The Progressive Era's

411 Pages·2017·2.06 MB·English

by  Anne Carter

Engineering Kinship:
Genetic Technologies, Economic Speculation, and the Queer Body

A Dissertation
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Jessica Lee Mathiason

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Cesare Casarino

June 2017
© Jessica Lee Mathiason 2017
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Of everyone on my committee, Nick Davis has been my mentor the longest. It
was through the many hours I spent with him at Northwestern, watching and re-watching
scenes from Transamerica and The Crying Game, that I learned the language of film
theory. Naomi Scheman has been instrumental not only to this project, but also to my
professional development. I am grateful for her meticulous reading of my essay “In
Herzog’s Hands,” published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, as well as the preparation
she has given me for interviews and conference presentations. Maggie Hennefeld has
only been a part of this project for two years, but her contribution has been
immeasurable. From teaching me how to navigate Lantern to her many, generous
readings of my chapter on The End of the Road, Maggie has pushed me to be more
rigorous in my historical research and my intervention into media theory. In fact it was
through a conversation with her that I developed the first kernels of what has become my
theory of new eugenic media. John Mowitt has been involved in my scholarly
development since my first day at the University of Minnesota. From his thoughtful
critique of my essay “Strapping on Second Life” to offering meta-commentary on the
final draft of this dissertation, he has always pushed my thinking, broadened my scope of
knowledge, and managed to recommend just the right text to help me grapple with
whatever theoretical conundrum was confounding me at that moment. Most of all, I
would like to thank my advisor, Cesare Casarino, who has meticulously read each
iteration of my chapters and offered feedback that is remarkable in its generosity,
diligence, and precision. Each time I have left a meeting with him, I have walked away
with a renewed sense of excitement for my project, a sharpened sense of intellectual
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curiosity, and a determination to produce a more rigorous, a more ethical, and a more
inciting final product. Even when I thought I was done, his gentle encouragement to write
a conclusion propelled me to delve deeper into the recesses of my mind to elaborate the
political stakes of my project in positing a radical theory of queer kinship in an age when
the alterity of queer theory is waning. Articulating this has become perhaps the most
satisfying part of this project.
Beyond my committee, I want to thank Keya Ganguly, with whom I began this
project. Throughout my time at the University of Minnesota, Keya has been a strong
voice, an ardent, critical reader, and a powerful ally. Were it not for her early direction to
ground my project in a historical archive, I may never have discovered the Progressive
Era hygiene films that have become both a personal fascination and the focus of this
project. I would also like to thank Jillana Enteen, who has been my mentor and friend for
more years than I can count. Taking her Cyberqueer course my Freshman year at
Northwestern exposed me to a whole corpus of critical theory I never knew existed, and I
have never looked back. Many colleagues and friends have provided both intellectual and
emotional support throughout the years: Michelle Baroody, Sara Saljoughi, Marla Zubel,
Emily Fedoruk, Eva Hudecova, Andrea Gyenge, Akshya Saxena, Courtney Gildersleeve,
and Vanessa Cambier. Beyond the department, I would like to thank Andre Gaspar who
has been a close friend since childhood as well as a calming and encouraging voice at
every step of this process.
Turning to my family, I would like to thank my sister, Tiffany Mathiason, who is
the only other person who fully understands my sense of humor. Her sticker-laden cards,
Conway Twitty cassette tapes, and renditions of Uncle Bill’s “I’m Puttin’ Her through
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Hell” have gotten me through many evenings of dissertation writing. I owe a debt of
gratitude to my grandmother, the teacher, who passed away long before I started
graduated school, but whose memory is always with me when I work with my students. I
would also like to thank an honorary member of my family, Suzanne Morgan, for lending
me her own confidence when mine was flagging and for being the person who sat next to
me in those moments when I needed it. Finally, I would like to thank my father, Garry
Mathiason, who taught me the power of persistence. It is that persistence, more than
anything else, that has enabled me to bring this project to fruition. My father has instilled
in me a variety of life lessons, all of which have found their way into my career
trajectory. For instance, when I was in preschool, I announced that I wanted to be an
astronaut, but the boys in my class laughed at me because they said girls couldn’t be
astronauts. A few days later, thanks to my parents, Sally Ride—the first American
woman in space—came to talk to my class. A few summers later, my father took me to
parent-child space camp, where he and I were the only father-daughter team. Reflecting
back on that experience twenty years later, I realize that instead of launching me on a
trajectory towards NASA, it launched me on a trajectory towards gender studies and the
feminist critique of science. In fact, those early years of watching endless hours of Star
Trek with my father planted the seed for what would become this dissertation. The quote
with which I begin my introduction—from the first season of the original series—is a
tribute to him.

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For the 1991 Star Trek VHS tape;
Garry-McCoy, Tiffany-Spock, and Jessica-Kirk
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ABSTRACT
Linking the critical humanities to the biological sciences, this dissertation
investigates how progressive, queer, and anti-racist techniques and technologies of
kinship emerge in Progressive Era eugenic cinema and return, reformulated, in twenty-
first-century sci-fi film and television. Drawing on research conducted at the Library of
Congress, the Wangensteen Health Sciences Library, and the John E. Allen Archives, I
contest the traditional narrative that American eugenics was an exclusively right-wing
movement by revealing the surprising appearance of several radical elements—feminism,
progressive economics, and social welfare reform—within this otherwise pernicious
social project. I argue prominent figures as diverse as the African-American physician
Dorothy Ferebee and the Sapphic writer Edith Ellis co-opted eugenic discourses to find
support for their social struggles. Today, these progressive strands of eugenic ideology
have been de-radicalized through the shift from state-sponsored eugenic projects to
corporation-driven geneticism. The new genetics movement has adopted neoliberal
theories of growth to overcome economic and ecological limits. Pairing ReGenesis and
Orphan Black with an analysis of gene patenting cases brought before the U.S. Supreme
Court, I argue this speculative future veers away from the progressives’ valuation of
queer difference by employing technological means and legal strategies to compel
domestic normativity. Divided into two parts, this dissertation offers a comparative
analysis of the ideological inheritance left to what I call “New Eugenic Media” from its
counterparts in the Progressive Era through a critical examination of two collections,
separated by a century: the U.S. Department of War’s hygiene films from 1915-1922 and
sci-fi film and television from 2000-2015.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................. i
ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ v
INTRODUCTION: WHAT CROP HAS SPRUNG FROM THAT EUGENIC SEED? ... 1
The Myth of the Eugenic Engineer ................................................................................. 6
“Positive” Eugenics, the Eugenic Hero, and Technologies of Kinship .......................... 9
Old Eugenic Cinema and New Eugenic Media ............................................................. 26
Faciliating Queer Difference: Genetic Technologies & The State ............................... 35
CHAPTER ONE: FROM SENTIMENTALITY TO SCIENCE: WOMEN, SOCIAL
UTILITY, AND THE END OF THE ROAD .................................................................... 47
Sociocracy, Education, and Progressive Economics ..................................................... 57
Positive Eugenics .......................................................................................................... 68
The Symbolics of Blood Vs. The Deployment of Sexuality ......................................... 73
Development of Oneself for the Service of Mankind: Educating Women through
The End Of The Road .................................................................................................... 77
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 106
CHAPTER TWO: NERVOUSNESS IS THE SERVANT OF THE INTELLECT:
SEXUAL INVERSION, AESTHETICS AND FIT TO WIN ......................................... 109
Eugenically Fit to Win: Billy Hale as the Sexually Abnormal Ideal .......................... 118
The Bachelor Tells the Story ....................................................................................... 125
The Theorization of Abnormal Sexuality: Freud, Foucault, and the Early
Eugenicists .................................................................................................................. 129
Edith Ellis’s Spiritual Parenthood ............................................................................... 152
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 164
CHAPTER THREE: PATENTING THE HUMAN: ORPHAN BLACK, SYNTHETIC
DNA, AND THE STERILITY SEQUENCE ................................................................. 172
Neoliberalism and Orphans “In the Black” ................................................................. 180
The Cold River Institute, 1918 .................................................................................... 184
Patenting the Human ................................................................................................... 204
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Surplus Life, Sterilization, and the Castor Virus ........................................................ 227
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 252
CHAPTER FOUR: BACK TO THE FUTURE: REGENESIS, THE GAY GENE, AND
SCIENTIFIC CENSORSHIP.......................................................................................... 254
The Progressive Era’s “Neurotic Cluster” Reimagined .............................................. 262
Anxiety ........................................................................................................................ 264
Addiction ..................................................................................................................... 268
The Gay Gene.............................................................................................................. 286
A. The Birth of the Gay Gene .................................................................................. 293
B. Gay Babies & Gay-Away ................................................................................... 310
C. The Dual-Use Dilemma ...................................................................................... 322
Asperger’s Syndrome .................................................................................................. 341
A. Jacobson’s Organ as a Biological Return to the Human Being’s Animality ...... 343
B. David’s Dream .................................................................................................... 350
CONCLUSION: THE .1%: GENOMIC RESEARCH, NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM,
AND QUEER FUTURITY ............................................................................................. 362
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 386

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INTRODUCTION:
WHAT CROP HAS SPRUNG FROM THAT EUGENIC SEED?

Khan Noonien Singh: “I’ve gotten something else I wanted. A world to win. An empire
to build.”

Mr. Spock: “It would be interesting, Captain, to return to that world in a hundred years
and learn what crop has sprung from that seed you planted today.”

Captain Kirk: “Yes Mr. Spock, it would indeed.”

— Star Trek: The Original Series, “Space Seed,” season 1, episode 22 (1967)

It is in this first season episode “Space Seed” that Star Trek introduces us to
Khan, the terrestrial ruler Rolling Stone proclaims is the series’ #1 “villain for the ages.”
A product of “controlled genetics,” Khan is a superhuman warlord who conquers Asia
and the Middle East during Earth’s third and final global conflict—the Eugenics Wars of
the 1990s. In 1996, Khan and approximately eighty of his fellow supermen are put in
suspended animation aboard Botany Bay and launched into space, where they remain
until the crew of the Starship Enterprise discovers and revives them nearly two centuries
later. Once aboard the Enterprise, Khan attempts a mutiny but is ultimately subdued by
the ship’s crew. Instead of punishing him by death, Captain Kirk sends Khan and his
people to the vast wilderness of Ceti Alpha V to build a new civilization. In the episode’s
final scene, Khan is directed off the ship, leaving Kirk and his senior officers alone in the
floating conference room. Spock, the ever-logical Vulcan, reasons that it would be
informative to return to Ceti Alpha V in one hundred years to “learn what crop has
sprung from that seed” they planted there today. It is precisely this question that drives
my dissertation project—not about the crops that have sprung on the fictional Ceti Alpha
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