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Chapter 2 - Projecting Eugenics and Performing Knowledges
- Edited by Neil Brooks, Sarah Blanchette
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- Book:
- Narrative Art and the Politics of Health
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 25 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 15 March 2021, pp 37-62
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Summary
This chapter examines how Canadian educational institutions played a key role in the early twentieth-century eugenics movement, entwined with legacies of British colonial policies and practices, by constructing and perpetuating destructive knowledges. The transfer of oppressive knowledge became evident through a close reading of archival documents that uncovered three decades of eugenics at a Canadian home economics and teacher training school, Macdonald Institute, in Guelph, Ontario, from 1914 to 1948. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's “Calls to Action on Education,” Justice Murray Sinclair notes that “[i] t is precisely because education was the primary tool of oppression of Aboriginal people, and miseducation of all Canadians, that we have concluded that education holds the key to reconciliation.” We draw on the archival documents and their display in a cocreated exhibition, Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario, that cast new light on these archival documents through prioritizing modes of knowledge transfer that celebrate difference, lived experience, anti-racism, decolonization and access. After analyzing how value-laden data about the body performs as it is projected and narrated in very different educational settings, we argue meaning is encoded in the performative transfer of knowledge. Notions of performance help us understand how eugenics slides, accompanied by their narration, transfers knowledge between bodies unevenly implicated in formations of power in ways that perpetuate and disrupt a Canadian status quo. As performance studies scholar Jose Esteban Munoz has argued, national norms are activated through the affective performance of gendered and racialized normativity. In addition to considering the role of performance in activating meaning, we show how performance also participates in the transfer, continuity and disruption of knowledge in how it is remembered and reproduced by bodies, in their movements and the images and/or words and silences they produce.
Archival research conducted at the Macdonald Institute unearthed a startling array of eugenics course documents: course outlines; a collection of eugenics slides, charts and images; exams; lecture notes and other student course work; and the Macdonald Institute eugenics reference library. These documents show that while Francis Galton (1822–1911) founded the eugenics movement in Britain with the publication of his Hereditary Genius (1869), eugenics in Canada took on an added British colonial layer.
Imagining Disability Futurities
- Carla Rice, Eliza Chandler, Jen Rinaldi, Nadine Changfoot, Kirsty Liddiard, Roxanne Mykitiuk, Ingrid Mündel
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This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re•Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which “the future” is normatively deployed in the service of able‐bodiedness and able‐mindedness (Kafer 2013), a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites of “no future” (Edelman 2004). By re‐storying embodied difference, the storytellers illuminate ongoing processes of remaking their bodily selves in ways that respond to the past and provide possibilities for different futures; these orientations may be configured as “dis‐topias” based not on progress, but on new pathways for living, uncovered not through evoking the familiar imaginaries of curing, eliminating, or overcoming disability, but through incorporating experiences of embodied difference into time. These temporalities gesture toward new kinds of futures, giving us glimpses of ways of cripping time, of cripping ways of being/becoming in time, and of radically re‐presencing disability in futurity.
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