180070 SE Lives Worth Living: Disability, Medical Technologies, and the ‘New’ Eugenics (2023S)

Eugenics was both an ideology and a set of practices: proponents sought to improve the human species through the gradual eradication of defective or unfit members (most prominently, disabled, poor, racialized and indigenous communities), using segregation, institutionalization, sterilization, and in some cases, genocide. Although eugenics is now largely discredited as a politically motivated pseudoscience, the ideas on which it was based about the worthiness of different kinds of people, and ways of improving the human species have a far longer history. Concerns have recently emerged that the same ideas underlie new and emerging medical technologies, such as genetic screening, prenatal testing, selective abortion, medically assisted suicide, and potential future technologies like gene editing and biological enhancement.
These medical technologies are typically presented as a universally beneficial means of improving human lives at the individual and societal levels. But to what extent do these contemporary ideas and practices depend on a eugenicist ideology of human value, worth, and supremacy? Is it possible to have a ‘positive’ eugenics which encourages health and enhanced abilities which does not itself depend on ‘negative’ eugenics which aims to eliminate certain traits, conditions, or ‘kinds’ of people from the human species?
This module will explore past manifestations of eugenic thinking and practices from the standpoints of those who were (or are) the targets of eugenicist ideology and medical technologies: specifically, racialized, disabled, and trans* and intersex communities. We will critically examine the assumptions about life-worthiness, ability, normalcy and heredity which upheld and justified past eugenics, and consider whether and how those same assumptions manifest in contemporary thinking around medical technologies and the desirability of human improvement.
The desired outcome of the module is students’ critical engagement with themes and materials, participation in seminar discussions, and the development of independent research skills.