Queer Kinship, Queer Eugenics: Edith Lees Ellis, Reproductive Futurity, and Sexual Citizenship

Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a suite of political essays and fiction at the turn of the twentieth century that explored questions of racial citizenship, reproductive politics, and women’s rights through the discourse of eugenics. Reading Ellis’s 1906 My Cornish Neighbours in relation to current debates surrounding queer theory reveals an important relationship between the history of eugenics and current queer theories of futurity and abjection. By examining early twentieth-century discourses of reproduction, kinship, and citizenship through the lenses of feminist geopolitics and queer temporality, the article illustrates how Ellis’s articulations of alternative kinships and queer eugenics might move current work in queer theory to consider the embedded structure of racial hierarchies in discussions of futurity, and the relationship of normative and oppositional kinship structures to the geopolitical.