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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 conc...
The Politics of Love explores the entanglement of emotions, social movements, and science in reconfiguring human and nonhuman relations. As Darwin's evolutionary theory informed the development of sexual science and the sex reform movement between the 1890s and the 1920s, sex reformers emerged as a group of diverse and culturally influential professionals--doctors, psychologists, artists, political activists, novelists, and academics--who shared a profound commitment to changing the world by changing the practice of sex. Sex reformers reinvented love as a scientific practice of sex that brought humans and nonhumans into the fold of early-twentieth-century racial, gender, and sexual politics. Carla Christina Hustak illuminates how sex reformers' insistence that love can shift human and nonhuman relations is more than just a historical narrative--it is a moment in time interconnected with urgent contemporary concerns over the global implications of our emotional relationships to other humans, animals, the earth, and atmospheric and technological forces.
"The interrelationship of fascism and sexuality has attracted a great deal of interest for some time now. This collection offers fresh perspectives by leading scholars on the history of sexuality under national socialism on such topics as the persecution of Jewish-gentile sex in the "race defilement" trials, homophobic propaganda and the prosecution of same-sex activity within the Wehrmacht and SS, representations of female sexuality in film, prostitution on home and battle fronts, sexual relations between Germans and foreign forced laborers, and reproductive practices among Jewish survivors. Moreover, the authors provide new insights into the relationships between Nazi sexual politics and antisemitism and challenge assumptions of Nazism as sexually repressive ; instead they emphasize the interrelationships between incitement to sexual activity and persecution and mass murder." --book jacket.
For teachers at the college and high school levels, this volume provides cutting-edge research and practical strategies for incorporating sports into the U.S. history classroom.
Treating such issues as animal sex, species politics, environmental justice, lesbian space and "gay" ghettos, AIDS literatures, and queer nationalities, this lively collection asks important questions at the intersections of sexuality and environmental studies. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature.
This book shows how eugenic sterilization policies were maintained after the 1940s in the United States and Canada despite the discrediting of such theories by comparable Nazi Germany policies. It focuses on the individual experience of victims of sterilization, the doctors concerned, and the mental health institutions that protected the system.
Throughout its history, the American West symbolized a place of hope and new beginnings, where anything was possible, especially for men. However, the history written until the 1970s and 1980s excluded women. Sigrid Schönfelder illustrates how the American West served as a catalytic gold mine for many transformations for women. It draws on the life narratives of three healthcare providers whose devotion within the social reform movements of the long nineteenth century contributed significantly to shaping healthcare policies. Their stories show how women contributed to place-making in the West and served as role models for other women to enter the field of medicine.
Populism has become a global movement associated with nationalism and strong-man politicians, but its root causes remain elusive. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts exposes one deep root in the soil of the American Great Plains. Julie Carr traces her own family's history through archival documents to draw connections between U.S. agrarian populism, spiritualism, and eugenics, helping readers to understand populism's tendency toward racism and exclusion. Carr follows the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem, three-term Populist representative from Nebraska, avid spiritualist, and committed eugenicist, to explore persistent themes in U.S. history: property, personhood, exclusion, and belonging....
This work provides a compelling explanation of something that has bedeviled a number of feminist scholars: Why did popular authors like Edna Ferber continue to write conventional fiction while living lives that were far from conventional? Amanda J. Zink argues that white writers like Ferber and Willa Cather avoided the subject of their own domestic labor by writing about the performance of domestic labor by "others," showing that American print culture, both in novels and through advertisements, moved away from portraying women as angels in the house and instead sought to persuade other women to be angels in their houses. Zink further explores lesser-known works such as Mexican American cookbooks and essays in Indian boarding school magazines to show how women writers "dialoging domesticity" exemplify the cross-cultural encounters between "colonial domesticity" and "sovereign domesticity." By situating these interpretations of literature within their historical contexts, Zink shows how these writers championed and challenged the ideology of domesticity.
From Glee to gay marriage, from lesbian senators to out gay Marines, we have undoubtedly experienced a seismic shift in attitudes about gays in American politics and culture. Our reigning national story is that a new era of rainbow acceptance is at hand. But dig a bit deeper, and this seemingly brave new gay world is disappointing. For all of the undeniable changes, author Walters argues, the plea for tolerance has sabotaged the full integration of gays into American life. Same-sex marriage is unrecognized and unpopular in the vast majority of states, hate crimes proliferate, and even in the much vaunted "gay friendly" world of Hollywood and celebrity culture, precious few stars are openly gay. She maintains that we are not "almost there," but on the contrary have settled for a watered-down goal of tolerance rather than a robust claim to full civil rights. After all, one "tolerates" unpleasant realities: medicine with strong side effects, a long commute, an annoying relative. Tolerance is not the end goal, but a dead end;.--From publisher description.