- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: University of Minnesota Press (13 Jan 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0816635595
- ISBN-13: 978-0816635597
- Product Dimensions: 22.8 x 15 x 1.8 cm
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2,351,849 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #90 in Books > Science & Nature > Biological Sciences > Genetics > Eugenics
American Eugenics
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Product Description
Book Description
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.
Nancy Ordover is an independent scholar who lives in New York City.
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6 reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Well Researched and Provoking
24 Mar 2003
Format:Paperback
This book provokes! Well researched (many original sources) it clearly shows how eugenics has been an on-going and central part of the national dialogue. I like the book too because it shows how both the left and the right use eugenics rhetoric to employ their politic. Turns out that eugenics is not a freakish back-room operation just used by hitler but actually saturates the way politicians, the legal system and various american factions and individuals express themselves in public policy. Racist, sexist, and homophobic ideology are the nutrients that strengthen the American eugenics movement today. Scary!
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
The Pervasiness of American Eugenics
14 Mar 2005
Format:Paperback
Ordover's well-focused historical eye counteracts the problematic tendency to minimize America's brutality in the constructions of race and sexual orientation; these constructions serve liberal and conservative politic and scientic thought but which yield devastating consequences for the actual lives under the microscope. Her rigorous research deserves accolades. Subtle eugenicist-thought pervades so much contemporary debate on issues from immigration to gay rights. Amazing book.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
The Bogus Concept of Race
29 Jan 2004
Format:Hardcover
This book documents the immeasurable harm that can be generated from a pseudo-scientific concept, such as 'race.' It has been demonstrated repeatedly by the science of genetics that the concept of 'race' is scientifically invalid.
Though European physical anthropologists of the 17th and 18th centuries proposed various systems of racial classifications based on such observable characteristics as skin color, hair type, body proportions, and skull measurements, codifying the perceived differences among broad geographic populations of humans, sciences of the 20th and 21st centuries now know that these are bogus and logically unsupported classifications.
Even the term 'Caucasian'--used almost exclusively to mean "white" or "European" actually includes a variety of peoples generally categorized as nonwhite.
As 20th and 21st century science now shows, the biological aspect of race is described today not in observable physical features but rather in genetic characteristics and metabolic processes. More specifically, so-called 'racial' and 'ethnic' categorizations cannot account for either the uniqueness or the universality of human populations evident in new knowledge in human genome sequence variation research. Human identity based on 'race' is suspect in light of the preponderance of data on human genome sequence variation
Differences between human groups must be accounted for more in terms of genetic variation and genetic drift, with distribution across populations that is continuous and overlapping.
This means that a person who is considered black in one society might be nonblack in another. Most cultural anthropologists now consider race to be more a social or mental construct than an objective biological fact. Any observed correlations with traditional concepts of race are not only seriously limited but must be considered bogus.
This scientific fact may disappoint those persons of a racist bent, such as members of the National Alliance, but science does not support the concept of race. For more information, see The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company
Myrna Estep, Ph.D.
Though European physical anthropologists of the 17th and 18th centuries proposed various systems of racial classifications based on such observable characteristics as skin color, hair type, body proportions, and skull measurements, codifying the perceived differences among broad geographic populations of humans, sciences of the 20th and 21st centuries now know that these are bogus and logically unsupported classifications.
Even the term 'Caucasian'--used almost exclusively to mean "white" or "European" actually includes a variety of peoples generally categorized as nonwhite.
As 20th and 21st century science now shows, the biological aspect of race is described today not in observable physical features but rather in genetic characteristics and metabolic processes. More specifically, so-called 'racial' and 'ethnic' categorizations cannot account for either the uniqueness or the universality of human populations evident in new knowledge in human genome sequence variation research. Human identity based on 'race' is suspect in light of the preponderance of data on human genome sequence variation
Differences between human groups must be accounted for more in terms of genetic variation and genetic drift, with distribution across populations that is continuous and overlapping.
This means that a person who is considered black in one society might be nonblack in another. Most cultural anthropologists now consider race to be more a social or mental construct than an objective biological fact. Any observed correlations with traditional concepts of race are not only seriously limited but must be considered bogus.
This scientific fact may disappoint those persons of a racist bent, such as members of the National Alliance, but science does not support the concept of race. For more information, see The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company
Myrna Estep, Ph.D.
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