Sissies, Loafers, and the Feebleminded

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3623716
AutoresRyan Lee Cartwright (0000-0003-2830-5909, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen28
Número4
Páginas515-540
Fecha de publicación2022-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1064-2684 • E-ISSN: 1527-9375
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/10642684-9991313
OpenAlexW4304091589
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas47

Focusing on rural white communities in the early twentieth century, this article examines how disability, queerness, and economic estrangement were intertwined in American eugenic assessments of the "unfit." In doing so, it attends to the knotty relations of power by which such communities were simultaneously adjudged deviant and bestowed with the privileges of whiteness. Eugenic family studies supported claims to white superiority by regulating and preventing reproduction among "unfit" rural white communities who might reveal the sham of white supremacy. Yet eugenicists were also concerned about same-sex sexuality and other nonproductive sexualities among the unfit, despite their focus on the "science of better breeding." This article first analyzes how eugenicists defined a desire for work as the counterpoint to perverse sexual desire. Next, it examines how state institutions used a legal "conduct test" to classify a person as incapable self-support - and therefore feebleminded - on the basis of same-sex sexual relationships, refusal to marry, interdependence, or failure to meet gendered labor norms. Throughout, the article details how eugenic family studies mapped disability, nonproductivity, and nonheteronormativity onto rural landscapes. It concludes by contending that rural queer studies can leverage these landscapes of marginality to think with the racialized city rather than against it

Criminology · Eugenics · Human sexuality · Political science · Power (physics · Queer · Reproduction · Sociology · White (mutation · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Medical History and Research