UC Santa Barbara

“Eugenic Spectrums: Gendered Science, Racial Defects, and the Making of Disability in the U.S. West from Progressive Reform to the Second World War” is an intensive exploration of the intersection of eugenics, medicine, and morals in the construction of disabled and disposable bodies. While histories of eugenics are vast, few have analyzed the positionality of eugenics’ data collectors, or field workers, who were overwhelmingly middle-class white women from the East Coast of the U.S. Fewer yet have examined how field workers meticulously “fitted” and “unfitted” institutionalized people’s biological, cultural, intellectual, and moral worth. My research on the practices of eugenic field workers contributes to a fuller understanding of eugenic science in the making by emphasizing the data-collection methods within a web of institutions, philanthropists, and state actors. Relying on hundreds of eugenic field workers’ sociomedical case histories, my work investigates three stages of eugenic field work and the evolving methods of their studies: 1) the early years of professionalization; 2) the development of practical application as seen in their family histories; and 3) the afterlives of professional eugenicists once they stopped using the qualifier eugenics in their work.

To unravel the complex web of familial and institutional data embedded in the case histories, “Eugenic Spectrums” examines family relationships and social networks of institutionalized people as mediated, analyzed, and documented by field workers. Each case narrative is a rich, multi-vocal repository of individual people’s histories that reveal contradictory social and medical accounts. Field workers, physicians, psychologists, administrators, and, at times, family members embarked on varied but ultimately ableist processes to oust seemingly dysgenic people from the social and biological body of the nation. This study also explores how eugenicists mobilized this data, derived from neighborhood and home visits, to give narrative power to the more formalized, official, and professional sources of information, including medical, criminal, and behavioral records and contemporary social scientific studies. In addition to social case histories, my primary source research consists of critical investigations of dozens of contemporary sociological, demographic, psychological, and anthropological reports, surveys, studies, training manuals, and articles funded by leading eugenics centers of research, including the California Bureau for Juvenile Research in Whittier, California.