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Queer Eugenics: Modernism and the Po...

Franks, Matt.

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Queer Eugenics: Modernism and the Politics of Uplift.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Queer Eugenics: Modernism and the Politics of Uplift./
Author:	Franks, Matt.
Description:	212 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-04(E), Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International76-04A(E).
Subject:	English literature. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3646287
ISBN:	9781321362503

Queer Eugenics: Modernism and the Politics of Uplift.
Franks, Matt.

Queer Eugenics: Modernism and the Politics of Uplift. - 212 p.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-04(E), Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Davis, 2014.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

"Queer Eugenics" argues that Anglophone women writers in the modernist period narrated how emerging forms of queer uplift were made productive for eugenics. Anticipating the neoliberal biopolitics of homonormativity and multiculturalism, writers and activists such as Virginia Woolf, Edith Ellis, Olive Moore, and Nella Larsen traced how certain deviant subjects---and especially queers---narrated themselves into eugenic national futurity through uplift, whereas otherwise they would have been cast as "unfit" and "degenerate." By exploring how sexual minorities contributed to eugenic projects of aesthetic and cultural enrichment, "Queer Eugenics" demonstrates the ways that the modes of biopolitics that emerged in the modernist period continued to manage life beyond the supposed death of eugenics after World War II and into its afterlife. In Woolf's To the Lighthouse, for example, the queer modernist artist Lily is the figurative inheritor of the powers of the Victorian matriarch Mrs. Ramsay. By occupying this position of lesbian generational transmission and queer artistic productivity, however liminal, Lily represents the growing centrality of uplift as the incorporation of difference within eugenic discourses of national futurity. But Woolf also subtly traces the ways that her inclusion forecloses the possibility of reproductive freedom for others: notably the working class, colonized, disabled housekeeper Mrs. McNab. Figures like Lily proliferate in the works of women writers in this period, and their texts trace how the increasing flexibility and invisibility of eugenics continued to police the generational belonging and reproductive autonomy of women in increasingly productive ways through uplift. While scholars now recognize the centrality of eugenics in securing family and sexual normativity in early twentieth-century texts, "Queer Eugenics" intervenes into these accounts by investigating how deviant figures also took up and repurposed eugenic discourse for their own ends, with contradictory effects. For example, the lesbian eugenicist Edith Ellis developed the concept of "spiritual parenthood" as a way for queers and other "abnormals" to participate in eugenics without directly reproducing offspring. While queer versions of eugenics like Ellis's offered new forms of belonging to gays and lesbians, her articulation of generational futurity folds them into new and shifting stratifications of populations along lines of race, class, sexuality, and disability. In my reading of Nella Larsen's Quicksand, for example, the tension is acute between certain white queers who were folded into generational futurity and black women who were slated for generational death. This project testifies to the diversity, adaptability, and pervasiveness of eugenics discourse in the modernist period, against scholars who read eugenics as a static and conservative ideology that modernist literature either replicates or contests. I read queer eugenics as a fulcrum that connects the emergence of twentieth century gay and lesbian subjectivities with the downfall of empire and the decline of eugenics, and I demonstrate how queer appropriations of eugenics represented a new generational temporality wherein queerness became integrated within emerging forms of biopolitics that produced, rather than suppressed, sexual and other forms of difference.

ISBN: 9781321362503Subjects--Topical Terms:

516356
English literature.

Queer Eugenics: Modernism and the Politics of Uplift.
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245 1 0 $a Queer Eugenics: Modernism and the Politics of Uplift.
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500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-04(E), Section: A.
500 $a Advisers: Elizabeth Freeman; Gregory Dobbins.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Davis, 2014.
506 $a This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.
520 $a "Queer Eugenics" argues that Anglophone women writers in the modernist period narrated how emerging forms of queer uplift were made productive for eugenics. Anticipating the neoliberal biopolitics of homonormativity and multiculturalism, writers and activists such as Virginia Woolf, Edith Ellis, Olive Moore, and Nella Larsen traced how certain deviant subjects---and especially queers---narrated themselves into eugenic national futurity through uplift, whereas otherwise they would have been cast as "unfit" and "degenerate." By exploring how sexual minorities contributed to eugenic projects of aesthetic and cultural enrichment, "Queer Eugenics" demonstrates the ways that the modes of biopolitics that emerged in the modernist period continued to manage life beyond the supposed death of eugenics after World War II and into its afterlife. In Woolf's To the Lighthouse, for example, the queer modernist artist Lily is the figurative inheritor of the powers of the Victorian matriarch Mrs. Ramsay. By occupying this position of lesbian generational transmission and queer artistic productivity, however liminal, Lily represents the growing centrality of uplift as the incorporation of difference within eugenic discourses of national futurity. But Woolf also subtly traces the ways that her inclusion forecloses the possibility of reproductive freedom for others: notably the working class, colonized, disabled housekeeper Mrs. McNab. Figures like Lily proliferate in the works of women writers in this period, and their texts trace how the increasing flexibility and invisibility of eugenics continued to police the generational belonging and reproductive autonomy of women in increasingly productive ways through uplift. While scholars now recognize the centrality of eugenics in securing family and sexual normativity in early twentieth-century texts, "Queer Eugenics" intervenes into these accounts by investigating how deviant figures also took up and repurposed eugenic discourse for their own ends, with contradictory effects. For example, the lesbian eugenicist Edith Ellis developed the concept of "spiritual parenthood" as a way for queers and other "abnormals" to participate in eugenics without directly reproducing offspring. While queer versions of eugenics like Ellis's offered new forms of belonging to gays and lesbians, her articulation of generational futurity folds them into new and shifting stratifications of populations along lines of race, class, sexuality, and disability. In my reading of Nella Larsen's Quicksand, for example, the tension is acute between certain white queers who were folded into generational futurity and black women who were slated for generational death. This project testifies to the diversity, adaptability, and pervasiveness of eugenics discourse in the modernist period, against scholars who read eugenics as a static and conservative ideology that modernist literature either replicates or contests. I read queer eugenics as a fulcrum that connects the emergence of twentieth century gay and lesbian subjectivities with the downfall of empire and the decline of eugenics, and I demonstrate how queer appropriations of eugenics represented a new generational temporality wherein queerness became integrated within emerging forms of biopolitics that produced, rather than suppressed, sexual and other forms of difference.
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