Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Contesting the Body: Art, Sexualities and Biogenetics
Convenors:
Fae Brauer, The University of New South Wales/University of East London fay.brauer@unsw.edu.au
Anthea Callen, University of Nottingham Anthea.Callen@nottingham.ac.uk
When the Third Reich Eugenic Sterilization Law was applied, both the American and British Eugenics Societies congratulated Hitler. Returning the compliment, Hitler acknowledged the eugenic policies fostered in these nations as his precedent. Before eugenics was stigmatized by the Holocaust and Western histories were sanitized of its prevalence, a huge array of eugenic organizations flourished, as did their conferences, exhibitions, publications, designs and artworks. This biogenetic culture spread rapidly and widely from Australia to the Soviet Union. Inspired by Francis Galton, Eugenic Education Societies mushroomed from Belfast to Tokyo. Mendelian eugenicists not only reinforced ‘sexual selection’ as a religion, but also expanded incarceration to encompass the ‘moron’ and ‘cretin’. Synthesising Galton’s Neo-Darwinian concept of superior races with August Weismann’s discovery of germ plasm hereditary transmission, Alfred Ploetz’s Rassenhygiene (Race Hygiene) associations spread across Europe, particularly Germany and Scandinavia. After the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders’ Association was initiated by Charles Davenport, 11 million people with defective germ plasm were targeted for compulsory segregation and forced sterilization. By 1927, 29 states sanctioned sterilization, California being the most active with nearly 5,000 sterilizations of ‘feeble-minded’ patients and criminals. Within these models of eugenics, the human body became a site of contestation, as revealed by art.
This session will examine the manifestation of these biogenetic cultures through art in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Northern and Republican Ireland, North and South America, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Soviet Union and Japan. It will explore how these diverse models were conveyed through representations of the body or the space and objects surrounding it in design, film, exhibitions, photography, prints, paintings, magazines, sculpture and architecture. It will address those anarchists, Fabians, feminists, socialists, radicals and modernists who supported eugenics, and those who opposed it. Since the relationship of art to biogenetics has shifted with the discovery of DNA and the advent of the Human Genome Project, this session will also examine how contemporary artists have been able to perform the role of geneticist to create new forms of art as illustrated by Bioart. Following Jürgen Habermas’ theory of bioethics, it will question whether, in its intolerance of any deviation from generic perfection, biogenetics has the capacity, like eugenics, to lead to a violation of human rights.
Speakers:
Anthea Callen (University of Nottingham)
Images of Infirmity: ‘A suitable case for treatment’?
Tanya Woloshyn (University of Nottingham)
'Le culte pittoresque du Soleil': Exploring artistic, medical, and tourist perspectives of Mediterranean sunlight and the Côte d'Azur, c.1890–1920
Katerina Chatzikonstinuou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
The Sanitoria: The Body, Social Hygiene and Eugenic Architecture
Fae Brauer (The University of New South Wales/University of East London)
Contesting Woman’s Body: Modernism, French Feminism and Lamarckian Eugenics
Pat Simpson (University of Hertfordshire)
The rape of the motherland: Contesting Narratives of the New Soviet Woman, August 1942
Caterina Albano (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design)
Eu-genes: beyond an aesthetic of genetics