Alexandra Minna Stern
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 131207 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Alexandra Minna Stern |
| PRENOMES | Alexandra Minna |
| SOBRENOME | Stern |
| ASSINATURA | STERN A M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1647-1846 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 147 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1997 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Disrupting the Reproductive Lives of Japanese American Families During Wartime
The World War II mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans disrupted families, enacted intergenerational trauma, and characterized Japanese Americans as inherent racial threats. This federal exercise in biopolitical management intersected with state-sponsored eugenic sterilization in California institutions. Linking War Relocation Authority and California Department of Institutions records, we document 32 Japanese American sterilization su…
Operationalizing racialized exposures in historical research on anti-Asian racism and health
Background: Addressing contemporary anti-Asian racism and its impacts on health requires understanding its historical roots, including discriminatory restrictions on immigration, citizenship, and land ownership. Archival secondary data such as historical census records provide opportunities to quantitatively analyze structural dynamics that affect the health of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans. Census data overcome weaknesses of other data so…
Racialization and Reproduction
During the twentieth century, state health authorities in California recommended sterilization for over 20,000 individuals held in state institutions. Asian immigrants occupied a marginalized position in racial, gender, and class hierarchies in California at the height of its eugenic sterilization program. Scholars have documented the disproportionate sterilization of other racialized groups, but little research exists connecting the racist, gend…
Entanglements of Eugenics, Public Health, and Academic Medicine
Victor C. Vaughan (1851-1929) was a noted medical educator, microbiologist, and active proponent for the idea of eugenics. Vaughan spent his career at the University of Michigan, where he served as Medical School Dean for many years. He lectured widely on the importance of "race betterment" and actively supported passage of state legislation that led to over 3,000 sterilizations in the state of Michigan. After his death, Vaughan's name was applie…
Gender and the Far-right in the United States
This article explores gender and the far-right in the United States with specific attention to female actors and gendered ideologies in the realms of culture and media. By focusing on several female extremists, I show how traditional and rigid ideas of home, marriage, family and community bolster the xenophobia and racism of white nationalism in the United States. This article includes a historical overview of the concept of metapolitics and emph…
Gender and Far-right Nationalism
This special issue explores the entangled history of contemporary far-right nationalism and gender. Seven case studies apply a distinct historical perspective and analyse gender as a meta-language for xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism since the 19th century, while solidifying patriarchy as a foundation of the contemporary as well as historical far right. Topics include family motifs in the propaganda of Alternative for Germany that draws on r…
A Reusable Past
It does not require great powers of observation to note the pervasiveness of Nazi Germany in contemporary U.S. cultural and political discourse. For better or worse, the discursive landscape is saturated with depictions of and references to Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Gestapo—an obsession visible everywhere, from the progressive left to the far right, from TV shows to Twitter feeds to video games. The allure of using the Third Reich as a rheto…
Cautions About Medicalized Dehumanization
Critical lessons can be gleaned by examining 2 of the most salient relationships between racism and medicine during the Holocaust: (1) connections between racism and dehumanization that have immediate, lethal, deleterious, longer-term consequences and (2) intersections of racism and other forms of hatred and bigotry, including discrimination against people with disabilities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people; and social and re…
Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate
From a loose movement that lurked in the shadows in the early 2000s, the alt-right has achieved a level of visibility that has allowed it to expand significantly through America's cultural, political, and digital landscapes. Yet it is also mercurial and shape-shifting, encompassing a spectrum of ideas and believers that resonate with white supremacy, right-wing nationalism, and anti-feminism. The alt-right offers a big and porous tent to those wh…
Disproportionate Sterilization of Latinos Under California’s Eugenic Sterilization Program, 1920–1945
Objectives. To compare population-based sterilization rates between Latinas/os and non-Latinas/os sterilized under California’s eugenics law. Methods. We used data from 17 362 forms recommending institutionalized patients for sterilization between 1920 and 1945. We abstracted patient gender, age, and institution of residence into a data set. We extracted data on institution populations from US Census microdata from 1920, 1930, and 1940 and interp…
Heredity Explored
Reviewed by: Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930 ed. by Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt Alexandra Minna Stern Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt, eds. Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016. viii + 472 pp. Ill. $49.00 (978-0-262-03443-2). The editors of this weighty volume have assembled a stellar international ensemb…
California’s Sterilization Survivors
From 1919 to 1952, approximately 20 000 individuals were sterilized in California’s state institutions on the basis of eugenic laws that sought to control the reproductive capacity of people labeled unfit and defective. Using data from more than 19 000 sterilization recommendations processed by state institutions over this 33-year period, we provide the most accurate estimate of living sterilization survivors. As of 2016, we estimate that as many…
Shadows of doubt
The arrival of DNA paternity testing in the 1980s was met with great enthusiasm in the Brazilian courts. Yet, over the past two decades, Brazilian legal doctrine and jurisprudence have increasingly rejected DNA proof as the sine qua non for paternity cases. Instead, DNA paternity testing has generated mountains of litigation, as biological proof has been challenged by the argument that paternity is primarily "socio-affective". Leading family law …
Raça, saúde e discriminação
A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru by Raúl Necochea López
A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru, by Raul Necochea Lopez. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 256 pp. $32.95 US (paper). In this well-researched and smartly-organized book, Raul Necochea Lopez expands and complicates the historical narrative about reproduction, contraception, fertility, society, and the state in modern Peru. Necochea is particularly interested in exploring the shifting constellation of act…
Measuring Manhood
Zika and reproductive justice
Eugenics, sterilization, and historical memory in the United States
From the 1920s to the 1950s, California sterilized approximately 20,000 people in state homes and hospitals based on a eugenic law that authorized medical superintendents to perform reproductive surgeries on patients deemed unfit and "suffering from a mental affliction likely to be inherited." Working with a unique resource - a dataset created from 19,000 sterilization recommendations - my team and I have reconstructed patterns and experiences of…
Facing Eugenics
Reviewed by: Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice by Erika Dyck Alexandra Minna Stern Erika Dyck. Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. xi + 304 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-1-4426-1255-6). On the hardscrabble prairies of western Canada, in the province of Alberta, a heterogeneous mix of scientific experts, agrarian reformers, social engine…
Mexican Americans and Eugenic Sterilization
This article explores the racial and gendered dynamics of sterilization in California state institutions from the 1920s to the 1950s, with a focus on the experiences of Mexican-origin patients. A set of recently accessed sterilization authorizations reveals that Mexican-origin patients were sterilized at elevated rates, disproportionate to their share of the state population, under California's eugenic laws. Mexican-origin patients were pathologi…
Fevered measures
Fevered measures: Public health and race at the Texas-Mexico border, 1848–1942, by John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2012, 440 pp., US$26.95 (paperback), ISBN 978082235276
Chicano/a History
This article surveys the writing of Chicano/a history since its inception and reflects on why scholars have been concerned with certain issues and how they have written about them. Born from the tumult of the Vietnam era, the field has challenged the status quo and emboldened those communities from which Chicano/a historians come and which they ultimately serve. Given the generation-long development of Mexican American history, this article focus…
On the Road with Chicana/o History
Chicana/o historians have transformed understandings of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, identity, labor, and space in the United States. In dialogue with the articles for this special issue, my commentary reflects on some of the significant contributions of Chicana/o history, highlighting the themes of complexity and spatial metaphors. I concur with the authors that there still is much historical reconstruction to do, and suggest that this wo…
Colonial Pathologies
Reproductive technologies and the persistence of eugenics
This book offers a steady philosophical examination of what race and racism do in the realm of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and practices. The author assembles a robust analytical frame
Sterilized in the Name of Public Health
In exploring the history of involuntary sterilization in California, I connect the approximately 20 000 operations performed on patients in state institutions between 1909 and 1979 to the federally funded procedures carried out at a Los Angeles County hospital in the early 1970s. Highlighting the confluence of factors that facilitated widespread sterilization abuse in the early 1970s, I trace prosterilization arguments predicated on the protectio…
Responsible Mothers and Normal Children
This article examines the emergence of the eugenics movement in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s and explores the ways in which eugenicists and physicians participated in the creation of a new paternal order focused on motherhood, sexuality, and child welfare. I analyze this transformation as part of a broader process of medicalization and state expansion that recast understandings of reproduction, heredity, childhood, and the female body during…
Disproportionate Sterilization of Latinos Under California’s Eugenic Sterilization Program, 1920–1945
Objectives. To compare population-based sterilization rates between Latinas/os and non-Latinas/os sterilized under California’s eugenics law. Methods. We used data from 17 362 forms recommending institutionalized patients for sterilization between 1920 and 1945. We abstracted patient gender, age, and institution of residence into a data set. We extracted data on institution populations from US Census microdata from 1920, 1930, and 1940 and interp…
Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood
Let's start with a building. The foundations of this two-story red-brick structure were laid in I910 alongside and partially underneath the Santa Fe Street Bridge, which spans the Rio Grande between Ciudad Juirez and El Paso (see fig. i). Initially designed as a site where every arrival from Mexico was to be bathed with soft soap and warm water, this disinfection plant and the bridge leadiiig to it became the stage of violent confrontation seven …
Gender and the Far-right in the United States
This article explores gender and the far-right in the United States with specific attention to female actors and gendered ideologies in the realms of culture and media. By focusing on several female extremists, I show how traditional and rigid ideas of home, marriage, family and community bolster the xenophobia and racism of white nationalism in the United States. This article includes a historical overview of the concept of metapolitics and emph…
California’s Sterilization Survivors
From 1919 to 1952, approximately 20 000 individuals were sterilized in California’s state institutions on the basis of eugenic laws that sought to control the reproductive capacity of people labeled unfit and defective. Using data from more than 19 000 sterilization recommendations processed by state institutions over this 33-year period, we provide the most accurate estimate of living sterilization survivors. As of 2016, we estimate that as many…
"The Hour of Eugenics" in Veracruz, Mexico
In 1932, the Mexican state of Veracruz passed Latin America's only eugenic sterilization law. Building on the foundational scholarship of Nancy Leys Stepan, this article critically examines Veracruz's eugenics movement, exploring how it intersected with public health, antivice campaigns, and radical agrarian and labor politics. I pay particular attention to Governor Adalberto Tejeda, who, during his second term in office (1928 - 1932) incorporate…
Which Face? Whose Nation
This article examines medical inspections of immigrants arriving to U.S. ports and borders from the period 1891 to 1928. Comparing the activities of the U.S. Public Health Service at four immigration stations, the authors emphasize the importance of regional differences in the history of immigration and public heath. In addition, they argue that categories of medical exclusion emerged in conjunction with early-20th-century attitudes toward skin c…
Gender and Far-right Nationalism
This special issue explores the entangled history of contemporary far-right nationalism and gender. Seven case studies apply a distinct historical perspective and analyse gender as a meta-language for xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism since the 19th century, while solidifying patriarchy as a foundation of the contemporary as well as historical far right. Topics include family motifs in the propaganda of Alternative for Germany that draws on r…
Eugenics, sterilization, and historical memory in the United States
From the 1920s to the 1950s, California sterilized approximately 20,000 people in state homes and hospitals based on a eugenic law that authorized medical superintendents to perform reproductive surgeries on patients deemed unfit and "suffering from a mental affliction likely to be inherited." Working with a unique resource - a dataset created from 19,000 sterilization recommendations - my team and I have reconstructed patterns and experiences of…
Mexican Americans and Eugenic Sterilization
This article explores the racial and gendered dynamics of sterilization in California state institutions from the 1920s to the 1950s, with a focus on the experiences of Mexican-origin patients. A set of recently accessed sterilization authorizations reveals that Mexican-origin patients were sterilized at elevated rates, disproportionate to their share of the state population, under California's eugenic laws. Mexican-origin patients were pathologi…
Making Better Babies
In 1920, Indiana's Division of Infant and Child Hygiene inaugurated its first Better Babies Contest at the state fair. For the next 12 years, these contests were the centerpiece of a dynamic infant and maternal welfare program that took shape in Indiana during the decade of the federal Sheppard–Towner act. More than just a lively spectacle for fairgoers, these contests brought public health, “race betterment,” and animal breeding together in a un…
Zika and reproductive justice
Measuring Manhood
Chicano/a History
This article surveys the writing of Chicano/a history since its inception and reflects on why scholars have been concerned with certain issues and how they have written about them. Born from the tumult of the Vietnam era, the field has challenged the status quo and emboldened those communities from which Chicano/a historians come and which they ultimately serve. Given the generation-long development of Mexican American history, this article focus…
Eugenics and Historical Memory in America
How is the history of eugenics in America remembered, and forgotten? In this article, I explore the recent gubernatorial apologies for forced sterilizations, which were carried out under the authority of state eugenics laws from 1907 until the 1970s. I situate the apologies in the global context of movements for reparations and restitution, examine the discursive architecture of apologies that seek to address the contravention of medical ethics a…
Paying the Price of Freedom
This study documents in detail the striving and ingenuity, the hard-won triumphs and bitter defeats of slaves who sought liberation in nineteenth-century urban Peru. Drawing on judicial, ecclesiastical, and notarial records - including the testimony of the slaves themselves - it uncovers the various strategies slaves invented to gain their freedom. The author pays particular attention to marriage relations and family life. Slaves used their famil…
Secrets under the Skin
Modern categories of citizenship and discourses of nationalism are inconceivable without the existence of two inventions: the microscope as a laboratory instrument and the statistical concept of normality. The former, first devised by Dutch opticians around 1600, was the sine qua non of the bacteriological revolution spearheaded by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur beginning in the 1870s.Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History …
Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood
Let's start with a building. The foundations of this two-story red-brick structure were laid in I910 alongside and partially underneath the Santa Fe Street Bridge, which spans the Rio Grande between Ciudad Juirez and El Paso (see fig. i). Initially designed as a site where every arrival from Mexico was to be bathed with soft soap and warm water, this disinfection plant and the bridge leadiiig to it became the stage of violent confrontation seven …
Which Face? Whose Nation
This article examines medical inspections of immigrants arriving to U.S. ports and borders from the period 1891 to 1928. Comparing the activities of the U.S. Public Health Service at four immigration stations, the authors emphasize the importance of regional differences in the history of immigration and public heath. In addition, they argue that categories of medical exclusion emerged in conjunction with early-20th-century attitudes toward skin c…
Responsible Mothers and Normal Children
This article examines the emergence of the eugenics movement in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s and explores the ways in which eugenicists and physicians participated in the creation of a new paternal order focused on motherhood, sexuality, and child welfare. I analyze this transformation as part of a broader process of medicalization and state expansion that recast understandings of reproduction, heredity, childhood, and the female body during…
The Foreignness of Germs
D uring the 20th century the united states witnessed sweeping social, political, and economic transformations as well as far‐reaching advancements in medical diagnosis and care. Despite the dramatic changes in demography, the meaning of citizenship, and the ability to treat and cure acute and chronic diseases, foreigners were consistently associated with germs and contagion. In this article we explore why, at critical junctures in American histor…
Making Better Babies
In 1920, Indiana's Division of Infant and Child Hygiene inaugurated its first Better Babies Contest at the state fair. For the next 12 years, these contests were the centerpiece of a dynamic infant and maternal welfare program that took shape in Indiana during the decade of the federal Sheppard–Towner act. More than just a lively spectacle for fairgoers, these contests brought public health, “race betterment,” and animal breeding together in a un…
Eugenics and Historical Memory in America
How is the history of eugenics in America remembered, and forgotten? In this article, I explore the recent gubernatorial apologies for forced sterilizations, which were carried out under the authority of state eugenics laws from 1907 until the 1970s. I situate the apologies in the global context of movements for reparations and restitution, examine the discursive architecture of apologies that seek to address the contravention of medical ethics a…
Sterilized in the Name of Public Health
In exploring the history of involuntary sterilization in California, I connect the approximately 20 000 operations performed on patients in state institutions between 1909 and 1979 to the federally funded procedures carried out at a Los Angeles County hospital in the early 1970s. Highlighting the confluence of factors that facilitated widespread sterilization abuse in the early 1970s, I trace prosterilization arguments predicated on the protectio…
An Empire of Tests
Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Implemented by US Cities During the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic
CONTEXT: A critical question in pandemic influenza planning is the role nonpharmaceutical interventions might play in delaying the temporal effects of a pandemic, reducing the overall and peak attack rate, and reducing the number of cumulative deaths. Such measures could potentially provide valuable time for pandemic-strain vaccine and antiviral medication production and distribution. Optimally, appropriate implementation of nonpharmaceutical int…
Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939
Journal Article Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 Get access Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939. By Molina Natalia. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xiv +279 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95, paper.) Alexandra Minna Stern Alexandra Minna Stern University of Michigan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar West…
Fit to Be Tied
Reviewed by: Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950–1980 Alexandra M. Stern Rebecca M. Kluchin. Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950–1980. Critical Issues in Health and Medicine. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. xi + 269 pp. Ill. $49.95 (978-0-8135-4527-1). In Fit to be Tied, Rebecca M. Kluchin impressively navigates a critical period in the history of reproduct…
"The Hour of Eugenics" in Veracruz, Mexico
In 1932, the Mexican state of Veracruz passed Latin America's only eugenic sterilization law. Building on the foundational scholarship of Nancy Leys Stepan, this article critically examines Veracruz's eugenics movement, exploring how it intersected with public health, antivice campaigns, and radical agrarian and labor politics. I pay particular attention to Governor Adalberto Tejeda, who, during his second term in office (1928 - 1932) incorporate…
Chicano/a History
This article surveys the writing of Chicano/a history since its inception and reflects on why scholars have been concerned with certain issues and how they have written about them. Born from the tumult of the Vietnam era, the field has challenged the status quo and emboldened those communities from which Chicano/a historians come and which they ultimately serve. Given the generation-long development of Mexican American history, this article focus…
On the Road with Chicana/o History
Chicana/o historians have transformed understandings of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, identity, labor, and space in the United States. In dialogue with the articles for this special issue, my commentary reflects on some of the significant contributions of Chicana/o history, highlighting the themes of complexity and spatial metaphors. I concur with the authors that there still is much historical reconstruction to do, and suggest that this wo…
Fevered measures
Fevered measures: Public health and race at the Texas-Mexico border, 1848–1942, by John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2012, 440 pp., US$26.95 (paperback), ISBN 978082235276
Mexican Americans and Eugenic Sterilization
This article explores the racial and gendered dynamics of sterilization in California state institutions from the 1920s to the 1950s, with a focus on the experiences of Mexican-origin patients. A set of recently accessed sterilization authorizations reveals that Mexican-origin patients were sterilized at elevated rates, disproportionate to their share of the state population, under California's eugenic laws. Mexican-origin patients were pathologi…
Facing Eugenics
Reviewed by: Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice by Erika Dyck Alexandra Minna Stern Erika Dyck. Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. xi + 304 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-1-4426-1255-6). On the hardscrabble prairies of western Canada, in the province of Alberta, a heterogeneous mix of scientific experts, agrarian reformers, social engine…
A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru by Raúl Necochea López
A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru, by Raul Necochea Lopez. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 256 pp. $32.95 US (paper). In this well-researched and smartly-organized book, Raul Necochea Lopez expands and complicates the historical narrative about reproduction, contraception, fertility, society, and the state in modern Peru. Necochea is particularly interested in exploring the shifting constellation of act…
Measuring Manhood
Zika and reproductive justice
Eugenics, sterilization, and historical memory in the United States
From the 1920s to the 1950s, California sterilized approximately 20,000 people in state homes and hospitals based on a eugenic law that authorized medical superintendents to perform reproductive surgeries on patients deemed unfit and "suffering from a mental affliction likely to be inherited." Working with a unique resource - a dataset created from 19,000 sterilization recommendations - my team and I have reconstructed patterns and experiences of…
Heredity Explored
Reviewed by: Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930 ed. by Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt Alexandra Minna Stern Staffan Müller-Wille and Christina Brandt, eds. Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016. viii + 472 pp. Ill. $49.00 (978-0-262-03443-2). The editors of this weighty volume have assembled a stellar international ensemb…
California’s Sterilization Survivors
From 1919 to 1952, approximately 20 000 individuals were sterilized in California’s state institutions on the basis of eugenic laws that sought to control the reproductive capacity of people labeled unfit and defective. Using data from more than 19 000 sterilization recommendations processed by state institutions over this 33-year period, we provide the most accurate estimate of living sterilization survivors. As of 2016, we estimate that as many…
Sociology (31 obras) · Political science (28 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Eugenics (15 obras) · Gender Studies (15 obras) · Medical History and Research (14 obras) · Medicine (14 obras) · Politics (12 obras) · Demography (11 obras) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (10 obras)