American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (review)

Tracing eugenic practices and rationales across the twentieth century, Ordover illustrates the disturbing continuities between past and present medical-juridical exclusions and abuses. She highlights three key domains—immigration and nativism; queer anatomy and the "biologizing" of homosexuality; and the sterilization of those deemed unfit or unworthy, particularly poor women of color. Although her first section on race and immigration treads little new ground, her discussion of the complicated relationship between homo-sexology and science and of liberal justifications for forced sterilization and birth control is original and provocative. Ordover argues that liberals and conservatives alike are heavily invested in the "technofix" mentality, advocating surgical solutions for social "problems" ranging from feeblemindedness and sexual deviance to welfare assistance and structural poverty.

Margaret Sanger occupies center stage in her analysis. Ordover refutes claims by some feminist scholars that Sanger forged opportunistic alliances with eugenicists and xenophobes only to help legitimize reproductive rights and cannot be considered deeply racist herself. Instead, Ordover untangles Sanger's extensive connections to members of leading eugenics organizations, birth-control groups, and neo-Malthusian population councils, asserting that "Sanger erected the bridge between scientific race- and class-demonization and what should have been a truly liberatory birth control movement" (213).

Following Sanger's career, Ordover charts the nonlinear path of eugenic sterilization from its initial implementation through state laws, largely in the West and Midwest during the 1910s, to its expansion after Buck v. Bell (1927) in the American South. She pays particular attention to the upsurge of operations on black women in North Carolina from the 1940s to the 1960s before covering the private and federally sanctioned sterilizations of African-American and Native American women, and Chicanas, in the 1970s and 1980s. Casting a similarly long line from late nineteenth-century theories of sexual inversion and hereditary degeneration to the recent hunt for the "gay gene," Ordover reveals the extent to which the divergent agendas of sex researchers, "family values" advocates, and the glbt (gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender) community have relied on science to make authoritative claims about nature, nurture, physiological difference, and evolutionary variation. Ordover suggests that, when it comes to the gay and lesbian struggle for human rights, the quest for the Holy Grail of biological essentialism is ultimately a self-defeating endeavor that must be abandoned altogether.

The overwhelming presentism and polemical tone of American Eugenics are at once the book's greatest strength and weakness. On one hand, they provide an effective motor for Ordover's narrative and allow her to link seemingly disparate patterns and processes. On the other, they flatten a complex historical terrain, and, at times, sacrifice nuance, in-depth archival research, and engagement with relevant scholarship (especially in the history of medicine and science) to propel forward arguments about the relentless versatility of eugenics and the effects of cumulative-causation models on marginalized social groups. More problematical is the uncertainty of what is particularly "American" about Ordover's story, given that European, Latin American, and Asian countries were home to vibrant eugenics programs in the twentieth century. Moreover, her reluctance to define "eugenics," either through reference to the eugenics historiography or to such analogous terms as hereditarianism, race betterment, genetic enhancement, or biological determinism leaves her vulnerable to the criticism that her rendering ofeugenics is too vague to convey significant social or philosophical meaning.