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Wade Taylor: A Family Haunting
- Southern Cultures
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 29, Number 1, Spring 2023
- pp. 92-99
- 10.1353/scu.2023.0007
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
This article explores neurodiversity, eugenics, and Appalachian identity in the early twentieth-century American South through the lens of the author's family history. It discusses the loss of a relative to long-term institutionalization. The article proposes that the central premise of the ideology and pseudoscience of eugenics—that deviance, disability, and most social ills are hereditary—posed a sufficient threat to families with disabled members to enforce their complicity with ableist practices and social structures in many cases, especially when paired with virtually nonexistent home- and community-based services. It also suggests that insufficient home- and community-based services continue to drive disabled people into institutions against their will to this day.