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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.3 (2005) 472-475



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Anatomizing Eugenics

Tracing the Legacy of Biology in Public Policy

American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism. Nancy Ordover. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. xxviii + 297 pp.

At the end of 2004, on an international queer studies listserv, a debate raged over the question of sexual "choice." A familiar question surfaced: do we choose to be queer, are we made that way, or is there some other possibility? As several list members pointed out, the question itself raises red flags. Why do we ask it in the first place? What are the stakes in locating an etiology for sexual orientation, sexual desire, and sexual behaviors? More important, what would the sequelae be if we found "the answer" to such a question? If sexual orientation could be linked to a single biological source or set of sources (as though sexuality were even a single identifiable thing), it would be hard to imagine homophobes laying down their weapons and embracing their queer brothers and sisters. In fact, one might expect quite a different response.

As Nancy Ordover shows in her thorough, even exhaustive, investigation of the role of eugenics in U.S. public policy over the last century, situating difference in the body is rarely if ever a route to progressive political change. Most often, biologically based theories of difference, whether ethnic, class-based, gendered, racial, or sexual, have provided ammunition to the right wing and made additional space for restrictive and oppressive policies. The history of eugenics in anti-immigrant legislation, officially sanctioned homophobia, and the coerced sterilization of poor people, people of color, and people with disabilities should disabuse any reader of Ordover's compelling study that focusing on biology can ever really palliate social marginalization.

While much of the material in Ordover's book will not be new to students of the eugenics movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, her analysis achieves a powerful synthesis of seemingly disparate phenomena: anti-immigration policies, the search for biological bases of nonnormative gender and sexual expression, [End Page 472] and forced sterilization. For Ordover, however, these three developments shared a frightening reliance on racist and nationalist eugenics, which argued for a purified, uncorrupted national identity, based in "unpolluted stock."

Shifting back and forth between the past and the present, Ordover contends that the contemporary search for a "gay gene" or a "gay brain" hardly differs from the body-based inquiries of the sexologists and eugenicists (who were often one and the same). Hereditarian arguments about nonnormative sexuality, which were immensely popular in the first decades of the twentieth century, encouraged thirty states to enact sterilization statutes that in some way aimed at limiting the transmission of sexual excesses. Countless queers were subjected to any number of different "treatments," ranging from genital surgery and sterilization to electroshock and lobotomy. Even with the rise of psychoanalytic explanations of sexual desires, interest in biology did not wane; rather, homophobic arguments simply integrated psychoanalysis into their already potent arsenal.

Ordover's dismay that gay people would take up biology as etiology is certainly justified, given the horrific stories she tells. However, she understands the "science as savior" mentality in queer communities. It is hardly a new phenomenon: the venerable Magnus Hirschfeld looked to biology and the theory of the "third sex" to explain homosexuality. But clearly Ordover believes that we should, or at least wishes that we did, know better. In the wake of the murderous rhetoric of AIDS, in which gay men were represented as no better than diseased bodies, one might have expected the body as the source of identity to lose its appeal. But in fact the "promise of liberatory biologism" only intensified in the 1990s, even as there were "a spate of anti-gay initiatives . . . on the ballot in towns, counties, and states across the country" (66). As Ordover observes, lesbians and gay men have been unique in embracing the biologism that for...

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