Abstract
Critiques of Anglo-American eugenics from the turn of the twentieth century through today demonstrate that the people swept up by the colossal eugenic broom were not biologically “unfit” without questioning either the notion of biological inferiority itself or the “menace” eugenicists saw in disability. They therefore imply that what was wrong with eugenics was its inaccuracy—that it was only ethically problematic because it did not correctly identify “unfit” people. Such critiques, while offering social models of race, poverty, criminality, and/or gender, leave disability untheorized and neglect the rights of disabled people.
Date of this Version
2024
Recommended Citation
“Disability Untheorized: Critiques of Eugenics, Then and Now,” Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures 2, 2024, pp. 172–183. Special issue guest-edited by Robert Volpicelli entitled “Disability on the Cusp.” 10.1353/cusp.2024.a934490, https://doi.org/10.1353/cusp.2024.a934490
Comments
This is the author-accepted manuscript of Linett, M.T. (2024). Disability Untheorized: Critiques of Eugenics, Then and Now. CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures 2(2), 172-183. Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press; the version of record is available at DOI: 10.1353/cusp.2024.a934490.