Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Literary-Medical Experimentation

This article explores Gertrude Stein's ambivalent participation in eugenic and medical discourse by reading Three Lives as a kind of modernist medical chart. Stein's immigrant and mulatto women characters represent sites of medical-literary experim entation, and her narrators articulate nationalist and racialist (eugenic) anxieties through non-native, non-white female bodies.