From Maternalist Care to Anti-eugenics

Abstract

In two parts, this chapter first describes how middle-class clubwomen imagined a maternalist, caring state that could enact eugenics consensually. This imaginary is shown in the utopian novel Herland published by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1915. The second half of the chapter speculates on a “eugenics history from below” by reading against the grain in the archive of eugenics institutions. Locating an oppositional consciousness of institutionalized people is difficult for a variety of reasons. However, to forget the perspective of the institutionalized person is to collude with eugenics, to disappear those labelled as dysgenic, and to obliterate the other possible futures that disabled and queerly bodied people could have created. This chapter works toward a history of anti-eugenics that comes from everyday acts of refusal, decades before a politically organized disability rights movement emerged.