Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Reproduction in Transatlantic Modern Thought (review)

This text offers stimulating and challenging contributions to the history of gendered and racialized thought in Europe and North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its core project is to deploy the category of "reproduction" in order to explore such thought not as a separate strand of intellectual development but as an embedded influence shaping the traditions of historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary theory as well as bonding discourses of sex and gender to those of race and nation. Its discussions span works of fiction, of political and psychological analysis, and of social, anthropological, and biological theory in order to reread, confront, and reflect upon such embedded themes and discourses. Canonical European and American texts such as Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, Freud's various writings on "Dora" and "Anna O." and on hysteria, and Friedrich Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State are brought into conversation with writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, and W. E. B. DuBois in a richly textured and learned argument.

As can be inferred from the close examination of these last three authors and of contemporary American art in the final section of the book, reevaluation of the ingredients that by around 1900 came to shape the specific character of gendered ethnonational thinking and images in the United States is central to that argument. Equally important is the reevaluation of materialist and liberal-reformist strands in feminist thought, grounded in the work of Marx and Engels and of Gilman, respectively, using the categories of reproduction and miscegenation not only to unlock critical readings but also to offer suggestions for less racialized practices within that tradition. This involves engaging with the gendered agendas entwined in DuBois' work on race and in Darwin's evolutionary theories as well as the ethnoracial elements in the work of Engels, Freud, and Gilman. In the process Weinbaum provides original contributions to debates that might be thought to be exhausted, like that on materialist feminism, or the intersections between American gender and racial thought.

Given the high level of conceptual discussion and the range of conceptual tools used to develop the argument, which can often lead to a certain impenetrability or use of jargon, it is particularly pleasing that the text is largely clear and readable, remaining in control of the rich range of references and ideas that it deploys. The view that the writings discussed all express anxieties about the implications of female choice and autonomy in reproductive matters as either dangerous or potentially empowering "waywardness" is established as a theme through the text without becoming overly emphatic. The suggestion that this theme had distinctive significance from the 1880s to the 1920s as well as some influential legacies in present-day thought is similarly clearly but carefully presented. Especially important steps in the argument are the emphasis on issues of reproduction and sexual choice as gender issues in the work of Darwin and of the ethnic/racial agendas underpinning both Darwin's work and that of Lewis Morgan and Engels. While the discussion of the relationship of Freud's view of his Jewishness to his construction of theories of hysteria and psychoanalysis is slightly strained, it contributes to the repeated and illuminating focus on how tropes of reproduction in his writing, like those in the other texts, expressed both gendered and racialized thinking.

This theme sustains the overall presentation of notions of reproduction in modern Western thinking as by their very constitution simultaneously sexualized, racialized, gendered, and nation minded. The case is made that in key texts that have formed that thinking, explicit and implicit concern with women and sex choice in the making of "peoples" and "nations" and with race and ethnicity in gender relations and nation making have flavored definitions of and challenges to gender, ethnic, and other markers of difference and power. This thesis...