Eugenic Monsters: A Seminar on Race and Disability

"Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is 

that we give our children what we wanted, 

whether they want it or not. 

We heal our wounds with the love we wish we’d received,

 but are often blind to the wounds we inflict."

Andrew Solomon
Far from the Tree

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Course Overview

Why are monsters so ubiquitous in literature and art? How do they, and other literary villains and anti-heroes, reinforce cultural values and anxieties? Who or what are the monsters of our own cultural moment? In this seminar, we will explore the history and representation of monsters in western culture. Using Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, well as other texts from disability, critical race, and post-colonial studies, we will examine monsters not merely as otherworldly creatures, but as figures that stand in for a wide range of "undesirables" and "others." This semester, we will concentrate on the themes of race and disability as they have been constructed by the philosophies and practices of eugenics, slavery, colonialism and freak shows. The very invention of race theory in the modern age hinges around eugenic beliefs in fundamental differences marked by skin color, facial and skull shapes, bloodlines, and aptitude. These theories created the concept of a “white race” and marked non-white races as inherently disabled, thus excusing and even endorsing the institutions of sterilization, extermination, captivity, colonialism, and exploitation. 

The first section of the course will concentrate on the wider concepts of eugenics as it came into being in the modern era. The benefits of technologies which offer power over your body will be connected to the racist and ableist philosophies which generated them. The genetic framework will then be interrogated throughout the rest of the semester through the film and book, Far From the Tree, which considers the relationship between parents and children, specifically those ways in which the fantasies of reproduction (preserving the purity of parentage) breaks down in the mutation, evolution, and divergent identities which arise among children who are born with Down's Syndrome, Autism, Dwarfism, and other conditions. This section ends with a science-fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet, which imagines the eugenic and colonialist project in the context of space exploration in order to test the desire for genetic control against the joy of discovering the beauty of difference. The second section turns towards the way in which captivity in its various forms makes monsters out of the captors and captives, beginning with the animated film, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The film Beloved follows up on the ways that slavery in the United States created trauma and monstrosity in the lives of formerly enslaved people, who experience this captivity still through the ghosts and isolation of a haunted house, representing the specters of slavery which live on across generations. The Green Mile follows the way in which slavery reinvented itself through the rise of the prison industrial complex which routinely caught men of color and people with disabilities in their cages, embodied by the film's central figure. Good Kings, Bad Kings explores how nursing homes adapt models of captivity from prisons and slavery, forcing people of color, poor populations, and people with disabilities into lives of abused isolation.

The third section the seminar concentrates further on the systems of colonialism which were already figured in the first two sections, carrying institutions of eugenics and captivity into Asia, the Americas, and Africa. Beginning with Animal's People, the book follows up on the ecological and human environmental consequences of global industries which introduce dangerous chemicals into the land and bodies of impoverished foreign countries. The film, Eclipse, from the Twilight series, considers the ongoing effects and consequences of colonization in the Americas through the monstrous figures and fighting of werewolves and vampires, each representing the native peoples of the Americas and the colonizers (at least one of whom fought on the side of Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War). Then the seminar turns to the world of Marvel super-heroes to contrast the film Black Panther -- which imagines an isolated nation in Africa that is free from colonization but also (seemingly) free of disability -- and the comic of the street-level hero Echo -- a native American woman with deafness who explores her place in the United States as a disabled colonized body at odds with the figure of Daredevil, a white American lawyer with blindness who literally represents the law of the colonizer. The final section of the seminar explores the history and legacy of the Freak Show. The film The Greatest Showman will be viewed alongside the book Bunk which tells the true histories of the scams and hoaxes which exploited and contributed to American racism and ableism in order to turn ethnic minorities and people with disabilities into profitable freaks. The racist, ableist, and transphobic effects of the Freak Show will then be considered in the way trans women of color are still exploited by sex work and conversion therapy which displays these pathologized, racialized, and queer bodies for a paying public. At the end of this section and the semester, we will watch the film Ray in order to interrogate the ways the blind man of color fought for personal liberation in an entertainment industry which sought to exploit him.

Course Objectives

By the end of the seminar you will be able to TEACH the course material:

• Think critically across multiple perspectives
• Engage with thinkers who passionately disagree with you
• Argue according to the dialectic method
• Compose your thoughts in clear and engaging writing
• Honor differences as important to propelling your thinking forward

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Selections from the Reading List

The Monsters of Eugenics

Genetics, Mutations, and Diversity

• Michelle Ferrari (dir.), American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade: What’s Wrong with Perfect?, PBS Distributions (2018), B07F83JZYF

• Rachel Dretzin (dir.), Far From the Tree, MPI Home Video (2019), B07J356J56

• Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Scribner (2013), 978-0743236720
• Including chapters: "Son," "Down's Syndome," "Dwarf," "[Intellectual] Disability," "Prodigy," "Crime," "Schizophrenia," "Deaf," and "Transgender."

• James Tynion IV, Eugenic, BOOM! Studios (2018), 978-1684152063

• C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Space Trilogy, Book 1), Scribner (2003), 978-0743234900

The Monsters of Captivity

Pariahs, Slaves, Prisoners, and Patients

• J. Demme (dir.), Beloved (1998) (AW)

• Frank Darabont (dir.), The Green Mile, Warner Home Video, B01GWCBR24

• Trousdale and Wise (dir.), The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Walt Disney Animation (2002), B00005TN8K 

• Susan Nussbaum, Good Kings, Bad Kings, Algonquin Books (2013), 978-1616203252

• R. Garland-Thompson, Staring: How We Look, 
• Including chapters: “Social Relationships” and "Beholding"

• J.B. Bouson, “The Dirtied and Traumatized Self of Slavery in Beloved” (PDF) (2000)

The Monsters of Colonialism

Asia, Americas, Africa

• Ryan Coogler (dir.), Black Panther, Marvel Studios (2018), B079FLYB41

• Indra Sinha, Animal’s People, Simon and Schuster (2009), 978-1416578796

• David Mack, Daredevil: Vision Quest, Marvel (2015), B016P0QCQE

• David Slade (dir.), The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Summit Inc./Lionsgate (2010), B0042MEQVG 
• Twilight & Psychology, “Bella’s Motivations for Risky Behavior” (PDF)         
• Twilight & History, “Alice and the Asylum” (PDF)      
• Twilight & History, “Jasper Hale, the Oldest Living Confederate Veteran”        
• Twilight & Psychology, “Prejudice in Twilight” (PDF)
• Twilight & Philosophy, “The Moral Hazards of Being Edward” (PDF)
• Twilight & History, “Why Team Jacob Is Doomed to Lose” (PDF)       

The Monsters of the Freak Show

Differences, Hoaxes, and Exploitations

• Taylor Hackford (dir.), Ray, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (2006), B000FVQLRU

• Michael Gracey (dir.), The Greatest Showman, 20th Century Fox (2018), B077R2WHSB 

• The Transformation (1994)

• Eli Clare, Exile & Pride: “The Mountain, Freaks & Queers”

• Janet Mock, Redefining Realness, “Ch. 15-17"

• Kevin Young, Bunk: the Rise of Hoaxes (AW)

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Half a Million Reasons: Transliterature Passes 500,000 Readers!

"The question we pose to the Other is simple and unanswerable:  ‘who are you?’"

Judith Butler

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This website began back 2011 with an invocation combining a visual poetry piece that I had composed along with a quotation from Judith Butler from Undoing Gender, "The question we pose to the Other is simple and unanswerable: ‘who are you?’  The violent response is the one that does not ask, and does not seek to know. It wants to sure up what it knows, to expunge what threatens it with not-knowing, what forces it to reconsider the presuppositions of its world, their contingency, their malleability. The nonviolent response lives with its unknowingness about the Other in the face of the Other, since sustaining the bond that the question opens is finally more valuable than knowing in advance what holds us in common, as if we already have all the resources we need to know what defines the human, what its future life might be." By this invocation I hoped to establish a thesis and a tone for what I wanted the website to be. Only time and readers can determine whether or not this promise materialized. In my own heart, it was a statement about the vulnerability of public scholarship but also its importance. Such a venture is sure to begin as a voice in a relative wilderness, crying out with some form of "this is who I am" and "who are you?" There were the dangers of turning oneself into a target, into a caricature and then into a sounding board for the worst anxieties or prejudices of others. Indeed, when I first began writing I was given warnings that putting my emerging ideas out into the world might come back to haunt me later when people steal my work or cite it later in my career as proof of some flaw. Yet amidst these tensions, there was hope for contact that might become a correspondence and perhaps then into a community. Years and half a million readers later, I've seen a mix of being targeted by people who regard me as a caricature as well as being contacted by people in search of community. But overall, the question, "who are you," continues to bring a plentitude of blessed contacts, correspondences, and communities.

Over the years, the website has evolved. Transliterature began as a public notebook where I could share many of my thoughts and projects as I worked through them, especially those concerning critical theory. Over time, conference papers and the beginnings of peer reviewed articles began to find their ways onto the site. Indeed, the last few months has been rather sparse in terms of exclusive web content because I've been using my approximately 3 posts a month to advertise for various peer-reviewed publications or public journals and newspapers. Yet even as my writing continues to expand into other necessary areas, I appreciate this forum as a place to share pedagogical tools and resources, announce partnerships, share digital humanities work, run fundraisers for organizations such as the Trans Travel Grant, publicize Calls for Papers, update my CV, announce upcoming events, compose memoirs, and yes, also share my in progress notes. Some of these things have their beginning on Transliterature but other projects begin elsewhere and find there way onto the website. This is an exciting growth and change as Transliterature becomes a quilting point wherein I can thread the various types of work in which I engage.

One of the areas into which I would love to see Transliterature continue to expand is its autobiographical content. As the website closes in on ten years, my life has changed a lot along the way. Importantly, how I view moments and movements in my life have also changed. I am grateful to my readers who have allowed me to make room for sharing these reflections. They helped me and I hope they have done some good for those who are not me. The audience component of a website like Transliterature is a good challenge for anyone who wants to write about their lives because in my experience writing for a public rather than in a private journal reminds me to write in such a way that benefits others and not merely myself. Drafts are often written (but not published) that are written in ways that I needed to write for my own benefit. But before I publish, I feel challenged to revise my memoirs in such a way that it works for others. To my surprise, writing for others usually improves even the portions that I write for myself because the process challenges me to be charitable (even with myself), measured (even with myself), and service-oriented (even with myself). How often I lack such generosity, mercy, and compassion towards myself when I recall things in my own head! Moreover, to my surprise people writ large seem as interested in the memoir pieces as the more academic work. Granted, in the fields of study in which I work and in those models of writing which I emulate, the political often affects the private and the private is often political. I grant that there are some who would prefer more of the one over the other but I am grateful for all those who have come to Transliterature and made space enough for other types of writing and readers. As this area grows, perhaps even into other media such as a book, I thank you for welcoming not only my writing but a bit of me along with it.

500,000 readers marks a point in the history of this website, my career, and my life that gives me pause to be grateful. Thank you to all my readers and advertisers. Thank you to my guest writers and those who have offered valuable feedback. Thank you to those who helped Transliterature grow and to help my work grow beyond it as well. Thank you to all the people who are part of the ongoing story which knits across Transliterature, all the people who likewise heard the question, "who are you?" and offered such rich and valuable responses; some stated and many silent among those half a million hits. This marker belongs most of all to you. Thank you for including me in your asking of this simple but unanswerable question.

Happy holidays, happy new year, and a new second half-a-million from Transliterature!

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New Publication: The Isle of Hermaphrodites: Disorienting the Place of Intersex in the Middle Ages

"Those who have been made to wait 
have not been waiting idly 
but enacting changes across worlds and eras 
we thought we knew."

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Transliterature was recently featured in a special collection on Medieval Intersex: Language and Hermaphroditism edited by Ruth Evans and published via postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, "The Isle of Hermaphrodites: Disorienting the Place of Intersex in the Middle Ages." Thank you to everyone involved!

The abstract:

"What is the place of intersex in medieval studies? How have non-binary bodies been oriented and reoriented as marginal by medieval literature and history? Might medieval intersex studies disorient such mappings of power? To provide inroads to these questions, this article puts medieval studies and intersex studies into conversation. Affirming the premise that non-binary scholarship offers necessary insights to the history of non-binary bodies, this critical analysis of the intersexual bodies on the Hereford Mappa Mundi and in the Book of John Mandeville utilizes the theoretical frameworks of Cheryl Chase and Hilary Malatino. In so doing, the essay proceeds to first orient the place of intersex using medieval pilgrimage as an experienced and imagined practice, generating and using objects such as Mappa Mundi to position certain places and communities as spiritual centers, loca sancta, eschewing other locations and peoples to the margins. Second, this essay unpacks how the second half of the Book of John Mandeville reorients relations to the margins through a sort of “boundary-lust,” imaginatively embodied by the Isle of “Hermaphrodites;” a medieval conception of intersex invoking the ancient parentage of Hermes the God of Travel and Boundaries and Aphrodite the God of Lust and Sex. To conclude, the passages describing the intersex bodies in Mandeville’s Book are close read alongside intersex and queer studies to conceive of how non-binary bodies disoriented the universality and centrality of binary gender for medieval writers and readers in much the same way that intersex continues to de-centralize the flow of power in modern mappings of gender and sexuality."

Read more of the article at postmedieval online!

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New Publication: Reconstructing the Pardoner: Transgender Skin Operations in Fragment VI

"Full of still stinging cuts and telling scars, narratives of transgender skin operations testify to the countless lives physically and socially made through the artifice of sharp-machines which continually make and unmake supposedly natural states."

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Transliterature was recently featured in Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer edited by Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp with the chapter, "Reconstructing the Pardoner: Transgender Skin Operations in Fragment VI." While published later than other articles and book chapters, this chapter is actually the first finished piece of peer-reviewed work I produced. The book experienced unexpected delays of a couple years that are nonetheless understandable by anyone familiar with the travails of academic publishing. That said, it is great to see the piece finally in print!

The abstract:

This chapter reclaims the Pardoner as a critically trans figure in the Middle Ages through an analysis of the discursive and historical reconstructions of skin. Given how narratives of transition and the politics of surgery become written on the skin of countless transgender lives across time, a trans literary approach to Fragment VI of the Canterbury Tales cannot ignore that the Pardoner’s presence and story arises in response to the Physician’s tale of medical authority and the nature of gender. Putting the medieval praxis of castration in dialog with Judith Butler’s theorizing of the ‘sharp-machines’ that construct culturally intelligible trans bodies, this study looks at how the narratives of Fragment VI fashion skin as a natural signifier of gender in the “Physician’s Tale” and as a mark of unnatural reconstruction in the “Pardoner’s Prologue.” Indeed, the deployment of the Pardoner’s body, relics, and voice speak back with tenants of what might be called medieval trans feminism against the subjugation of non-cisgender men and the devaluation of surgically altered bodies throughout Fragment VI. A critical outcome of such a reconsideration of Geoffrey Chaucer’s sexually complex figure is that while we may never know definitively what is between the pilgrim’s legs – as with many transgender persons – nonetheless, based on the physical and social operation of gender he embodies, the Pardoner evidently stands at the crossroads of medieval trans discourse.

The book Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer is available now for purchase!

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New Publication: Trans Textuality: Dysphoria in Medieval Skin

"A trans soul lives in the skin 
and goes deeper with each touch of the knife. "

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Transliterature was recently featured in a special collection on Queer Manuscripts edited by Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt, published by postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies with the article, "Trans Textuality: Dysphoria in the Depths of Medieval Skin." Thank you to everyone who encouraged this piece along and who attended its reading at the New Chaucer Society session in London.

Abstract:

"This article proposes a theoretical method of approaching manuscripts, such as the Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, through transgender theory, called trans textuality. Beyond looking for transgender identities in medieval texts, such a method asks, ‘what is a trans way of reading?’ and ‘how might non-human objects function in trans ways?’ The study is informed by foundational texts in trans psychoanalysis concerning the processes that trans skin undergoes during transition, texts which are put in conversation with medieval manuscript studies and new materialisms. The resulting response focuses on the threefold work of trans textual skins: depth, duration, and dysphoria. Whether the object is the organ of a transgender body or a medieval manuscript, such trans texts are skin constructs which relate through materiality and metaphor the ongoing narrative of bodies in transition. The article concludes with a twofold study of Fragment VI of the Ellesmere manuscript where the images and writing of the Physician and Pardoner demonstrate the principles of trans textuality: the depth of meanings from other times and genders, the duration of a body through transitions in form, and a dysphoric soul striving in the deeps of medieval skin."

Read the full article online at postmedieval online.

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New Publication: TSQ Trans*Historicities Roundtable

"We need transgender history now more than ever."

Jack Halberstam

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Honored to be co-authors with gifted scholars of the caliber of Howard Chiang, Jack Halberstam, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Marcia Ochoa, C. Riley Snorton, Leah DeVun, and Zeb Tortorici. A truly fantastic issue and an especially enjoyable roundtable discussion on the critical theories of "Trans*historicities"

The TSQ abstract:

“Trans*historicities: A Roundtable Discussion” offers reflections on how thinking about time and chronology has impacted scholarship in trans studies in recent years. Contributing scholars come from numerous disciplines that touch on history, and have expertise in far-ranging geographic and temporal fields. As a broad conversation about some of the potential possibilities and difficulties in seeking out—and finding—trans in historical contexts, this discussion focuses on the complex interrelations between trans, time, and history."

Read more via Transgender Studies Quarterly online!

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New Publication: Were There Trans People in the Middle Ages?

"Yes...
Sorry, did you need more than that?"

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Transliterature recently partnered with the Public Medievalist in order to produce a summary of some of my research in order to introduce a lay audience into the history of transgender in the Middle Ages. Already the article has had wide readership just in time for the midterm elections! As addressed in the article, responses to medieval trans studies reflects many of the interests as well as anti-trans prejudices which cluster around contemporary transgender studies. Yet overall, it has been a gift to speak again to a wider audience to let them know that the future of our past is much vaster and more complicated than society leads us to expect.

Introduction from the Public Medievalist:

"A fantastic article on the long history of medieval transgender people, by the amazing Gabrielle MW Bychowski. If you've been led to believe that being transgender is a relatively "new" phenomenon, or some kind of "postmodern lifestyle choice", you should read this article. There is a long transgender history that shows clearly that being transgender is simply part of the human condition, and can't be imagined away."

Read more on the Public Medievalist Website!

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