual constructs of race and sexuality were mobilized to subdue Aboriginal peoples. Building on the comparative settler-colonial and imperial histories that appeared after the book's original publication, this completely revised edition includes two new chapters. In this singular contribution to the study of transnational and comparative settler colonialism, Smithers expands on recent scholarship to illuminate both the subject of the scientific study of race and sexuality and the national and interrelated histories of the United States and Australia"--

Nature's Body
Nature's Body

Author: Londa L. Schiebinger

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780813535319

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Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature--one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women.

American Eugenics
American Eugenics

Author: Nancy Ordover

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780816635580

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Traces the history of eugenics ideology in the United States and its ongoing presence in contemporary life. The Nazis may have given eugenics its negative connotations, but the practice--and the "science" that supports it--is still disturbingly alive in America in anti-immigration initiatives, the quest for a "gay gene, " and theories of collective intelligence. Tracing the historical roots and persistence of eugenics in the United States, Nancy Ordover explores the political and cultural climate that has endowed these campaigns with mass appeal and scientific legitimacy. American Eugenics demonstrates how biological theories of race, gender, and sexuality are crucially linked through a concern with regulating the "unfit." These links emerge in Ordover's examination of three separate but ultimately related American eugenics campaigns: early twentieth-century anti-immigration crusades; medical models and interventions imposed on (and sometimes embraced by) lesbians, gays, transgendered people, and bisexuals; and the compulsory sterilization of poor women and women of color. Throughout, her work reveals how constructed notions of race, gender, sexuality, and nation are put to ideological uses and how "faith in science" can undermine progressive social movements, drawing liberals and conservatives alike into eugenics-based discourse and policies.

Queer Feminist Science Studies
Queer Feminist Science Studies

Author: Cyd Cipolla

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2017-12-01

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0295742593

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Queer Feminist Science Studies takes a transnational, trans-species, and intersectional approach to this cutting-edge area of inquiry between women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and science and technology studies (STS). The essays here “queer”—or denaturalize and make strange—ideas that are taken for granted in both areas of study. Reimagining the meanings of and relations among queer and feminist theories and a wide range of scientific disciplines, contributors foster new critical and creative knowledge-projects that attend to shifting and uneven operations of power, privilege, and dispossession, while also highlighting potentialities for uncertainty, subversion, transformation, and play. Theoretically and rhetorically powerful, these essays also take seriously the materiality of “natural” objects and phenomena: bones, voles, chromosomes, medical records and more all help substantiate answers to questions such as, What is sex? How are race, gender, sexuality, and other systems of differences co-constituted? The foundational essays and new writings collected here offer a generative resource for students and scholars alike, demonstrating the ingenuity and dynamism of queer feminist scholarship.

Primate Visions
Primate Visions

Author: Donna J. Haraway

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 1136608141

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Haraway's discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research.

Measuring Manhood
Measuring Manhood

Author: Melissa N. Stein

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1452944695

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From the “gay gene” to the “female brain” and African American students’ insufficient “hereditary background” for higher education, arguments about a biological basis for human difference have reemerged in the twenty-first century. Measuring Manhood shows where they got their start. Melissa N. Stein analyzes how race became the purview of science in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America and how it was constructed as a biological phenomenon with far-reaching social, cultural, and political resonances. She tells of scientific “experts” who advised the nation on its most pressing issues and exposes their use of gender and sex differences to conceptualize or buttress their claims about racial difference. Stein examines the works of scientists and scholars from medicine, biology, ethnology, and other fields to trace how their conclusions about human difference did no less than to legitimize sociopolitical hierarchy in the United States. Covering a wide range of historical actors from Samuel Morton, the infamous collector and measurer of skulls in the 1830s, to NAACP leader and antilynching activist Walter White in the 1930s, this book reveals the role of gender, sex, and sexuality in the scientific making?and unmaking?of race.

Human Diversity
Human Diversity

Author: Charles Murray

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 689

ISBN-13: 1538744007

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All people are equal but, as Human Diversity explores, all groups of people are not the same -- a fascinating investigation of the genetics and neuroscience of human differences. The thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas: - Gender is a social construct. - Race is a social construct. - Class is a function of privilege. The problem is that all three dogmas are half-truths. They have stifled progress in understanding the rich texture that biology adds to our understanding of the social, political, and economic worlds we live in. It is not a story to be feared. "There are no monsters in the closet," Murray writes, "no dread doors we must fear opening." But it is a story that needs telling. Human Diversity does so without sensationalism, drawing on the most authoritative scientific findings, celebrating both our many differences and our common humanity.