Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/personhood 9781478002598

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anima   Critical Race Studies Other­wise A series edited by Mel Y. Chen and Jasbir K. Puar

Infra human isms S C I E N C E , C U LT U R E , A N D T H E M A K I N G OF MODERN NON/PERSONHOOD

Megan H. Glick

duke university press  durham and london  2018

© 2018 D UKE UN I VERSI TY P RESS All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker Typeset in Minion Pro and Helvetica Neue LT Std by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Glick, Megan H., [date] author. Title: Infrahumanisms : science, culture, and the making of modern non/personhood / Megan H. Glick. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Series: anima Identifiers: lccn 2018015848 (print) | lccn 2018020551 (ebook) isbn 9781478002598 (ebook) isbn 9781478001164 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9781478001515 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Persons. | ­Human beings. | Human-­animal relationships. | Extraterrestrial beings. | ­Human rights. Classification: lcc bd450 (ebook) | lcc bd450.g538 2018 (print) | ddc 128—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/2­ 018015848​ Cover art: Young Baboon, 2001 © Kendra Haste. Courtesy Patrick Davies Con­temporary Art. A portion of chapter 2 previously appeared as “Ocular Anthropomorphisms: Eugenics and Primatology at the Threshold of the ‘Almost ­Human,’ ” Social Text 112, 30, no. 3 (fall 2012): 97–121. A portion of chapter 5 previously appeared as “Of Sodomy and Cannibalism: Dehumanization, Embodiment, and the Rhe­torics of Same-­Sex and Cross-­Species Contagion,” Gender and History, 23, no. 2 (August 2011): 266–82.

For Laura, who taught me the meaning of personhood; and in memory of ­Little, B., and Snugs, who showed me its utter irrelevance

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CONTENTS

Acknowl­edgments ​ix Introduction: ­Toward a Theory of Infrahumanity ​1 PA RT I.

Bioexpansionism, 1900s –1930s  25

1. Brief Histories of Time: Nature, Culture, and the Making of Modern Childhood ​29 2. Ocular Anthropomorphisms: Eugenics and Primatology at the Threshold of the “Almost ­Human” ​56 PA RT II.

Extraterrestriality, 1940s –1970s  81

3. On Alien Ground: Extraterrestrial Sightings, Atomic Warfare, and the Undoing of the ­Human Body ​85 4. Inner and Outer Spaces: Exobiology, ­Human Ge­ne­tics, and the Disembodiment of Corporeal Difference ​110 PA RT III.

Interiority, 1980s –2010s  135

5. Of Sodomy and Cannibalism: Disgust, Dehumanization, and the Rhe­torics of Same-­Sex and Cross-­Species Contagion ​139

6. Every­thing except the Squeal: Porcine Hybridity in the Obesity Epidemic and Xenotransplantation Research ​159 Conclusion. The Plurality Is Near: Techniques of Symbiotic Re-­speciation ​196 Notes ​209 Bibliography ​247 Index ​263

A C K N O W L­E D G M E N T S

Upon entering gradu­ate school, I remember wondering why it took so long for academics to publish their first book and also feeling certain that I could avoid ­doing the same. Years ­later, humbled by the pro­cess and every­thing that it has taken to get ­here, I ­will try to do justice in ­these acknowl­edgments to all the ­people who have guided me along the way. First, I would like to thank Duke University Press. I am grateful to the anonymous readers for their thoughtful and transformative feedback; Christine Riggio for helping with the book’s extensive images and illustrations; Sandra Korn for coordinating the review pro­cess; Stephanie Gomez Menzies for her patience, care, and investment in the proj­ect; Sheila McMahon for her careful edits and bibliographic assistance; Susan Albury for helping to bring the final proj­ect together; Mel Chen and Jasbir Puar for conceiving of and producing this series; and Courtney Berger, whose vision and understanding made the entire pro­cess manageable. The research for this book was made pos­si­ble by mentors and colleagues at Yale University, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dickinson College, and Wesleyan University. I am eternally grateful to Matthew Frye Jacobson at Yale University for his guidance and support, for his willingness to listen, and for helping me to see the forest instead of the many, many trees that tend to fill my mind. His belief in this proj­ect from its inception made every­thing that came a­ fter pos­si­ble, and his unwavering kindness has meant more than I can say. To Susan E. Lederer, who first introduced me to the history of science and medicine during my second year of gradu­ate school at Yale, and who never tired of my questions and unfamiliarity with her areas of expertise: thank you. I would not have been able to complete

this proj­ect without your incredible generosity. At Yale I am also grateful to Jean-­Christophe Agnew for his thorough feedback and attention to detail; Paul Gilroy for his help developing and executing an exam on “theories of the ­human”; Laura Wexler for introducing me to the study of images that led me to find the Yerkes archive; Katie Trumpener for sharing her im­mense knowledge of ­children’s lit­er­a­ture; and Alicia Schmidt-­Camacho and Steven Pitti for helping to create an intellectually rich and emotionally supportive environment in the department of American Studies. Among the many brilliant p ­ eople I met while at Yale, I am especially thankful for my friendship with the luminous Susie Woo, fellow traveler through “emotional landscapes” and “parceling” proj­ects—­and whose sense of self and supportive presence have often moved me. To G. Melissa García, whose energy and creativity know no bounds, I ­will always be grateful for discussions big and l­ittle, holiday cele­brations, and late nights at 119 Nicoll Street in the trenches. I am also thankful to have spent time with Kimberly Juanita Brown, Dara Orenstein, Jorge Matos, Tisha Hooks, Françoise Hamlin, Robin Bern­stein, J. Emmanuel Raymundo, Christopher Geissler, Jinan Joudeh, and Anna Chen. I arrived at gradu­ate school by way of the Departments of En­glish and History at Northwestern University. I have often thought of my experience as an undergraduate at a large research university as “lucky”—­lucky that I managed to find so many incredible classes, lucky that I had the chance to learn from so many radiant ­people. Now looking back, that word seems so small. I am especially grateful to Julia Stern, whose lectures on nineteenth-­ century lit­er­a­ture captured my imagination during my freshman year of college, and who inspired me to become an academic; Steven Hahn, who first sparked my interest in the study of history, and whose kindness, wisdom, and dedication to his craft I have long admired; and Stephanie McCurry, whose teaching felt more like art than l­abor, and whose support helped me envision a day when I, too, might be able to perform such acts of magic. I would also like to acknowledge Jay Grossman, Jules Law, and Adam Green for their remarkable instruction and thoughtful advice. In the years between gradu­ate school and the publication of this book, ­there have been many colleagues at dif­fer­ent institutions whose support has been critical to my pro­gress. First, I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of American Studies and the Science in Society Program at Wesleyan University, whose encouragement has helped me grow as a scholar and teacher. I am especially grateful to Patricia Hill for her passionate mentorship and belief in my work; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui for her guidance, openx  Acknowl­edgments

ness, and frank po­liti­cal edge; Joel Pfister for his exuberant commitment to the field of American Studies; Matthew Garrett, Amy Tang, and Margot Weiss for welcoming me into the department and for their many offers of help in navigating uncharted w ­ aters; Indira Karamcheti for her congeniality; Liza McAlister for her sense of humor and survival strategies; and Joe Rouse and Jill Morawski for opening the doors to the Science in Society Program. I would also like to thank the many incredible undergraduates who helped shape the dialogues in my classes at Wesleyan, particularly Kelsey Henry, Lauren Burke, Jaya Sahihi, and Aleyda Robles, whose research proj­ects have often impacted my own. Before coming to Wesleyan, I held positions in the Departments of Africana Studies, American Studies, and ­Women’s and Gender Studies at Dickinson College; the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania; and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. I am grateful to colleagues and administrators at each of t­hese schools for their assistance and support. In par­tic­u­lar, I am indebted to Lynn Johnson, whose friendship and guidance made small-­town life feel cosmopolitan; Megan Yost and T. Evan Smith for their kindness, support, and life-­saving baby care; and James McMenamin, Luca Lanzilotta, Carolina Castellanos, Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy, Amy Farrell, Cotten Seiler, Jerry Philogene, Sharon O’Brien, and Perin Gurel for our time together. Last but not least, I would like to thank my ­family. I am grateful to my parents for instilling within me the importance of learning. I am thankful to my b ­ rother, Justin Glick, for his companionship, understanding, and, of course, our mutual love of minutia; I appreciate his presence in my life more than he knows. I am grateful to Vanessa Erguiza for her warmth, patience, and friendship—­I look forward to what the f­ uture holds. I extend my complete and total gratitude to the Grappo f­amily—­from the Bronx, New York, to Holliston, Mas­sa­chu­setts—­and to the Ramos f­ amily, particularly Emily, for welcoming me, feeding me, and showing me a dif­f er­ent path. To my ­children, Rocco and Luz, whom I love and admire more with ­every passing day, I am grateful for the inspiration to always do and be better. To my nonhuman ­family, past and pres­ent—­Little, B., Snugs, Tortu, and Ralph—­I am forever thankful for feats of magnificent naughtiness and unassuming devotion. Fi­ nally, this book is dedicated to my partner, Laura Grappo, in appreciation of fifteen years, innumerable adventures, and a life I never i­ magined pos­si­ble.

Acknowl­edgments 

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INTRODUCTION

­Toward a Theory of Infrahumanity

On May  14, 1916, an article appeared in the Washington Post, bearing the title, “If Science Should Develop Apes into Useful Workers . . . ​Would a Race of Highly Intelligent Ape-­Laborers Have Souls, and so Be Entitled to Religious Instruction and Protection from the Degradation of Slavery?” (figure i.1). Covering recent developments in primate be­hav­ior studies, the piece described the work of two researchers: Robert Mearns Yerkes, a psychobiologist now remembered as the founding ­father of modern primatology, and William  H. Furness III, an anthropologist specializing in animal be­hav­ior. Although ultimately destined for very dif­fer­ent fates in the annals of history—­one celebrated, one forgotten—­Yerkes and Furness shared an interest that had begun to spread throughout the scientific community, namely, the use value of nonhuman primates for h ­ uman research purposes. While Yerkes became known for his work with chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans as models for ­human intelligence experiments, Furness spent his ­career training chimpanzees in forms of ­human mimicry, from the production of oral “speech” to the per­for­mance of manual ­labor.1 It was this latter point that the Post article marveled over, explaining how Furness’s work with the “Remarkable Chimpanzee ‘Mimi’ ” might offer a solution to “one of the most difficult prob­lems of civilized society”: how to “get men to do the rough and dirty work requiring ­little intelligence and much muscular effort . . . ​absolutely necessary to the existence of society.”2 Although ­these ruminations hardly live up to the article’s sensationalized title

F I G U R E  I . 1 .

“If Science Should Develop Apes into Useful Workers” (1916).

(sadly, ­there is no mention of nonhuman souls, religious instruction, or slavery throughout the text), they nonetheless provide an unusual variance on the common fears of ­human “degradation” and degeneration that are known to have haunted the United States at the turn of the twentieth ­century. From responses to the end of slavery, to the growing secularization of the American populace, to the production of empiricized racial hierarchies in both ­legal and scientific arenas, questions continually arose as to ­whether and how such a diverse society could survive the onset of modernity. While the instability of this era is a story already well told in the registers of history, 2 introduction

it is typically not a tale that begins with a coal-­shoveling chimpanzee, though perhaps it should be. In 1916—­the same year of Furness and Mimi’s brief fame—­Yerkes published a paper formally endorsing the widespread integration of primates into ­human psychological research, where he i­magined that they would serve as models of the “natu­ral” ­human mind, unrefracted by the prisms of technology and culture.3 Like many scientists of his moment, Yerkes was consumed with questions of evolution, ideas of innate versus learned difference, and, more generally, humankind’s relation to the animal kingdom. His interest in nonhuman primates stemmed from a commonly held belief that they ­were “living” missing links in the search for ­human ancestors, capable of offering insight into the nature of ­human be­hav­ior and development. ­Toward this end, Yerkes focused on what he called the “infrahuman” primates, due to their presumed proximity to mankind. Though by modern standards, this group would include the “­great apes,” or the taxonomic f­ amily Hominidae (composed of chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans), it is impor­tant to note that ­these terms are not equivalent.4 Rather, unlike con­temporary classifications that definitively link t­hese species together according to established evolutionary histories, their relationality during Yerkes’s era was murky at best. It was this ambiguity that grounded his interest in infrahuman primates—­which he alternately referred to as “almost” or “near” ­human. In many ways, the seeming interchangeability of the concept of the infrahuman in Yerkes’s work is a fitting instability, signaling a grasping for knowledge not yet defined or understood. While the term infrahuman itself dropped out of usage fairly quickly as taxonomic forms grew and diversified, the liminality implied by the concept itself, as well as the contexts in which it arose, should not be overlooked. This book reimagines the term infrahuman by using it as a framework from which to consider how the management of the human/nonhuman boundary has impacted a wide array of biopo­liti­cal phenomena. Indeed, the liminal biological and cultural states of humanity implied by the concept illuminate far more than a gesture t­ oward zoological nomenclature. Rather, as this book demonstrates, the infrahuman speaks to a vast network of thought surrounding the politics of race, nation, and embodiment that had already begun to rise within U.S. public culture by the late nineteenth c­ entury. I therefore reappropriate and rehabilitate the infrahuman in a way that pays homage both to its historical moment and to its lasting impact on hierarchies of evolution, hybrid speciation, dehumanization, and conditions of in­equality. By exploring the term’s modern root in evolutionary frameworks, Introduction 

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I call attention to the coproduction of ­human and nonhuman difference in both scientific and cultural spheres. In blunt terms, this work imagines the ­infrahuman as a position of liminal ­human speciation created within an anthropocentric frame. While such a characterization is not at odds with Yerkes’s original usage, I reconceptualize the term in new form as ideology and practice—or, infrahumanism/s. Articulating conventions of liminal speciation that exist in proximity to anthropomorphic being, infrahumanist ontologies mobilize ambiguities surrounding the bound­aries of the h ­ uman itself to engage forms of biologically determined difference that maintain broader hierarchies of speciation. In this context, the phrase “hierarchies of speciation” includes practices of ­human differentiation (via race, sex, and so on), which remain deeply bound to non/human evolutionary frames. In ­doing so, I foreground the discourse of species in the production of ­human biopo­liti­cal management and in­equality.

The Infrahuman

At its heart, this book is about the unsettled relationship between ideas of biological difference among ­human groups and practices of anthropomorphic speciation that cross the animal-­human boundary. It is a story about how we have come to view certain lives as valuable and ­others as not through the lens of speciation, and how the terms of humanity itself have become understood as at once universal and par­tic­u­lar, broadly encompassing and narrowly exclusionary. I argue that it is, in fact, through the very mobilization of the “­human”—as scientific classification, as rights-­bearing subject position, as discursive ontology—­that the promise of universal personhood and the real­ity of marginalized non/personhood are dually forged. This premise stands against more commonly held understandings of humanity as a desirable endpoint, the culmination of pro­cesses of po­liti­cal humanization, juridical enfranchisement, and liberal social pro­gress. ­These positivist conceptualizations can be seen across discourses of h ­ uman rights, academic theorizations of racism and antiracism, and multiculturalist rhe­ torics of diversity and inclusion. In ­these frameworks, humanity is used as a benchmark for standards of universal care and protection, where it is thought that simply “being h ­ uman” should be enough to warrant equal consideration. Yet what does “being h ­ uman” actually mean? Unlike most categorizations of corporeal and psychic difference, the h ­ uman remains deeply tied to a sense of biological essentialism that is perceived to be historically stable and 4 introduction

universally comprehended; in other words, to be ­human is often simply to belong to the “­human species.” This book interrogates t­ hese assumptions from a historical perspective to better understand how pro­cesses of h ­ uman speciation are contingent on prevailing cultural and scientific discourses. By unearthing debates about the nature of humanity across a wide variety of scientific disciplines—­including primatology, astrobiology, and biomedicine (pediatrics, infectious disease management, and organ transplantation)—­I demonstrate the importance of discourses of speciation to the historical construction of other categories of ­human difference. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth ­century, when massive shifts w ­ ere underway in the culture of scientific research due to the concurrent expansion of US imperialism, technological innovation, and urban industrialism, this narrative demonstrates how new theorizations of the h ­ uman and its ­“others” ­were critical to the fracturing of knowledge into disciplinary practices and modalities. Indeed, while hierarchies of speciation and the privileging of Western empiricism can be dated centuries earlier to the Eu­ro­pean scientific revolution, it was n ­ ot u ­ ntil the late 1800s, when anx­ie­ ties over profound demographic changes in American cities found articulation through the burgeoning sciences of eugenic hereditarianism. And while neither the scientific community nor the lay public agreed upon a dominant theorization of evolution—­whether from within the animal kingdom or between the ­human “races”—­issues surrounding biological difference and its pos­si­ ble meanings ­were increasingly at the forefront of national consciousness. Through the development of more refined animal and ­human research protocols, classificatory lines began to be redrawn with greater precision on and between bodies of difference. From the late 1800s onward, categorizations of life according to spiritual and religious meanings increasingly gave way to ideas about species survival and environmental sustainability as quantifiable, limited resources. At the same time, changes in biological understandings of speciation and h ­ uman life unfolded alongside iterations of the ­human as cultural and juridical form. In par­tic­u­lar, concerns about two vulnerable populations—­ children and animals—­became fodder for public debates surrounding the necessity of “humane treatment” in “modern” life.5 Led largely by w ­ omen’s social organ­izations involved in broader progressivist co­ali­tions, and bolstered by anti-­slavery rhe­toric dating prior to the Civil War, ­these movements articulated an understanding of the “­human” and “humane” as deeply interrelated. In this context, child abuse and animal abuse became understood as signifiers not only of individual moral failing, but also of a lack Introduction 

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of self-­restraint incongruous with the cool-­headed rationalism of scientific understandings of difference and hierarchy. Importantly, then, the inseparable moral and intellectual imperatives of humane care articulated by progressivist thought on the one hand, and debates surrounding the meaning of species difference and biological hierarchy on the other, unfolded at the same moment. It was in this era that the terms of biopo­liti­cal engagement ­were first stated through an interlocution of expert knowledge and civic participation, through the rise of “public health” as an institution and way of life. As scholars such as Warwick Anderson and Nayan Shah have demonstrated, the emergence and routinization of public health regulations—­indeed, the very notion of health as manageable in the public realm—­are inseparable from trajectories of U.S. empire-­building and racial formation.6 Less well understood is the role of discourses of nonhuman speciation and the management of nonhuman beings in the rapid transformation of scientific and popu­lar attitudes t­oward ­human bodily management and care. This book addresses t­ hese influences to illustrate how the categories of the h ­ uman, nonhuman, and infrahuman profoundly s­ haped understandings of embodied difference. I argue that this moment is marked by the arrival of a technics of the “infrahuman”—­not in the sense that Yerkes ­imagined it, but rather, as a liminal subjectivity bound through practices of speciation, where lines drawn between and within the ­human and nonhuman realms provide critical vectors in the determination of matterable life. To chronicle the infrahuman is therefore to make manifest specific practices of humanization and dehumanization, anthropomorphization and deanthropomorphization, in a way that bridges the gap between sociocultural-­juridical definitions of humanity as a rights-­based category and scientific definitions of humanity as a marker of empirical speciation. ­Here, it is impor­tant to pause and acknowledge the distinction between de/humanization and de/anthropomorphization—­while the former is typically understood in relation to questions of ­human in/dignity, the latter often connotes a privileging of ­human speciation characteristics in the assessment of nonhuman beings. Yet, as this proj­ect demonstrates, this separation of meaning often serves to occlude rather than clarify. Similarly, the term non/personhood—­referenced in the book’s title—­speaks to specific understandings of the ­legal category of (the) “person/hood”—­which in theory has been synonymous with “human/ity,” but which in practice has been reserved for individuals that inhabit dominant sex/race/class positions. Again, however, I do not use the terms of “person/hood” and “human/ity” in op6 introduction

position to each other, nor do I imagine that ­either can be separated from discourses of biological essentialism. The history offered in what follows thus incorporates the symbolic realm of po­liti­cal ideologies and the seemingly concrete, although ultimately figurative, realm of scientific classification, in order to understand their coproduction. I demonstrate how the concept of the h ­ uman has been used as a rhetorical veil for parity and inclusion, in spite of its practical usage for purposes of exclusion, and how this denigration is often mobilized through infrahumanist ontologies. Unlike concepts such as the “inhuman” or the “subhuman,” which, in spite of the latter’s indefinite prefix, typically denote a binary relation with the ­human, I intend the infrahuman to suggest an ongoing pro­cess of differentiation that hierarchizes ­human life through a shifting discourse of speciation. At times, this discourse draws strength from con­temporary proj­ ects of racialization and sexualization, moral and po­liti­cal economies of non/ personhood, and/or standards of normative able-­bodiment. My deployment of the term infrahuman therefore differs from other scholarly uses, where it typically stands as a synonym for subhumanity. For example, sociologist Paul Gilroy uses the term in his work on Enlightenment philosophy and racial genealogy, employing it in contexts dealing with dehumanization and disenfranchisement; at turns, it stands in for the subaltern, the slave, black non/personhood, and a type of “bare life” (in the tradition of Giorgio Agamben, addressed shortly).7 Nonetheless, Gilroy’s work bears mentioning ­here for two reasons: first, he is one of the only con­ temporary academic writers to make use of the word itself; second, his work speaks to an impor­tant theme in critical race theory, namely, the plea that we must strive to work t­ oward a “common humanity,” or the possibility of a radically antiracist humanism. By contrast, this book considers the “­human” itself as a central prob­lem in rights frameworks and in relation to expectations of liberal Western personhood. Importantly, this laudatory formulation manages to coexist alongside critiques of humanist ideology that continually demonstrate how Enlightenment hierarchies of life enable pro­cesses of exclusion and disenfranchisement. We must ask, then, why the condemnation of Enlightenment humanism has not extended to the figure of the ­human itself, or how and why it has become pos­ si­ble to think of the h ­ uman outside and apart from the terms of humanism. In his work on what he calls the “government of species,” Neel Ahuja offers insight into this paradox, asserting that it is likely an effect of the unexplored “colonial genealogies of the posthumanist turn” in con­temporary scholarship. Referring to the rise of new work across the humanities and social sciences Introduction 

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that engages with nonhuman positionalities and anthropocentric frameworks, “the posthumanist turn” is at once “post-­humanist”—in the sense of reevaluating humanist ontologies—­and “post-­human”—in the sense of being beyond the h ­ uman. According to Ahuja, however, “posthuman knowledge proj­ects” are haunted by undercurrents of racialization and imperialism, a fact that becomes “particularly evident when environments or animals are rendered through tropes of wilderness external to the ­human or when turns to animals, environments, and t­ hings rely on a figure of unmarked whiteness in the form of the universal ­human.”8 In this same vein, Infrahumanisms suggests that post/humanist discourses frequently rely on problematic iconographies of the h ­ uman. For example, on the one hand, optimism surrounding the potentially restorative universality of the h ­ uman pushes back against histories of racist and xenophobic thought, which served to parse and hierarchize diverse bodies and subjectivities. Yet on the other hand, the desirability of this shift—­from vertical to horizontal conceptualizations of matterable life—­fails to recognize the h ­ uman itself as a term that is already deeply imbricated within, and productive of, states of non/personhood. That is to say, rather than arguing for the ethical expansion of the par­ameters of the ­human (in which historically marginalized groups’ fundamental humanity is recognized and codified in law), it is imperative to look to the terms of humanity itself as the very site of ongoing conditions of in­equality. ­Here we might cite scholarship on the shortcomings of ­human rights proj­ects as an example of why the positivist language surrounding the ­human must be reconsidered. Take, for instance: Carole Pateman’s and Charles Mills’s theorizations of the “sexual contract” and “racial contract,” respectively, wherein it is demonstrated that sexual and racial inequalities are constitutive rather than aberrant features of U.S. po­liti­cal history; or, the long-­standing refusal to recognize sexual vio­lence as a “­human” rather than “­women’s” rights issue, as illustrated by Miriam Ticktin; or, the development of new military techniques of “enhanced interrogation” in an era characterized by a distaste for more familiar h ­ uman rights violations, as demonstrated by Darius Rejali.9 In the Western juridical arena, the ­human is typically defined in negative relation, against forms of vio­lence deemed “inhumane.” The circularity of this definition—in which the terms of protectionism and enfranchisement are guided by ambiguous conceptualizations of degradation—is often left unquestioned. To do so, it seems, is itself an inhumane act. And so, the “­human” of ­human rights discourse, and of the law in the Western tradition more broadly, appears to speak less through concrete channels of ­legal 8 introduction

subjecthood and more through vague modalities of species membership. Evidence of this formulation can be seen in the recent movement for nonhuman personhood rights, where animal rights activists have used the purportedly inalienable attributes of humanity (intelligence, rationality, and so on) to argue for the liberation of certain nonhuman species.10 In ­doing so, symbolic characteristics associated with the h ­ uman are mobilized to enable the bound­aries of ­legal personhood to extend across species lines. Yet ­these symbolic characteristics are not only created from a ­legal or philosophical standpoint. In addition, they rely on an ambiguous application of scientific theory that first and foremost consolidates the ­human as a species, and secondarily marks it as a unit defined by mea­sur­able attributes. In both ­legal and scientific frameworks, the species divide trumps all other forms of differentiation. While many members of the h ­ uman race do not meet anthropomorphic thresholds of normative cognition, they remain, for all intents and purposes, “­human beings,” even if their treatment by society is frequently dehumanizing or in violation of the very tenants of the sanctity of ­human life. Similarly, animal rights activists pursuing nonhuman personhood status for certain species have used scientific evidence, ranging from brain scans to behavioral studies, to assert that ­legal personhood should not be demarcated by species membership. Still ­others, in the tradition of scholars such as Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum, have placed t­hese arguments in conversation with one another, asking how and why it is that anthropocentric systems of thought include certain h ­ uman individuals who do not meet established standards of intellectual capacity, while excluding other nonhuman subjects who do.11 At the same time, even as the use value of h ­ uman species difference is frequently queried (how and in what way humanness m ­ atters to conversations about the right to life and self-­determination, among other issues), the ­actual terms of the ­human as a quantifiable, biological species are not usually interrogated. By contrast, Infrahumanisms examines the legacy of the ­human as a historical production that shifts according to time and place. Infrahumanisms holds no faith in the “­human” as a reservoir of potential social change. Rather, it is a history of both ­human and nonhuman subjectivity, as told through the lenses of U.S. science and culture, in which the discourse of universal humanity is demonstrated to produce axes of in­equality, vio­lence, and biological essentialism. Such a history necessarily moves beyond the literal ­human boundary into the realm of animality, which scholars have only just begun to unpack as a site where unequal states of humanity are brokered. In the chapters that follow, I use the term infrahuman to begin to bring ­these Introduction 

9

discourses together in a way that demonstrates the interlocking significance of practices of speciation, de/humanization, and de/anthropomorphization. The infrahuman is therefore not synonymous with other categorizations. It is not the subaltern or the invisible subject position of the global ­under caste; it is not the slave or the figuration of social or po­liti­cal death; it is not blackness nor nonwhiteness, ­because it serves as a symbolically deracinated placeholder in both technical and popu­lar realms; and fi­nally, it is not “bare life” (although it does find interlocution with this term in chapter 4’s treatment of the post-­Holocaust moment).12 Thus, at certain times and places, specific subject positions or broader categories of difference may fall within contours that are encompassed by the infrahuman, but I want to be clear that my use of the term stands apart through a critical refracting of both ­human and nonhuman biopolitics. Ultimately, I argue that unmasking this ideology is crucial to better understanding the per­sis­tence of ­human social in­equality, laying bare the rhe­torics of being “beyond” or “post” race, gender, and other forms of social difference thought now to be on the precipice of mere social construction. At the same time, I argue that the infrahumanist episteme is also critical in the configuration of species difference and species hierarchy, in relation to both animal rights and nonhuman personhood. I explore how h ­ uman and nonhuman oppression are ultimately reciprocally fortifying and mystifying. The title of this book thus founds a new idiom to encompass rituals of infrahuman speciation: infrahumanism/s. Infrahumanist ideology can be ­imagined as humanism’s shadow Other, the very ­thing that bolsters the strategic use of the ­human as a positivist category. It is about the utilization of discourses of species difference, the practice of speciation, and the maintenance of ­human and nonhuman hierarchies that serve broader biopo­ liti­cal aims. For example, what did it mean that the eugenics movement gained strength alongside the expansion of nonhuman speciation proj­ects, particularly the symbolic racialization of higher order primates? Or, how can we rethink the birth of ge­ne­tic research at midcentury as a field that once included the search for “alien” life in outer space—­a proj­ect that took shape in the age of “Three Worlds,” when the decolonization of the Global South gave way to yet another extra/terrestrial frontier? Or, more broadly, how has the breaching of the species boundary in biomedical experimentation and concerns surrounding zoonotic (cross-­species) contagion been informed by con­temporary ideologies of race, kinship, and nation? In all ­these instances and more, I demonstrate how infrahumanist frameworks mobilize the liminally ­human subject as a comparative point for the justi10 introduction

fication of biological essentialism and the naturalization of social hierarchy. As such, infrahumanist ideologies further biopo­liti­cal austerity narratives of survival and extinction, in which the needs of literal and symbolic ­human groups, and literal and symbolic nonhuman groups, are often pitted against each other.

Contexts

This proj­ect draws on, seeks to contribute to, and yet departs from four primary interrelated fields of inquiry that have received considerable attention within the past two de­cades of humanities scholarship: (1) biopo­liti­cal inquiries into “­human rights,” (2) historical treatments of the afterlife of eugenic science, (3) biomedicalization and critical bioethics, and (4) animal studies’ theorizations about the hierarchization of ­human and nonhuman life.13 In this brief section, I w ­ ill situate the book in relation to a series of ongoing issues and debates, while reserving a more detailed exploration of each for the chapters that follow. Within recent years, the question of ­human rights has been addressed primarily from a juridico-­political perspective, while also drawing heavi­ly from Michel Foucault’s theorization of biopower, or, “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the ­human species became the object of a po­liti­cal strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how starting from the 18th  ­century, modern Western socie­ties took on board the fundamental biological fact that h ­ uman beings 14 are a species.” (Of interest to this proj­ect, certainly, is the use of “species” ­here—­even though it is not typically interrogated as such in treatments of Foucault’s work.) Motivated in part by the mounting war on terror and its attendant forms of torture and dehumanization, as well as renewed interest in the history of the Nazi Holocaust, recent scholarly treatments of biopower have further crystallized around Agamben’s concepts of “bare life” (defined as a form of life regulable by the state yet devoid of all po­liti­ cal rights) and the “state of exception” (defined as a signpost of sovereign power, asserted through the suspension, rather than the enactment, of state laws). For Agamben, it is the state of exception that enables the condition of bare life, and he uses the example of po­liti­cal prisoners as a way to think through how a subject might experience a form of national inclusion vis-­à-­ vis the premise of po­liti­cal exclusion.15 ­Relatedly, Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability” has become pivotable in considerations about the nature of disposable versus meaningful life. As Butler notes, “specific lives cannot be Introduction 

11

apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living” through par­tic­u­lar affective modes, “ethical dispositions,” and “a selective and differential framing of vio­lence.”16 Similarly, scholars of culture, law, and lit­er­a­ture, such as Lisa Marie Cacho, Colin Dayan, and Alexander Weheylie, have begun to reformulate the concept of “social death” called forth by sociologist Orlando Patterson’s earlier work on the history of international slavery. While Cacho has illuminated the profound criminalization of marginal populations as a form of modern social death, Dayan uses the concept of “civil death” to explore how the law is used to socially disable par­tic­u­lar populations, in which the subject is “drained of self-­identity, forever anomalous, condemned as extraneous to civil society, excluded from belonging.”17 In his assessment of biopo­liti­cal philosophy’s crude circumvention of black feminist theory, Weheylie critiques the centrality of Foucault and Agamben in dominant scholarly iterations of biopower, noting how the reliance upon t­ hese late twentieth-­century thinkers often works to erase earlier histories of colonial vio­lence and racialized slavery (and in this re­spect, his critique of biopo­liti­cal theory dovetails with Ahuja’s assessment of posthumanism’s racial amnesia). Weheylie’s work addresses “racializing assemblages of subjection” through an idiom that he calls “habeas viscus”—­“you ­shall have the flesh”—to begin to unpack the historical dehumanization of nonwhite persons at and beyond the site of the body.18 Infrahumanisms builds upon t­hese works, while also contrasting with them, by addressing states of personhood that are often not formally stripped of po­liti­cal rights or inclusivity but nonetheless experience forms of de facto cultural and po­liti­cal exclusion based on differential conditions of embodiment and identity, including race, gender, sexuality, disability, and disease status. ­Toward this end, the history of eugenic thought becomes an impor­tant backdrop for conversations about the nature of ­human evolution, pro­gress, and changeability. Existing scholarship on eugenic science has addressed t­ hese concepts in both transparent and opaque ways. Eugenic theory has been shown to be profoundly impor­tant in the production of early twentieth-­century nationalist sentiment and corporeal classifications. At the same time, the ubiquitous dispersal of eugenic princi­ples throughout the course of the mid-­to late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries has become a pivot point in conversations about state power and the nature of embodied life. Scholars such as Alexandra Minna Stern, Nancy Ordover, Troy Duster, and Dorothy Roberts have all identified the ways in which post-­Holocaust eugenic science began to appear ­under other names and disciplinary 12 introduction

frameworks. Stern has demonstrated the legacy of eugenic thinking in reproductive research and clinical practice. Ordover has contextualized eugenic theories of sexuality within a larger chronology of thought surrounding the pathologization of queer bodies and sex acts, from early sexological studies, to the decline of the formal eugenics movement, and fi­nally, into the era of queer liberation. Duster has shown that the very enterprise of ge­ne­tic science is bound by inherently racist princi­ples that ­will inevitably lead ­toward new forms of oppression and exclusion (quoting from Rus­sian playwright Anton Chekhov, he notes, “if in the first act, you hang a gun upon the wall, by the third act, you must use it”).19 Fi­nally, Roberts has identified the significance of racial science in posteugenic visions of ­women’s health, reproductive politics, and ge­ne­tic engineering, suggesting the ways in which t­ hese fields have operated according to par­tic­u­lar racial codes and categorizations.20 Stern, Ordover, Duster, and Roberts represent an impor­tant new generation of thought surrounding the omnipresence and slipperiness of eugenic ideology. Their work speaks to the changing nature of medical science and practice in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, a transformation described by Adele E. Clarke, Janet K. Shim, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, and Jennifer  R. Fishman as a movement from pro­cesses of “medicalization to biomedicalization.” Clarke and her coauthors identify this progression as a shift from “control over biomedical phenomena to transformations of them,” achieved through risk assessment and surveillance procedures, the growth of the global bioeconomy, the emergence of new ge­ne­tic technologies, the intensification of medical information management, and the emergence of new “individual and collective technoscientific identities.”21 Recent lit­er­a­ture treating pro­cesses of biomedicalization has largely emphasized new forms of bodily commodification occasioned by technological innovation and existing conditions of socioeconomic and geopo­liti­ cal in­equality. Ideas of “genomic capital” (Kaushik Sunder Rajan), “clinical ­labor” (Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby), “life as surplus” (Cooper), and “biological citizenship” (Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas) articulate an austerity politics of the body, where biomedical innovation u ­ nder late capitalism is understood to ascend in direct proportion to the fracturing and desanctification of h ­ uman life. Th ­ ese scholars demonstrate how the proliferation and commercialization of ge­ne­tic knowledge, the rise of the phar­ ma­ceu­ti­cal industrial complex, and the role of scientific advancement in the spiral of transnational conditions of privation are often overlooked in the name of “universal” pro­gress.22 Introduction 

13

Importantly, scholarship that addresses pro­cesses of biomedicalization has come to fruition at the same moment as the emergence of the field of animal studies. But the connections between ­these fields—­that is, the question of neoeugenics and the question of the animal-­human boundary, or what we might call bioethics writ large—­are impor­tant and remain largely underexplored. Recent works by scholars such as Ahuja and Mel Y. Chen have just begun to illuminate the connections between the ­human sciences, biopower, and species difference. Ahuja has called attention to issues of scale and geography, where the biomedical use of animals is ­imagined to signify the terms of postcoloniality and racial alterity. Examining the history of disease management as a technique of imperialism, Ahuja proposes the concept of “dread life” to describe the “racialized channeling of the fear of infectious disease into optimism regarding the remaking of life through technical intervention.”23 In ­doing so, he demonstrates how governmental concerns over the spread of contagious illnesses have often sought to manage h ­ uman life through the manipulation, regulation, and decimation of nonhuman life. Chen has further broadened configurations of the human-animal boundary by thinking through the politics of “animacy”—or “qualit(ies) of agency, awareness, mobility, and liveness”—in relation to questions of health and debility, queer sexuality, and po­liti­cal identification.24 ­These works offer impor­tant complications to more traditional narratives of animality that have undergirded the foundations of the field of animal studies, itself less than a c­ ouple of de­cades old. Cary Wolfe—­whose Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (2003) is widely cited as a field-­originating text—­has been both hailed for almost single-­handedly introducing animal studies to the main ways of academic legitimacy and si­mul­ta­neously criticized for divorcing repre­sen­ ta­tional meanings from the lived realities of his subjects. For instance, Greta Gaard notes that we must consider w ­ hether the “growth of animal studies has been good for animals,” interrogating Wolfe’s oft-­repeated phrase that “we need to understand that the ethical and philosophical urgency of confronting the institution of speciesism and crafting a posthumanist theory of the subject has nothing to do with ­whether you like animals.”25 Gaard argues that statements like t­hese demonstrate a broader problematic within the aims of the field, which has in turn failed to acknowledge the long legacy of eco/feminist thought surrounding symbolic discourses of non/human oppression and ­actual forms of vio­lence and exploitation. Referring to Wolfe’s work alongside Jacques Derrida’s famous essay on his cat (in “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” 1997), as well as Donna Haraway’s perplexing engage14 introduction

ment with canine agility competitions (in When Species Meet, 2008), Gaard laments that “no one should have been surprised, then, when the confluence of Derrida’s discovery of himself as an animal, Wolfe’s coinage of the term ‘posthumanism,’ and Haraway’s exploration of dog training together catapulted the field of animal studies into academic respectability.”26 Thus while Wolfe, Derrida, and Haraway are often credited with cracking open the question of the animal to a broader audience by demonstrating its repre­sen­ta­tional value, they also stand in complicated relation to scholars such as Gaard and Ahuja, who remain skeptical about the possibilities of posthumanist animal studies. ­Those whose work aligns with the latter group call for a clearer comparison between the stakes of animal studies and more well-­established fields known for their interrogation of power, subjectivity, and embodiment, including feminist studies, critical race studies, queer studies, and disability studies. Making ­these connections reveals the impossibility of simply bypassing the subject at stake—­the animal—in order to produce a usable ontological framework. As Vasile Stanescu has argued, following Carol Adams’s earlier work, “feminism should not simply end at the species divide. Nor, for that ­matter, should gay, lesbian, or queer rights.”27 Yet for other scholars still, eschewing the potential radicalism of animal studies has become a popu­lar strategic move to solicit a wider audience. Robert  C. Jones, for instance, delineates between what he calls “vegan 1” and “vegan 2”: two competing trajectories of animal activism and related scholarship. While Jones describes the vegan 1 position as a type of “self-­ righteous zealot[ry]” that “preaches veganism as the only way to go, and judges non-­vegans as inauthentic and shirking their responsibility to ‘the cause’ ” (further noting that he wishes to “avoid” this group), he suggests that the vegan 2 position is “not a lifestyle, but an ‘aspiration’ . . . ​an endless work-­in-­progress, a pro­cess of d ­ oing the best one can to minimize damage—­ vio­lence, exploitation, domination, objectification—­whenever and wherever we can.”28 And yet the same arguments would never occur in other related fields. To divorce real life forms of oppression from ­those that are repre­ sen­ta­tional or philosophical—in the cases of race, sexuality, gender, class, nationality, religion, or disability, and beyond—­would immediately be understood as myopic at best, immoral at worst. And so animal studies strug­gles for legitimacy even as the tools of that legitimacy work to undo the very aims of the field for so many of us. To be clear, this book is interested in the welfare and rights of all living beings. It treats questions of (infra)­human social and po­liti­cal difference and inclusion, and, as such, it acknowledges the deep and abiding connections Introduction  15

between ­human and nonhuman suffering. Indeed, its central aim is to reveal this interrelationality, to illuminate its history, its vocabulary, and its psyche. And yet even so, I am not unsympathetic to questions of disciplinary mattering—­after all, if scholarship is the repre­sen­ta­tional realm of the acad­ emy, it is also made more or less pos­si­ble by the “real world” consequences of funding, opportunity, and employment. I see this book as contributing to the vast and difficult conversation about the place of nonhuman animals in the humanist acad­emy. How and where animals should enter; how and in what way their lives reflect on and mold conditions of ­human life—­these are questions that I seek to address, while acknowledging their impossible complexity. Moreover, although this book directly queries the social, po­liti­cal, and ­scientific place of animals for their own sake, it is most centrally concerned with identifying the critical roles that discourses of infrahumanity have played in leveraging certain nonhuman beings and devaluing certain ­human beings. Infrahumanisms is therefore about the production of the dehumanizing impulse, while also acknowledging that the underbelly of this impulse is the humanization of par­tic­u­lar animal species. This is not to say that the hierarchization of species is only problematic in light of h ­ uman disenfranchisement; rather, infrahumanist epistemologies unfold precisely ­because we are dealing with a zero-­sum game. When thresholds of survivability all depend on the same economy of resources, rights, and spaces of inhabitance, t­ here ­will always be sliding scales of enfranchisement and dispossession. Much like the impossibility of questioning the sanctity of “­human rights” without somehow devaluing them, the real­ity that radical theorizations of nonhuman rights and/or personhood may be irreconcilable with idealized h ­ uman rights and/or personhood is an issue that has yet to be fully grappled with. Addressing the interrelationality of racism, sexism, and speciesism, Claire Jean Kim proposes a “multi-­optic vision” that encourages a re­orientation ­toward an ethics of mutual avowal, or open and active acknowl­edgment of connection with other strug­gles. . . . ​If disavowal is a closing off, a repudiation, a turning away from, avowal is an opening, a recognition, a turning ­toward. . . . ​If we develop an ethics of mutual avowal in relation to other justice strug­gles, we not only reduce the chance we w ­ ill reinscribe other forms of oppression . . . ​but also open ourselves to new ways of imagining ourselves in relation to ­others. . . . ​If single-­optic vision generates a Manichean opposition of oppressor and victim, multi-­optic begins with and in turn reinforces 16 introduction

a sense that positionality is a very complicated ­thing indeed. In a dense web of relationships structured by multiple forms of difference, ­simple oppositions such as powerful/powerless, good/bad, over/under have limited purchase. Positionality is better ­imagined as fractured, contingent, and continually disputed.29 While Kim identifies a series of recent critical events that demonstrate the importance of her call to a multi-­optic approach—­from the controversy over San Francisco’s Chinatown live animal markets, to the management of nonnative amphibian species across the state of California—we are nonetheless left with the question of remaining structural hierarchies. Arguing against simplistic comparisons that prioritize dif­fer­ent forms of suffering and against intersectional approaches that can potentially obscure the specificities of dif­fer­ent groups’ experiences, Kim proposes a more fluid conceptualization of positionality and “avowal.” In ­doing so, she articulates how existing analytic frameworks appear to suffer from narrow and static perspectives. Yet what if the types of friction Kim argues against—­racism versus speciesism, sexism versus racism, and so on—­are not always the result of reductive thinking? Rather, what if ­these comparisons are in fact necessary to both historical and con­temporary conceptualizations of oppression? In other words, if we consider that the disavowal of speciesism has frequently relied on the avowal of racism, and vice versa, it is not enough to suggest a more pluralistic positionality. Rather, we must interrogate how and why ­these categorizations have come to be mutually exclusive, and how and why maintaining them—­even if for the singular reason of appreciating diverse standpoints—­does not fully answer the question of how we might begin to think beyond existing conditions of in­equality. In this book, the intersections between diverse forms of oppression are understood as ontologically necessary. Th ­ ese compulsory intersections often reproduce states of ­human in­equality in the name of nonhuman rights. Moreover, when we see instances of vio­lence ­toward animals being compared with vio­lence t­ oward marginalized h ­ uman populations, we must acknowledge that u ­ nless we are willing to take a completely universalist perspective on all living forms (and even then, we would be confronted with beings that inhabit liminal states of vitality)—we cannot ethically argue for the direct comparison of ­people and animals. One haunting example of this resides in the appropriation of a slogan that was originally linked to the Black Lives ­Matter Movement by animal rights activists, which stated, “I am Introduction 

17

Trayvon.” Initially coined in 2012 to mourn the vigilante murder of a young African American boy named Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and further used to call attention to broader patterns of state-­endorsed vio­lence against African Americans, the phrase soon became picked up and reframed by vari­ous animal rights organ­izations. Two of the most well-­known examples include the usage of “I am Lennox” in 2012  in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and “I am Cecil” in 2015 across the U.S. In the first case, activists ­adopted the phrase to protest Breed Specific Legislation (bsl) policies that resulted in the euthanization of a pitbull named Lennox; in the second case, activists used the phrase to rally against the slaughter of a lion named Cecil by an American tourist on safari at the Hwange National Park in Matabeleland North, Zimbabwe.30 While ­these campaigns received a wide variety of reactions, ­those in ­favor generally noted that by definition, vio­lence justified by a victim’s identity, ­whether ­human or nonhuman, was the very definition of prejudice. By contrast, ­those who opposed the comparison argued that it dehumanized Martin and made light of his death, a critique that animal rights’ activists deemed speciesist. In a sense, neither group was exactly wrong, but the controversy illuminated the difficulty of trying to extricate racism from speciesism and vice versa. Perhaps more to the point, however, is the way in which the appropriation of Martin’s death ignored the larger real­ity of juridical constructions of enfranchisement. While Western socie­ties are hardly settled on the question of animal rights (such that even ­those in ­favor of animal advocacy often do not approach all species with equal concern), modern ­human rights frameworks have officially been codified since the ­middle of the twentietha ­century. The real­ity that t­ hese frameworks have not been sufficient to ameliorate the exploitation and abuse of many populations within even the wealthiest nations cannot be understood as accidental; to raise the question of animal rights as a minority rights issue—­and vice versa—­disavows the imbrication of the law in tautologies of suffering. Infrahumanisms therefore examines narratives of speciation and the production of the animal-­human boundary in the interest of unearthing critical connections between other forms of social, cultural, and biological difference. I argue that nonhuman subjectivities and positionalities are impor­tant to a wide variety of intellectual proj­ects precisely b ­ ecause they demand that we rethink so many long-­held truths. They force us to rethink biological meaning and difference. They are a social construction insofar as every­thing is—­but at the same time, the primary discourse that we use to articulate who “they” are comes from biology. ­Here, differences between life forms are articulated 18 introduction

through scientific taxonomies, without much regard for their subjective or intersectional natures. An equivalent form of reasoning would be to use biological theories of heredity in order to understand race without regard for other influential f­actors, or without offering a stern critique of hereditarianism. In this post/multicultural moment, such a claim would seem ridicu­lous; however, the story of animals tells us that we need to look again. Embedded within the discourses of nonhuman speciation—­including conceptualizations of survival, instinct, and be­hav­ior—­are the vestiges of deeply and profoundly held theories of biological essentialism that still provide the critical basis for so many invisible and problematic understandings of h ­ uman difference. And yet animals cannot and should not be ­imagined as simply another marginalized group. As theorists of intersectionality have demonstrated, comparing groups always elides points of commonality and coproduction; ­there are also significant material differences at stake in considering nonhuman ontologies. Animals do not have any kind of power of mobilization or retrenchment. They cannot speak for themselves. They cannot be asked what they want, though we can make educated assumptions about their desires. It is indeed hard to think of any kind of ethic aside from nonintervention that might be conscientiously held. It is not the intention of this book to answer this question. But it is also not unimportant that the thresholds of the h ­ uman and nonhuman worlds are in a constant state of mutually produced flux.

Sites

The chapters that follow offer a history and theorization of how we have come to think about the h ­ uman and its spectral o ­ thers as critical positions in cultural configurations, rights-­based frameworks, and scientific research proj­ects. I argue that the categorical imperative of the h ­ uman is not incidental or contrary to conditions of disenfranchisement and marginalization but rather is central to the ways in which spheres of belonging and alienation become mapped and executed. I contend that the infrahuman is a terrain on which science and popu­lar culture work out the details of biocultural difference. At dif­fer­ent times and places, the infrahuman is a category that comes to be occupied by dif­fer­ent populations. Although t­ here are no doubt many other spaces in which one could locate the infrahuman, I chose the following sites for their significant presence within both scientific and popu­lar cultures. Moreover, I have addressed them at the moments in which they ­rose to national consciousness, instead of the moments in which they became fully institutionalized. Introduction 

19

Or­gan­i­za­tion­ally, the book is divided into three chronological sections of two chapters each: (1) “Bioexpansionism, 1900s–1930s,” (2) “Extraterrestriality, 1940s–1970s,” and (3) “Interiority, 1980s–2010s.” The first section, “Bioexpansionism, 1900s–1930s,” demonstrates how the concept of the infrahuman took shape at precisely the moment in which the hegemony of modern, empirical, scientific discourse became established, persisting as the remainder of a more ambiguous past. This was the moment in which Furness and Yerkes embarked upon their respective proj­ects with anthropoid apes, and in which scientists and the lay public alike became increasingly curious about non/human primate speciation. This interest was linked to broader concerns about the futurity of (white) humanity in the wake of massive demographic transformations resulting from urbanization, industrialization, and domestic and international migration patterns. I use the term bioexpansionism to connote the widespread dissemination of new scientific ideologies and practices regarding biological meaning and difference on the one hand, and the rising tide of biopo­liti­cal tactics of governance on the other. Indeed, the turn of the twentieth ­century can aptly be characterized as a period of both small- and large-scale scientific revolutions, when fields that addressed issues of evolution, heredity, and the nature/culture divide became sites of technical debate, increased governmental funding, and public conversation. At the same time, the embeddedness of racism and xenophobia within t­hese fields—­even when official language spoke in neutral terms—­ suggests how public enthusiasm for scientific pro­gress was guided by a hunger for po­liti­cally usable formulations of biological essentialism. This was the moment that witnessed the full instantiation of Foucauldian biopower, marking the growth of population management techniques that relied on both private and civic forms of participation. I argue that ­these techniques w ­ ere further imbricated with vari­ous intellectual proj­ects concerning both ­human and nonhuman speciation. Situating the proj­ect within three cultural-­scientific narratives—­the popularization of eugenics, the history of primatology, and the “invention” of modern childhood—­part I examines the centrality of evolutionary discourse and racial science within early twentieth-­century U.S. public culture. Chapter 1, “Brief Histories of Time: Nature, Culture, and the Making of Modern Childhood,” examines the language of childhood in the parks and recreation movement, the rise of pediatric psy­chol­ogy and physiology, and the creation of a distinct form of ­children’s outdoorsmanship. Chapter 2, “Ocular Anthropomorphisms: Eugenics and Primatology at the Threshold of the 20 introduction

‘Almost ­Human,’ ” illustrates how the racialization of higher order primates in scientific and popu­lar discourse worked to abet scientific racism in the years of its “official” decline. Part I thus demonstrates the significance of seemingly unrelated phenomena—­from the symbolic role of the “child” in definitions of infrahumanity to the mapping of biological race on and through the bodies of nonhuman creatures. Moving from early twentieth-­century considerations of the primitive, the second section, “Extraterrestriality, 1940s–1970s,” looks in the opposite direction, to the utopian and futuristic fantasies offered by the nation’s initial forays into outer space. To this end, this section of the book traces the nation’s increased interest in extraterrestrial life at midcentury and reads the cultural fascination with the “alien” body as a symptom of postwar racial melancholia. Unlike part I, in which the infrahuman is understood to be a liminal evolutionary subject, the infrahuman of part II is located within a politics of alienation. That is, rather than considering prehistories of h ­ uman existence, part II treats ­imagined posthistories of ­human life that posit their own theories of ­human degeneration. Chapter  3, “On Alien Ground: Extraterrestrial Sightings, Atomic Warfare, and the Undoing of the ­Human Body,” considers the devastating effects of atomic and biological weaponry, alongside the anticipated arrival of alien beings that ­were predicted to incite a re-­hierarchization of species, nations, and races. Chapter 4, “Inner and Outer Spaces: Exobiology, H ­ uman Ge­ne­tics, and the Disembodiment of Corporeal Difference,” recovers lost histories of space science that reveal the close connections between the histories of the search for extraterrestrial life and the rise of ge­ne­tic engineering. In ­doing so, part II offers a genealogy of the “posthuman,” a term that has come to suggest a dual meaning of ontological removal from humanist frameworks on the one hand and, on the other, a positivist understanding of technological pro­gress and cyborgian posterity. At first glance, this latter type of posthumanism might appear to stand in opposition to the pre-­or transitory states of humanity suggested by the conceptual framework of the infrahuman. To be sure, the notion of the techno-­scientifically produced cyborg is generally understood to advance “beyond” the ­human, w ­ hether in terms of physical or cognitive ability; therefore, the figure of the cyborg is often ­imagined as a type of super, or supra, ­human. By contrast, I demonstrate how narratives of the posthuman, ­whether in the form of ­actual scientific innovation or in the form of the science fiction imaginary, are largely guided by anx­ie­ ties about the per­sis­ tence of the infrahuman form, and ultimately how par­tic­u­lar forms of Introduction 

21

technological advancement—­including eugenics and industrial warfare—­ are perceived to threaten a reversal of anthropoid evolution. The last section of the book, “Interiority, 1980s–2010s,” shifts to another form of bodily alterity: disease. By treating the emergence and cultural resonance of modern zoonotic (cross-­species) diseases, focusing on hiv/aids, as well as the return of “eugenic” rhe­toric in medical, ­legal, and cultural constructions of obesity and xenotransplantation (cross-­species transplantation), this section reflects on the increasingly public nature of health rec­ords and knowledge systems. In so ­doing, part III demonstrates how expanding knowledge of corporeal interiority has generated new categories of embodiment and social difference that have begun to reformulate older conceptualizations of racial and national identity. Chapter 5, “Of Sodomy and Cannibalism: Disgust, Dehumanization, and the Rhe­torics of Same-­Sex and Cross-­Species Contagion,” loops back to discourses of the primitive, which increasingly haunt configurations of “foreign” dietary and sexual cultures in an age of heightened global proximities. Using the recent history of animal rights and wildlife conservationist discourse concerning the uses and consumption of animal bodies, this chapter considers how issues of species hierarchy are reproduced through racial, sexual, and national tropes. Chapter 6, “Every­thing except the Squeal: Porcine Hybridity in the Obesity ‘Epidemic’ and Xenotransplantation Research,” examines the use of pigs in the manufacture of artificial ­human organs, as well as in symbolic conceptualizations of the current panic over obesity. In both cases, I demonstrate how pigs are deployed as a hybridized “spare part” species for bioeconomic ends, necessitating a standardization of the h ­ uman body untainted by material difference. Fi­nally, the conclusion, “The Plurality Is Near: Techniques of Symbiotic Re-­speciation,” addresses nascent advances in entomological weaponization and the mapping of the microbiome to contemplate pos­si­ble ­futures of the infrahuman. In brief, then, part I traces the engagement with “primitive” forms of life; part II examines the use of “posthuman” models of life; and part III illuminates the uncomfortable desire for release from both ends of the spectrum. Although the range of materials presented across t­ hese sections may initially appear broad, I argue that the infrahuman can only be seen through a wide lens, in which it becomes pos­si­ble to fully witness the trajectory of overlapping histories of scientific advancement and cultural production. The scope of this book is therefore necessarily expansive, and seeks to redress a blind spot in existing scholarly conversations. Discourses treating the biological, social, po­liti­cal, and cultural construction of the ­human rarely, if ever, meet. This is a fact largely determined by their oppositional casts; while 22 introduction

the “­human” of the sociopo­liti­cal realm is configured as a move away from the animal self—­that is, to achieve ­human rights is precisely not to be an animal—­the “­human” of the biological realm is understood to signal a return to physical essentialism and reductionism. Indeed, late twentieth-­century liberation philosophies and movements—­ including feminism, civil rights, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism—­ have often firmed up the species boundary in their quests for equal “­human rights” and a “common humanity.” In this formulation, the h ­ uman is established as axiomatic; it is the basis on which the rights of the individual must be claimed. Thus while it is commonplace to imagine other categories of difference as culturally constructed (race, gender, sexuality, and so on), it is rare to imagine species difference, or the “­human,” as a concept relevant to the formulation of differential subjectivities. Rather, “humanness” is still often understood as an essential biological truth, even as other modes of identity have been rescued from biologically deterministic frameworks. This prob­lem is further compounded by postmodern theorizations of embodiment, which call on the subject to detach meaningful forms of identification from notions of essentializing corporeality. Yet as feminist theorists such as Nancy Hartsock and Christine di Stefano have argued, this detachment effectively works to devalue minoritized positions that are grounded in real world experiences of oppression. Hartsock writes: Somehow it seems highly suspicious that it is at the precise moment when so many groups have been engaged in “nationalisms” which involve redefinitions of the marginalized O ­ thers that suspicions emerge about the nature of the “subject,” about the possibilities for a general theory which can describe the world, about historical “pro­gress.” Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic? Just when we are forming our own theories about the world, uncertainty emerges about ­whether the world can be theorized. Just when we are talking about the changes we want, ideas of pro­gress and the possibility of systematically and rationally organ­ izing h ­ uman society become dubious and suspect. Why is it only now that critiques are made of the ­will to power inherent in the effort to create theory?31 Thus, just as feminist theorizations of power have called for a rearticulation of the subject from specific positionalities, Infrahumanisms calls attention Introduction 

23

to the universalizing impulse b ­ ehind the discourse of the h ­ uman, particularly with regard to the emergence of posthumanist discourse at midcentury. In other words, is it not “highly suspicious” that at the very moment in which activists from minoritized groups gained footholds in the strug­gle for “­human rights,” the broader scientific-­industrial complex began to deconstruct and devalue the ­human itself as a meaningful idiom? This book addresses ­these complex phenomena by exploring the construction of the “­human” within cultural and scientific thought in two primary ways. First, it considers the literal production and invocation of humanness, by historicizing critical markers in the evolution and maintenance of the bound­aries between the animal, h ­ uman, and technological worlds. Second, it addresses the symbolic production of humanness, by reflecting on instances in which par­tic­u­lar groups of p ­ eople are not treated as fully “­human” in the sociopo­liti­cal sense, demonstrating how figurative practices of dehumanization are nonetheless dependent on a transparent biocultural rendering of the h ­ uman itself. By locating ­these twin discourses within spaces of infrahumanity, this book seeks to create a new language for imagining forms of alterity that are produced through interlocking structures of ­human and nonhuman difference. In ­doing so, I imagine the infrahuman as a shifting socio-­psychic space between the conditions of animality, humanity, and technology. As ­will be explored, this space is profoundly marked by a visualizing impulse, in which the infrahuman is fashioned through and by visual texts and/or its discursive presence is concerned with forms of physicality that rely upon the production of knowledge through practices of sight and embodiment. At the same time, the concept of the infrahuman offers a unique framework for thinking about conditions of otherness that fall ­under the rubric of what might be called “hyperalterity.” Whereas “alterity” is understood as a condition of symbolic dehumanization achieved through meta­phorical practices of othering, “hyperalterity” connotes a literal state of dehumanization or posthumanization created by a breach of the species boundary, when the ­human body is literally thought to become animal, alien, or machine. Most importantly, the infrahuman is a concept that illuminates critical points of intersectionality in the production of ­human difference. By defamiliarizing a discourse on which so many o ­ thers rely—­the ­human itself—­and by giving this defamiliarization a theoretical basis, a historiographical location, and a language from which to speak, this book offers insight into the construction of modern biopo­liti­cal identity through the eye of the infrahuman. 24 introduction

1. Brief Histories of Time N AT U R E , C U LT U R E , A N D T H E M A K I N G OF MODERN CHILDHOOD

In 1920 Chicago attorney Sebastian Hinton filed for a patent on a structure called the “jungle gym.” Fashioned from interlocking metal tubes, the jungle gym was designed to produce a vertical play space that could be installed in virtually any setting. Hinton based his invention on the premise that climbing was the best form of exercise for ­children, enabling them to perform the “natu­ral method of locomotion which the evolutionary pre­de­ces­sors of the ­human race ­were designed to practice.” On the jungle gym, Hinton reasoned, ­children would be able to play like “a troop of monkeys through the tree tops in a jungle,” in much the same way that a “kitten might play with a ball.”1 Asserting that the “monkey instinct” pres­ent in ­children would encourage their use of the structure, Hinton drew on a loose understanding of biological evolution and ­human morphology that had begun to develop within U.S. public consciousness during the early twentieth c­ entury.2 Yet by aligning ­children with kittens, he also made an odd analogy, raising questions about the logic of play itself as a vestigial form. If the kitten chased yarn instinctually ­because of the unnaturalness of domestication, it would follow that the child might perform the tasks of early man, not of “monkeys” in the “treetops.” E ­ ither way, Hinton’s invention located the child as a liminally ­human figure who must be made to perform and reperform evolutionary tasks.

Such ideas ­were not unique to Hinton’s vision, and in fact marked a clear pattern of thought within early twentieth-­century attitudes ­toward ­children’s corporeal subjectivities. From the establishment of a ­children’s rights discourse based on animal sentience rather than h ­ uman rights; to the growth of the U.S. scouting movement, which incorporated c­ hildren into animalistic rituals and identities; to the rise of pediatric science that established the child as a proto-­evolutionary creature; and fi­nally, to the birth of the playground movement that insisted on the construction of artificial green spaces to promote “wild” forms of play, the turn of the c­ entury witnessed the critical production of the child as a marginally ­human subject. This chapter thinks through the category of childhood as an infrahumanist ontology of American modernity. In ­doing so, the generic terms child and ­children are commonly employed for two reasons. First and foremost, it is in keeping with the ambiguity of the vernacular of the period, which, as ­will be demonstrated, is clearly related, but also not simply reducible, to an idiom of the empirical, white, male subject who generally passes for the invisible “I.” Second, and pursuant to this premise, it enables the category of age to surface as a primary determinant in the pro­cesses of ­children’s identity formation, demonstrating the ways in which the meaning of childhood itself defied the expected mapping of social divisions. It is therefore precisely in the centering of the biological and cultural considerations of childhood in which another narrative emerges, one that does not conscript c­ hildren within the expected pro­cesses of gender per­for­mance or racial typography but rather within a complicated progression of liminal humanity. In order to understand the story of how the child becomes an infra­ human figure, it is first necessary to access the profound transformation of juridical and cultural attitudes ­toward c­ hildren that occurred during the late nineteenth ­century, and that served as the framework through which infrahumanist visions ­were produced. By the mid-1800s, the location of the child within the modern pro­cesses of industrialization and urbanization became a central prob­lem within U.S. po­liti­cal and social activist cultures. While the question of child l­abor was raised as a result of changes in the economy, the issue of child abuse also received newfound attention due to the efforts of humanitarian reformers, who advocated on behalf of vari­ous disenfranchised populations, including the poor, “insane,” criminally institutionalized, and enslaved.3 Like the eugenics movement that would follow during the twentieth ­century, humanitarianism used the language of the “­human” ambiguously 30  chapter 1

to represent a broader sense of social commonality rather than as a discrete biological sign of species identity. In this context, humanitarianism and the language of the human/e offered a framework for extending consideration ­toward liminal groups. Based on an empathetic sense of what it meant to experience physical pain (later understood as “sentience” in animal rights’ lit­er­a­ture), humanitarianism created a universal affiliation determined by a presumption of shared corporeal feeling among all living creatures.4 As historians of ­human rights have pointed out, the rise of humanitarian sentiment is inseparable from Enlightenment discourses of rationality, which emphasized reason and stigmatized the types of heightened emotionality that could lead to vio­lence. As such, humane treatment became understood as marker of a properly civilized society, rather than a s­ imple form of altruism.5 While humanitarian reformers ­were successful in raising concerns about the treatment of groups at the borderlands of po­liti­cal and cultural agency, they also managed to reify the role of corporeality in the production of liminal subjectivities. By using the body as a barometer of the humane, humanitarian ideology produced devalued forms of subjectivity that stood in stark contrast to the rational empiricism so esteemed by the “modern” world. Ironically, then, to argue in f­ avor of humanitarianism, or to argue on behalf of humane treatment, was in a sense to culturally de-­anthropomorphize ­human beings, and to remember their sentient, animal selves in the interest of modern sensibilities. This line of logic was made explicit in the transformation of animal protection organ­izations, which opened their doors to mistreated ­children during the last quarter of the ­nineteenth century. The formal relationship between the child and animal welfare movements was struck in 1874, when Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (aspca), helped remove a badly beaten ten-­year-­old girl from her foster ­family in New York City. Shortly thereafter, the Brooklyn Ea­gle reported that by rescuing the child u ­ nder animal cruelty statutes, Bergh had “recognized the h ­ uman race as animals.”6 Bergh himself hoped that his actions might redraw the lines of kinship and affinity, declaring, “The child is an animal. If t­ here is no justice for it as a h ­ uman being, it s­ hall at least have the right of the cur in the street. . . . ​It s­ hall not be abused.”7 Bergh’s intervention pointed to a curious feature of nineteenth-­century po­liti­cal culture. Animals ­were indeed understood to be more sympathetic creatures than c­ hildren, who w ­ ere often i­magined to solicit the treatment they received.8 On the occasion that the courts did intervene into their lives, Brief Histories of Time  31

it was typically for punitive purposes that protected society from “troubled” youths rather than protecting ­children from the troubled society in which they lived.9 Yet Bergh’s remarks also illustrate the ways in which late nineteenth-­century visions of humanitarian reform established a language of “rights” that had nothing to do with notions of intellectual or po­liti­cal equality but began and ended with the pitiable “cur in the street.” As Susan J. Pearson has argued, child welfare gained par­tic­u­lar currency through its affiliation with animal protectionism. This connection was naturalized through designated similarities between the plight of nonhuman and nonadult subjects—­whether in relation to issues of l­abor, abuse, trafficking, or safety in public spaces—­producing an “ideology of sentimental liberalism . . . ​ that reconciled dependence with rights and pledged the use of state power to protect the helpless.”10 Within the domestic context, this association became fodder for the gradual rise of the welfare state, where policies of protectionism often contravened the rights of t­ hose who fell between the cracks of demo­cratic citizenship. Overseas, protectionism became a guiding princi­ple of U.S. imperial exceptionalism. As the U.S. became increasingly invested in colonial proj­ects at the turn of the ­century, rhe­torics of humanitarian concern enabled strategies of empire building that reconfigured military intervention as charity. In 1904, President Theodore Roo­se­velt articulated ­these connections while presenting his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to Congress. Arguing that the United States was indeed a “self-­respecting, just, and far-­seeing nation,” Roo­se­velt pledged to “endeavor by ­every means to aid in the development of the vari­ous movements . . . ​which tend to render nations . . . ​more responsive to the general sentiment of humane and civilized mankind.”11 At the same time, he warned that if other nations proved themselves un­worthy of self-­governance, they “may force the United States, however reluctantly . . . ​ to exercise an international police power.”12 Pro-­imperialists who did not share Roo­se­velt’s “reluctance” to intervene nonetheless held a similar rationale for expanding the U.S.’s influence outside of national borders. Suggesting that the legacy of slavery in the United States made the nation “an ideal training and testing ground” for the “uplift [of] the child races everywhere”; “domestic blacks w ­ ere but a small part of the ‘white man’s burden.’ ”13 Such rhe­toric was indicative of broader late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­ century imperialist discourses, in which notions of “civilization” became articulated through overlapping trajectories of ­human morphology and childhood development. In par­tic­u­lar, the popu­lar meta­phor of the c­ olony-­ and/or-colonial-­subject-­as-­child served to naturalize imperial conquest 32  chapter 1

while subsuming the decline of formal U.S. isolationism ­under the rubric of humanitarian concern. As Stuart Creighton Miller has demonstrated, U.S. formulations of foreign policy during this period centered on President William McKinley’s notion of “benevolent assimilation,” or, “the substitut[ion of] the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.”14 Comparable to idioms of benevolent paternalism deployed ­under the institution of slavery, benevolent assimilation used the language of charity and kindness to deflect the grave power relations at hand. Roo­se­velt followed his pre­de­ces­sor’s reasoning, stating that the “aim [of intervention] is high. We do not desire to do . . . ​merely what has elsewhere been done for tropical ­peoples by even the best foreign governments. We hope to do for them what has never been done for any p ­ eople of the tropics—to make them fit for self-­government a­ fter the fashion of the ­really ­free nations. . . . ​Such desertion of duty on our part would be a crime against humanity.”15 Establishing the exceptionalism of American “aims,” Roo­se­velt justified military occupation in the Philippines, cautioning that the ­people ­were “thirty generations ­behind,” and that the institutionalization of freedom and demo­ cratic governance might in fact be a long and halting progression.16 It was for this reason that he found it to be the duty of the American ­people to take up arms and enable the “emancipation” of the world. While requesting additional funding from Congress for the expansion of the naval forces, he quoted the now famous “old African proverb” that advised to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”17 In many ways, Roo­se­velt’s warning was a fitting meta­ phor for the changing conditions of demo­cratic governance and American citizenship during an era of intense international arbitration and domestic transformation. Disavowing the implicit vio­lence of global “police” work and colonial occupation, Roo­se­velt’s paternalistic formula would remain at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy for years to come. At the same time, the very idea that fear might be a greater motivator than force—­that one might be made to know a “stick” without ever feeling its blows—­was also an apt description of changing attitudes ­toward the proper treatment of U.S. c­ hildren. As strident, “inhumane” mea­sures of control fell out of f­ avor, the question of how to best govern c­ hildren in the modern era remained unclear. ­Because the c­ hildren’s “rights” discourse that grew out of humanitarian reform relied on a certain kind of disenfranchisement from adult liberties, the po­liti­cal vision of child protectionism, like that of colonial paternalism, ultimately provided a more totalizing form of control than the potentially violent embrace of a single ­house­hold. For just as foreign Brief Histories of Time  33

interventionism required the governance of a “far-­seeing” nation, so too did the conscription of unruly c­ hildren demand surveillance of a dif­fer­ent sort. As Ernest Thompson Seton, cofounder of the Boy Scouts of Amer­ic­ a, flatly declared in 1910, “control from without is a poor ­thing when you can have control from within.”18

Re-­creation

The development of a distinct youth culture at the turn of the twentieth ­century marked a new moment in the lives of U.S. ­children, and it was an impor­tant instantiation of nascent modes of surveillance designed to monitor ­children’s physical and psychological growth. As Progressive Era humanitarian reformers sought to create new institutions to protect American youths from the challenges of modernity, so too was the role of childhood reconceptualized in distinct ways.19 Sentimental concern for ­children’s moral and physical vulnerability in urbanizing environments produced a framework for understanding childhood as a condition defined by imperilment and fear. Childhood became re­imagined as a fragile time, in need of stricter bound­aries and definitions; ultimately, the concurrent coalescence of the fields of public health, statistics, and pediatric medicine worked to produce more specific understandings of childhood as tied to specific temporal frames and chronological progressions. By the first de­cade of the twentieth c­ entury, transformations of attitudes ­toward c­ hildren could be seen across a variety of arenas, from social reform (e.g., child protectionism) to medical knowledge and consumer culture. The ­children’s lit­er­a­ture industry, for instance, grew substantially during the late 1800s and early 1900s. While this expansion mirrored other patterns in American publishing due to technological innovation, it was also the case that the content of manuscripts written for ­children changed dramatically. Scholars including Karen Sanchéz-­Eppler and James Kincaid have demonstrated that narratives produced for ­children increasingly understood childhood as a special—even “magical”—time, a temporality deeply imbricated with notions of fantasy and dependent upon highly variable worlds of individual imagination.20 The toy industry expanded at the same time, and manufacturers began to reconceive of their products in relation to newly sentimentalized understandings of the child. Emphasizing attributes like “softness” and “safety,” modern toy makers began to replace traditional materials of wood, metal, and ceramic with cloth and yarn. As Sianne Ngai has noted, the populariza34  chapter 1

tion of plush toys in the early years of the twentieth ­century occurred in tandem with the rise of psy­chol­ogy. Arguing against earlier ideas of children as “naturally moral or virtuous creatures,” psychologists increasingly asserted that ­children possessed innate tendencies ­toward aggression, brutality, and destruction. Thus while plush toys ­were popularly correlated with sentimental ideals of tenderness and care, they w ­ ere also prized for their malleability and resilience against “the vio­lence with which c­ hildren ­were increasingly associated.”21 This presumed dualism was emblematic of broader concerns surrounding ­children’s lives and subjectivities that emerged during the Progressive Era; not only w ­ ere ­children i­ magined as imperiled by external dangers, but so too ­were they understood as a threat in and of themselves. It was in this context that social reformers began advocating the institutionalization of public playgrounds, locations where Hinton’s jungle gym, among other new play structures, would be erected in the interest of restructuring c­ hildren’s f­ ree time. Prior to the development of playgrounds as child-­specific spaces, the U.S. parks movement had already begun to carve out distinct spaces of nature.22 In urban settings, parks ­were understood to offer a respite from the ills of modern industrial life. By the turn of the ­century, social reformers including Jane Addams and Jacob Riis began advocating the specific design of parks to address the growing prob­lem of juvenile delinquency in cities.23 Attempting to escape overcrowded living conditions, many ­children who lived in urban tenement housing ­were forced to play in the streets. In New York, the growing number of ­children in public spaces resulted in the illegalization of their presence, leading to the arrest of thousands of c­ hildren during the late 1880s and 1890s.24 Social reformers argued that the instantiation of public playgrounds would resolve this issue by keeping the streets and jails clear of unwanted youths, while also serving a larger goal of improving child welfare.25 In 1906, reformers founded the American Playground Association (APA), and in 1907 began circulating a monthly periodical entitled The Playground dedicated to the promotion of their cause. Reflecting upon the importance of public access to playgrounds, l­abor and recreation activist Otto T. Mallery linked the constitution of ­children’s play to the ­future prosperity of the nation: A supervised playground for active, pleas­ur­able out-­door exercise within the daily reach of e­ very city child is necessary to continue the stalwart, virile, work-­a-­day race upon which the greatness of Amer­ i­ca depends . . . ​we know that the majority of our city ­children have Brief Histories of Time  35

no opportunity for health-­giving play . . . ​All work and no play makes Jack not only a dull boy but a menace to civilization. All work and no play makes Mary not only a dull girl, but a ­mother of misery to ­future generations.26 For Mallery, the economic success of the nation relied on a proper balance of play and work, plea­sure and control. Explaining the purpose of the newly pop­u­lar­ized term “recreation,” Mallery noted that it did not specify relaxation or “­free” play. Rather, it literally meant “to re­create, to make new.”27 The intentionality of shaping ­children’s leisure time to produce specific social results can be seen across the writing of playground advocates. Addams, for instance, asserted that the social plight of c­ hildren was a result of “organ­izing work and failing to or­ga­nize play.”28 Similarly, physician Luther H. Gulick, who became the first president of the apa in 1907 and went on to become the first U.S. superintendent of physical education, noted that “­free play is a misnomer, if by it we mean uncontrolled play . . . ​the playground movement represents training for self-­direction.”29 ­These remarks reflected an understanding of social control based upon self-­surveillance. Unlike c­ hildren’s subordination to teachers at school, employers at work, or parents at home, the playground offered a space imbued with the potential for a dif­fer­ent kind of control. Requiring open terrain and the transformation of public space, playgrounds became transparent sites that both produced and required certain forms of be­hav­ior and engagement. Hinton’s jungle gym fit this paradigm perfectly. Not only could c­ hildren be seen at any ­angle while playing on the structure, but so too could they perceive of themselves being observed by ­others. As one advertisement directed ­toward educational authorities offered, “­Children need no watching on the junglegym [sic]” (figure 1.1).30 In Hinton’s patent application (figure 1.2), he pictured the child in dotted lines, transposing the object (child) and mechanism (jungle gym) of surveillance made pos­si­ble by his invention in a way that seems to suggest their profound inseparability. While the jungle gym likely found an adult audience for reasons of convenience—­simplicity of build, ease of supervision—it was also understood to be widely enjoyed by the ­children who used it. Hinton’s own suggestion that the apparatus appealed to ­children’s “monkey instinct” was mirrored in broader understandings about the nature of c­ hildren’s play as primitive in nature. Indeed, while the establishment of public parks are often ­imagined as responding to a sort of public nostalgia for a pastoral life, the discourse surrounding playgrounds suggests a deeper primordial melancholia for an 36  chapter 1

almost pre-­human past. As Addams remarked, “To set [the child’s] feet in the path of civilization is not an easy task . . . ​but it may give us a clue for the undertaking to trace his misdeeds to the unrecognized and primitive spirit of adventure corresponding to the old activity of the hunt, of warfare, and of discovery.”31 While playground advocates articulated a clarity of vision regarding the social necessity of their movement, they also revealed an instability in broader understandings of ­children themselves. C ­ hildren w ­ ere conceived of as at once primitive and capable of civilization, and yet it was not an evolution that could occur naturally; instead, forms of “controlled play” w ­ ere understood as a necessary form of “re-­creation.” This was the context in which new organ­izations dedicated to the restructuring of ­children’s leisure time emerged, including the founding of the boy and girl scouting movement. In his overview of the movement’s importance, acclaimed writer Hermann Hagedorn—­friend and biographer of Roosevelt—­articulated the stakes of scouting for the nation’s ­future: “Youth is safe, the country is safe, as long as ­there is an adequate percentage of boys and girls who accept the scout oath and law and strive to live by it and accept responsibilities ­toward their own minds and bodies and ­toward their fellow creatures which that oath and law impose.”32 While existing scholarship on the scouting movement has focused largely on the Boy Scouts as a proj­ect of white masculinity building in a moment of profound social transformation,33 this chapter yields a another story. Contextualizing the movement with other social and scientific concerns demonstrates how the scouting movement articulated broader concerns about the nature of ­human evolution, exceptionalism, and futurity. Established in 1910, the movement claimed three founding f­athers: Ernest Thompson Seton, a Canadian naturalist who had previously created an outdoorsmanship/racialist-essentialist Native Americana group for youths called the “Woodcraft Indians”; British General Robert S. S. Baden-­Powell, who had founded a military survivalist training organ­ization for boys in ­England called the “Scout Patrols”; and Chicago publishing magnate W. D. Boyce, who wrote profusely on issues of inheritance, fitness, and scientific racial difference during his extensive world travels. Boyce was also a leading proponent of maintaining the colonial annexation of Alaska based on the presupposition that it was the evolutionary cradle of Western humanity.34 This hypothesis was one of many that existed both among the lay public and within the scientific community. The search for a Western or “white” primordial ancestor was critical to proj­ects of racial imagining in a moment of heightened international immigration and domestic migration. Brief Histories of Time  37

Jungle gym advertisement, Playground and Recreation (1927).

F I G U R E  1 .1 .

­ ese d Th ­ emographic changes, coupled with the growing conspicuousness of Charles Darwin’s theory of h ­ uman evolution that located a “common” ­human ancestor in black Africa, intensified the pursuit of a dif­fer­ent, and racially distinct, origins story.35 Thus born of the essentialist appropriation of Native American culture and frontier folklore, as well as the seeds of British military order, American ethnographic exploration, and evolutionary discourse, the Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca (bsa) soon was joined by a feminine counterpart, the Girl Scouts of Amer­i­ca (gsa), established in 1915 by child welfare activist Juliette Low. Although the bsa and gsa are often i­magined as entirely separate institutions that offered instruction along gendered lines, it is actually true that they ­were largely separate in name only. The handbooks contained predominantly the same information, the same activities, and the same call to 38  chapter 1

Sebastian Hinton, drawing of a jungle gym from original patent application (1923).

FIGU R E 1.2.

national duty.36 To be sure, ­there ­were par­tic­u­lar instantiations of gender, issued through “home-­making” activities provided in gsa handbooks. But what is especially in­ter­est­ing is the fact that t­ hese activities did not reflect a preponderance of the manual, which principally trained its participants in wilderness survival and crude military techniques.37 ­These techniques ­were reflective of con­temporary interest in Darwinian theories of fitness, theories that both supported ideologies of colonial dominance and spoke to profound anx­i­eties about the disintegration of modern humanity.38 Boyce, for instance, wrote that white dominance over indigenous American ­peoples was “an example of the law of ‘the survival of the fittest’ ” enabled by a “superior mind and skill[set].” And yet he supported scouting precisely ­because it trained the unruly and unpredictable minds of white American youth and offered proficiency in skills that had long begun Brief Histories of Time  39

to wane. Through instruction in hunting, trail making, fire starting, and woodsmanship activities, the scouts took part in what the found­ers called “the primitive life.” “We have lived to see an unfortunate change,” Seton wrote, “partly through the growth of im­mense cities, with the consequent specialization of industry, so that each individual has been required to do one small specialty and shut his eyes to every­thing e­ lse, with the resultant perpetual narrowing of the ­mental horizon”; “degeneracy is the word.”39 Throughout early twentieth-­century U.S. culture, the fear of “degeneracy” was cast in explic­itly racialized terms, comparing the perceived dissolution of the white body to the presumed physical prowess of the “darker” races.40 For Seton, a clear example of this phenomenon was the “fact” that “consumption” was a “white man’s disease,” acquired through the indulgences of urban life.41 ­Imagined as a proj­ect of racial transformation, the scouting movement typically appropriated simplified and ste­reo­typical forms of Native American culture (e.g., Seton originally named his group the “Woodcraft Indians”).42 And yet ­these discourses also called on rhe­torics of animality and ­human evolution in ways that spoke less to racist morphological hierarchies and more to a triangular relation between the bound­aries of speciation, humanity, and raciality. Just as the scouting movement created a primordial racial self through the reappropriation of Native American rituals, so too did it produce a vision of the animal self through evolutionary narratives. The campfire, for example, was understood to be “magical” b ­ ecause it symbolized the moment in which the “first brutal anthropoid stood up and walked erect.” In this time and place, it is critical to remember that notions of racial difference and primitive humanity were not synonymous. To be sure, racial typographies and hierarchies suggested a temporal progression from primitivity to civility. Yet, at the same time, the con­temporary interest in white ancestral heritage, embodied by Boyce himself, suggests that something ­else was at stake in the per­for­mance of primitivity. While sharing a campfire, “men shed all modern form and poise, and hark[ened] back to the primitive—to meet as man and man—to show the naked soul.”43 Summoning the spirits of the ancestors was a form of magical thinking that was often attributed to Native Americans; at the same time, it was the stuff of natu­ral history, of the biological, social, and cultural evolution of mankind. Prior and con­temporary to founding the Woodcraft Indians and working with the bsa, Seton himself published dozens of lengthy naturalist works, some written explic­itly for the nascent field of ­children’s lit­er­a­ture. Like other naturalists working at the turn of the c­ entury, Seton was concerned 40  chapter 1

with the preservation of the nation’s wildlife and took pride in the “truth” of his stories, which put biological and anthropological taxonomies to narrative form. At a moment in which nature seemed to be literally disappearing, as ­people moved away from the country t­oward the city and U.S. industry developed previously open lands, Seton’s stories ­were at once nostalgic and presciently modernist, offering far more information about a far greater number of animals than any pastoral resident would typically have known. Similarly, as animal characters became a staple of c­ hildren’s lit­er­a­ture, the genre alternately employed quotidian species such as rabbits and wolves (as in the works of Beatrix Potter and Jack London) and exotic species such as lions and zebras (as in the works of Rudyard Kipling and the alphabet zoo genre), offering at once a remembrance of ­things past and a form of rarified knowledge.44 It was in this context, as literary critic Peter Hunt has pointed out, that Seton “revolutionized the animal story,” by treating “the real lives of individual animals in natu­ral settings without sentimentalization or romanticization.”45 Yet ultimately, his “individual” characters ­were species typologies created from the composite sketches of many animals; “it is the species, rather than the ‘individual,’ that I wish to expose,” Seton remarked.46 In this way, his works taught a form of species knowledge, as well as a method of classification. ­Because of the popularity of his animal stories among youths, Seton rewrote one of his works as The Wild Animal Play (1900), for “­children who wanted to play the characters in [his] books.”47 Strikingly, the costumes he proposed w ­ ere not particularly realistic nor disguised the actors very well (figure 1.3); as Seton specified, the costumes “could be reduced to mere symbols if desired.”48 Seton’s writing spoke to a presumably “natu­ral” relationship between ­children and animals, and he infused the scouting movement with a holistic approach to the proper location of ­humans vis-­à-­vis nature. Charged with the task of being “a friend to animals,” scouts w ­ ere instructed to “save them as far as pos­si­ble from pain,” to “not kill any animal unnecessarily,” and to take “par­tic­u­lar care of our dumb friends, the animals.”49 Scouting also urged identification with the nonhuman world through naming, as each scout was a member of a “patrol” with an animal mascot, whose image they drew along the trail and whose call they imitated for communication purposes when dispersed.50 Seton further stressed the natu­ral affinity between animals and ­children in his work on “sign talk,” a form of nonverbal, nonlanguage-­based communication that he hoped to pop­u­lar­ize for use between nations, noting, “Animals have far more gestures to express thoughts and emotions than they Brief Histories of Time  41

“Suggested costume” for enactments of Ernest Thompson Seton’s The Wild Animal Play (1900).

F I G U R E  1 .3 .

have sounds, and c­ hildren instinctively use gestures for vari­ous ideas long before they acquire the sound for them. In all races as a rule, the very young ­children’s gestures are the same. . . . ​All of which goes to prove the greater antiquity of eye-­talk over ear-­talk. . . . ​It is widely believed that sign language is the oldest of all languages, that indeed it existed among animals before man appeared on earth.”51 For Seton, ­children ­were thus the link between the pres­ent and the past; they ­were the access point to ancient languages and ancient ways of being, possessing the very ele­ments that had been lost in the modern moment. In order to retrieve ­these sensibilities, however, ­children required a systematic awakening. While studying schoolchildren, Seton culled “150 gesture signals” for his sign talk dictionary, discovering that “all denied any knowledge of the sign language, at first, but w ­ ere themselves surprised on discovering how much they had in established use.”52 Attempting to reinstate methods of visual communication, Seton hoped to cultivate the “accurate thinking” and “keenness of observation” that came naturally to ­those more closely engaged with the natu­ral world. 42  chapter 1

Perhaps more than anything ­else, scouting was a guiding vision; for just as scouts w ­ ere encouraged to emulate the primordial spirit of mankind, so too w ­ ere they required to achieve a systematic, modernized knowledge of the natu­ral world. This duality was more than an outgrowth of an appreciation for indigenous understandings of the natu­ral world that regrettably had been lost to the urban eye. Rather, it represented the beginning of a form of visual, classificatory training that borrowed as much from biology textbooks as it did from native folklore. In its appropriation of the visual symbolism offered by popu­lar understandings of American Indian culture, modern science, and the primitive h ­ uman self, scouting incorporated its members into a strangely nonlinguistic visual field that had become the province of a nascent, national ­children’s culture, including, for instance, the rise of the picture book genre.53 Scouting made use of images referred to as “totems,” or “emblem[s] of a man, a group of men, or an idea,” with “no reference to words or letters.” Totems ­were explained as having originally served ancient proprietary ends, as prelinguistic “marks to indicate owner­ship”; in this primordial tradition, scouting appropriated totems for creating badges of honor, such as logs of wood for fire making, a life buoy for swimming, a hammer for handy work, a sea­horse for zoology, and so on. In some ways, t­ hese symbols had affinity with their signification; in ­others, their inability to directly and linearly “reference words or letters” marked them as portals to a secret world of codes and signs (­ figure 1.4).54 The ancestral impulses of scouting—­including forms of wild animal play, animal imitation, a naturalized relationship with the environment, and a departure from linguistic modes of communication (see figures 1.4–1.6 for examples of scouting’s visual lexicon)—­thus created a discourse of evolutionary transformation that relied as much on a notion of a prehuman ancestor as it did on the racist procurement of Native American cultural practice. More importantly, scouting worked to make expert observers out of its charges. Knowledge in this context was a reciprocal praxis. Guidebooks detailing the classification of the natu­ral world, coupled with educational publications aimed at teaching ­children’s hygiene, provided dual instruction, looking outward and inward. The trained gaze of the scout was informed by visions of biological taxonomy and species survival. Taught to use sight-­ enhancing tools such as binoculars, magnifying glasses, and telescopes, the scouting child learned to imagine the world quite literally through lenses of modern technology and pro­gress. In par­tic­u­lar the use of the new affordable Kodak “Brownie” cameras marketed to c­ hildren enabled forms Brief Histories of Time  43

FIGURE 1.4.

“Totems Often Seen,” Scouting for Girls (1915).

FIGURE 1.5.

“Signs and Blazes,” Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca (1911).

F I G U R E  1 .6 .

“Wild Food-­Plants,” Scouting for Girls (1915).

of individualized documentation theretofore unknown. ­These practices in turn created a sense of mastery through an educated and trustworthy gaze. Through tutelage in hygiene, scouting also marked the child’s body as an occasion for self-­governance and self-­control. Burgeoning ideas about health, sanitation, diet, and deepening philosophies that tied a “clean body” to a “clean mind” ­were both imparted and created through the scouting movement. ­These proj­ects ­were understood to be part of the “scouting way of life,” which bore tremendous similarity to con­temporary hygienic standards that ­were already at work in U.S. culture. Scouting badges such as “Health Guardian” and “Health Winner” signaled a child’s understanding of appropriate patterns of “recreation and health” and “public ser­vices and sanitation,” as well as a commitment to “improved posture,” regular exercise, positive sleep and dietary habits, self-­cleanliness, and a daily bowel movement. More impor­tant than obtaining the badges themselves was the pro­cess by which the scouts worked t­ oward them, taking note of their habits and choices in a personal “Health Rec­ord.”55 In all ­these ways, scouts internalized a panoptical gaze, a sense of always watching, seeing, and attempting to know—­and of being watched, seen, and known. The “scouting way of life” mirrored con­temporary developments in the governmental management of ­children’s health and well-­being. Throughout the 1910s, the newly created ­Children’s Bureau led the crusade compiling data on ­children’s weight and height, two coordinates that ­were thought to be a sort of shorthand screening for other health prob­lems.56 Like all statistical tabulations, the pro­cess of accumulating ­these figures, and then analyzing them, created new standards of normativity and deviance for the U.S. child. Signed into law by President William Howard Taft in 1912, the ­Children’s Bureau was effectively a “clearing h ­ ouse, a source of information and reliable education on all ­matters pertaining to the welfare of ­children and child life.”57 Brought to fruition in part by the efforts of humanitarian workers concerned with the question of child welfare, the bureau was understood to be a “compromise” in the wake of debates about child ­labor and its pos­si­ ble ill effects on c­ hildren’s physiological health. As New York Congressman Herbert Parsons noted, “if . . . ​the Federal Government is not now to legislate directly on child ­labor ­there is one ­thing that it directly can do by legislation, and that is to establish a c­ hildren’s bureau . . . ​of information on and investigation of the subject of child l­abor as well as other subjects relating to the health and welfare of ­children.”58 Pawning action for “information,” the establishment of the bureau was a significant trade-­off, inaugurating the child as a special biopo­liti­cal subject. Brief Histories of Time  47

Ontogeny

The liminal evolutionary status of c­ hildren at the turn of the c­ entury was most clearly articulated in the burgeoning fields of pediatric physiology and psy­chol­ogy, which literally and symbolically i­magined the child as a separate “species.” Earlier conceptualizations envisioned ­children as miniature adults, whose minds, bodies, and subsequent medical treatment differed in no way from their more mature counter­parts. Pediatrics changed this by creating a field structured around the peculiarities—­and peculiarizaiton—of the developing body. Unlike other specializations that took shape around par­ tic­u­lar techniques, diseases, or anatomic parts, pediatrics was driven by an evolutionary epistemology that sought to make sense of ambiguous growth patterns. As such, it produced the child’s body, and the condition of childhood itself, as pathology. While previous biomedical approaches ­were not standardized in their approaches to childhood maladies, new techniques of preventive medicine, coupled with a general societal interest in child welfare issues, converged to imagine pediatrics as a special field. Physician Abraham Jacobi is largely credited with its overarching vision. In 1880 he formed a special division of the American Medical Association called Diseases of ­Children, and eight years l­ater, he worked to inaugurate the American Pediatric Society, serving as president of each. The development of t­hese organ­izations, coupled with their staffing by prominent physicians, helped to concretize the field of pediatrics in teaching hospitals and clinical practice by the dawn of the twentieth ­century.59 Jacobi focused on the inclusion of modern ideas of nutrition, hygiene, and disease prevention in the field. He argued that pediatric medicine should focus on the management of healthy c­ hildren rather than the restoration of the sickly. Jacobi’s program represented a larger paradigm shift in U.S. medicine during the late nineteenth ­century, when germ theories of disease etiology took hold in medical research and practice. By the turn of the c­ entury, long-­ feared contagious diseases such as cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and typhoid ­were understood and made containable in the new light of bacteriological science.60 No longer scrambling to address the devastation of uncontrolled outbreaks, physicians w ­ ere able to turn their attention to less acute considerations of h ­ uman health. Chronic illnesses, physical impairments, and m ­ ental health all received greater attention as the medical community moved out of triage mode. At the same time, public faith in medical knowledge improved, while greater medical surveillance became routinized through advocacy for preventative mea­sures. As scientific knowledge became augmented by technological advances in communication and manu48  chapter 1

facturing, governmental and private funding, and the growth of educational institutions, new disciplinary bound­aries w ­ ere created across the sciences. The emergence of state licensing acts throughout the late nineteenth ­century officially parsed medical specialization.61 Thus on a practical level, the establishment of pediatrics as a specialized field could and did occur ­because of a greater availability of resources, technology, and bureaucratic structures. Substantively, however, the concerns of the field correlated with larger social reform interests and a more generalized interest in medicine as a form of population management. In this context, the production and maintenance of healthy ­children became a priority.62 The “well child” visit, or annual physical exam, became a critical component of this new vision, where c­ hildren’s growth and development could be monitored, tracked, and compiled.63 The subjection of the populace to non-­ urgent medical attention at specific intervals over time produced health as a newly temporalized coordinate, measureable through a discrete calculus of the body. Medical surveillance and data tabulation came to be seen as critical tools for disease prevention. Perhaps more importantly, regular physician visits trained c­ hildren and their parents to understand their bodies as sites of knowledge that required medical diagnoses even in the event that nothing was “wrong.” Pediatrics sought to mold the biology of ­those who ­were not “old” enough to understand how to do so themselves, and at the same time served to instruct c­ hildren in their own biopo­liti­cal roles. The field offered a model of the child-­citizen, who was to be watched and monitored even in benign moments and yet who was also to be taught the terms of self-­sufficiency and proper growth. This was a particularly eugenic logic (as ­will be explored further in the following chapter), and was indicative of the rising tide of public health organ­izations. As Jacobi wrote, “Questions of public hygiene and medicine are both professional and social. Thus ­every physician is by destiny a po­liti­cal being in the sense in which the ancients defined the term, viz., a citizen of the commonwealth with many rights and responsibilities.”64 The po­liti­cal vision of medicine was further carried out in the field of child psy­chol­ogy, which bore out close connections to the field of pediatrics. ­Children’s “­mental hygiene” was understood to be an impor­tant component of raising healthy c­ hildren, and it represented another forum in which the monitoring of “well” ­children became the primary task. Earlier institutional claims to ­mental health had been brought about by reformers concerned with the management and confinement of mentally ill and indigent patients. Yet in this context, care for, and intervention in, ­children’s psychological Brief Histories of Time  49

well-­being was understood as a necessity in the rearing of healthy c­ hildren, and in the promotion of ­human evolution. Stated differences between ­children and adults became the occasion for medical mediation. As physician Borden S. Veeder wrote in 1926, effective pediatrics must be “taught from the standpoint of the child,” a standpoint that would require an understanding of “the psy­chol­ogy of childhood [as] . . . ​an integral part of the development of the child. . . . ​Without it one [could] not understand many of the ­factors influencing physical growth.”65 (Importantly, the figure of the child was also often central to theorizations of adult psychopathology, as in the work of Sigmund Freud, whose research located trauma inside narratives and mythologies of childhood experience.)66 The notion that physical and psychological forms of development could be co-­productive was fairly new from a medical standpoint. Since the Enlightenment, René Descartes’s theorization of the mind/body dualism governed both philosophical and medical conceptualizations of corporeal ­matter and ephemera. As scholars such as Richard Dyer and Elizabeth Grosz have argued, this dualism was filtered through lenses of race, gender, and nationality.67 A tight proximity between mind and body or, worse yet, a hovering overlap was suggested to exist in the “baser” races, in ­women, and in persons from non–­Western Eu­ro­pean countries. The purported distance that the white male Eu­ro­pean experienced from his body was a sign of intellectual victory, restraint, and civility. Yet as psy­chol­ogy gained momentum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth ­century, the connections between psyche and soma ­were reopened. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall, for instance, argued that the deep interrelation between ­children’s minds and bodies was reflective of the possession of a “primitive soul,” one of three critical components that could be used to excavate “natu­ral history” of mankind: “the animal, savage, and child-­ soul.”68 For Hall, ­these figures ­were the closest semblances to “natu­ral,” or early, man that modern science had access to. He lamented the extinction of “missing link” species and deceased “ethnic types,” fearing that “much, perhaps most, soul life ha[d] been hopelessly lost.”69 Understanding the life of the mind thus became a historical recovery proj­ect, in which Hall attempted to “collect states of mind, sentiments, phenomena long since lapsed,” as well as unconscious “impulses that, it may be, never anywhere rise above the threshold, but manifest themselves only as automatisms, acts, be­hav­ior, ­things neglected, trivial, and incidental.”70 In his pursuit of such “impulses,” Hall was inspired by Charles Darwin’s work on evolution and Ernst Haeckel’s theory of ontoge­ne­tic recapitulation. 50  chapter 1

From the former he took an understanding of gradual change over time and the necessity of adaptability for species survival.71 From the latter he took the idea that the ­human species perpetually reenacted its own biological evolution during gestation and development. As Haeckel described, “ontogeny is a short and quick repetition, or recapitulation, of phylogeny, determined by the laws of inheritance and adaptation.”72 Hall used ­these evolutionary frameworks to model the child’s psyche, while also framing the child as a living missing link, a creature whose growth and transformation into adulthood could be used to shed light onto the larger mystery of an originary h ­ uman nature. As Hall wrote, “the child and the race are keys to each other.”73 Hall’s vision of the child as infrahuman carried across understandings of the immature body and mind, and his work demonstrated the critical ways in which the child’s status as fully “­human” remained largely unresolved at the dawn of the twentieth c­ entury. A 1904 photo­graph of infant and adult skeletons taken for Hall’s purposes demonstrates the discrete differences between them (figure 1.7).74 In 1914, Hall’s former student Louis Terman, then an educational psy­chol­ogy professor at Stanford University, reproduced the image in his work The Hygiene of the School Child. Hygiene was reflective of eugenic concerns over the instruction of physical education, bodily cleanliness, and moral instruction, and argued for the special positioning of the child in debates over the ­future of ­human evolution and eugenic training. Terman insisted that it would be a ­mistake to assume a true biological parity between adult and infant ­human beings. Offering an illustration of Hall’s photo­graph “drawn to scale” (figure 1.8), Terman presented the skeletons of each subject, and noted, Judged by size alone, the child might be looked upon as like the adult, only smaller. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The child is dif­ fer­ent from the adult in ­every fiber, ­every blood corpuscle, ­every bone cell, and in the relative proportions of all his parts. His re­sis­tance to disease, his powers of recuperation, his food and sleep requirements are unlike ­those of the adult. He is differently affected by ­every ele­ment of environment and regimen. Child hygiene and child physiology are far from synonymous with the hygiene and physiology of the adult. . . . ​ Plainly the l­ ittle child is a sessile organism whose main business, judging from the disproportionate size and activity of the vital organs, is to keep alive and to grow.75 And indeed, Hall’s and Terman’s ­human skeletons look like they belong to dif­fer­ent species. Of the figures, Terman remarked, “the relative size of his Brief Histories of Time  51

Photo­graph showing (from right) “the skeleton of an adult”; “the skeleton of a new born infant on the same scale”; and “the same infant’s skeleton magnified photographically to approximate the length of an adult skeleton.” G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. 1 (1904). FIGU RE   1 . 7 .

parts is such that an adult retaining the exact infantile proportions would strike us as a misshapen monster.”76 Similar images appeared in other developmental psy­chol­ogy texts in the early twentieth c­ entury, including A. R. Luria and L.  S. Vygotsky’s Apes, Primitive Man and Child: Essays in the History of Be­hav­ior, a work originally published in 1930 in Rus­sia.77 In this text, Luria and Vygotsky brought together numerous works published in the 1920s that imagined the child as a “primitive,” or nonhuman, primate-­like figure. Influenced by the French sociologist and ethnologist Lucien Lévy-­ Bruhl and the American anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, Luria and Vygotsky focused extensively on the relation between gestural and oral languages, a “dual” form of communication that they argued was evident in apes, primitives, and c­ hildren.78 Luria and Vygotsky also drew on the works of German psychologists Heinz Werner, Karl Bühler, Hildegard Hetzer, and 52  chapter 1

Sketch replicating Hall’s photo­graph from Louis M. Terman, The Hygiene of the School Child (1914). FIGU R E 1.8.

Beatrix Tudor-­Hart, to consider the role of sensory perception in the pro­cess of child development, asserting that: While the adult is connected with the world mainly through the eyes, the child is connected through the mouth. . . . ​Of g­ reat, determining importance for the adult are ­those behavioral functions that connect him with the environment and that by themselves are the product of this social, cultural influence, that is, his perceptions, his skills, and his intellect. For the infant, the dominant role is played by organic sensations restricted to the body (primitive drives, stimulations from the mucous membrane of the mouth, ­etc.). . . . ​The primitive phase of an infant’s development is characterized by dif­ fer­ent values, dif­fer­ent proportions, and dif­fer­ent laws; in certain re­spects, the infant differs from the adult no less than a chrysalis from a butterfly.79 Brief Histories of Time  53

Thus in Luria and Vygotsky’s estimation, differential modes of interaction and stimuli, oral versus ocular, indicated unique levels of psychological development between ­children and adults. The idea that an infant might be thought of as a “chrysalis” and an adult as a “butterfly” suggests an understanding of aging as an evolutionary transformation of form, substance, and purpose. Such images are a power­ful indicator of the perceptions that existed about the uncertainty of ­human exceptionalism in the era of post-­Darwinian thought, as well as the way in which evolutionary discourse had forever ruptured notions about the permeability of the species barrier. Imagining the child as unique in soma and psyche, in dietary consumption and patterns of rest and activity, in health and illness—in short, imagining the child as infrahuman—­seemed to allay fears about ­human pro­gress, of which ­there was still so much to learn. The consideration of the child as a special case, in the rise of both child psy­chol­ogy and pediatric physiology, animated fantasies of control and quantifiable difference. According to Haeckel’s law of ontoge­ne­tic recapitulation, the child was, in fact, related more closely to the evolutionary pro­cess and to earlier forms of life. By locating the child as a transitory figure in the “natu­ral history of man,” as Hall put it, a better understanding of zoological hierarchy, as well as man’s ascension within it, might be reached. At the same time, it was precisely this position that made the child a figure of perpetual evolutionary uncertainty. “Nothing . . . ​is better established,” Hall wrote, than that ­there is a closer rapport between animals, especially ­those that are domesticated, and c­ hildren than is the case with adults. From the myths of feral c­ hildren living with beasts to the familiar facts that domestic animals are often more nearly related and in closer sympathy with ­children than with adults, and from the fact that rudimentary animal organs are relatively and often absolutely larger in ­children than in adults, to the greater similarity of the early vocal utterances and gestures, as well as of infantile psychic states and pro­cess to ­those of animals, we cannot argue, but only conjecture and won­der.80 In ­these ways, Hall found his subjects to be ultimately mysterious and unknowable. Beginning from, and returning to, a state of “conjecture and won­der” about the question of the child, Hall acknowledged that it was the child’s peculiar link to the animal world—­itself a world that would, in some ways, always remain inaccessible to the ­human eye—­that made ­children’s be­hav­ior, psy­chol­ogy, and even physiology a m ­ atter of indeterminacy. As such, 54  chapter 1

the child subject appeared to be at odds with the proj­ect of modern empiricism, both ­because the child rebelled against being known and ­because disagreements about ­children’s subjectivity made it very difficult to make “pro­ gress” on their behalf. Consequently, throughout the early 1900s, the study of ­children became a profoundly interdisciplinary proj­ect, calling on both experts and laypersons alike to do their part in raising the nation’s c­ hildren. The call to scientific motherhood, for example, conscripted ­mothers in the business of child observation and instruction by replacing previous systems of familial knowledge with ­those of modern medicine.81 Marking the child as biologically unique, the fields of child psy­chol­ogy and pediatric physiology both became or­ga­nized around the differences, rather than similarities, that existed between p ­ eoples of dif­fer­ent age groups. Each field favored a perception of evolutionary capability. In the former, this meant that the child might both be studied as a “missing link” to the past h ­ uman self and be molded if offered proper instruction. In the latter, this meant that the child’s body was understood to be especially impressionable, and that the issues of child health and hygiene ­were among the most pressing faced by the modern medical establishment.82 But it was also a view that found reiteration within a critical social reform movement that occurred at the same moment through the establishment of parks and a ­children’s leisure culture dedicated to wild play. The stakes of imagining the child as an infrahuman figure are extended in the following chapter, which demonstrates how the perceived likenesses between chimpanzees and white ­children bolstered claims of scientific racism and entrenched the racialized speciation of higher order primates.

Brief Histories of Time  55

2. Ocular Anthropomorphisms E U G E N I C S A N D P R I M AT O L O G Y AT T H E T H R E S H O L D O F T H E “ A L M O S T ­H U M A N ”

The primate has long stood apart from other categories of animality, both for its perceived similarity to the h ­ uman and for its central role in Western cultural semiotics. Across centuries and discursive contexts, apes have served as symbolic placeholders for a wide range of vexed categorizations. ­Whether ­imagined as a link or, as Donna Haraway has called it, a “border zone,” between nature and culture, primitivity and modernity, bestiality and humanity, the ape’s meta­phorical position as an iconic interstitial category has become deeply naturalized.1 Rather than reproduce this naturalization, this chapter ponders how the primate came to occupy a liminal station within the popu­lar consciousness, by focusing on the historical moment in which the primate moved from an object of cultural importance to an object of the scientific gaze. In d ­ oing so, this chapter uncovers lost histories of the “almost ­human,” the consequences of which m ­ atter far beyond conceptualizations of the primate itself. Most significantly, this reconceptualization takes to task the assumed but often uninterrogated connection between the construction of species difference and racial difference as they meet in evolutionary frameworks. In reductive appropriations of the visual as “illustrations” in the fields of history, literary analy­sis, and cultural studies, the primate continues to serve as an almost timeless shorthand for the primitive, the justification of racist imperialism, and the imprint of social Darwinism. In par­tic­u­lar, po­liti­cal

cartoons featuring simian caricatures are often used in works of history to illustrate paradigms of primitivist thinking, in which a monkey stands in for the purported “savageness” of a nonwhite subject. Yet ­because t­hese symbolic associations have gone largely unquestioned, they have also become historiographically fixed, such that even as attitudes ­toward the category of race and the pro­cesses of racial formation have changed over time, the sign of the primate has remained the same. One consequence of this oversight has been a perpetual disavowal of the primate as a form of racial shorthand, an idiom that understands corporeality to be a determining f­ actor of social difference but that simply parodies racial logic rather than imagining a vital relationship between the terms of race and humanity. When this relationship is taken seriously, a new history is revealed. In par­tic­u­lar, while the terms of dehumanization and racialization are often understood to be familiar bedfellows, this chapter demonstrates how the pro­cess of humanization is equally as impor­tant in the construction of racial difference and in­equality. By looking at the case of the speciation of higher order primates in early twentieth-­century U.S. public and scientific cultures, this chapter demonstrates how the anthropomorphization and symbolic whitening of the chimpanzee enabled the reaffirmation of biological racial hierarchy in an era when traditional forms of scientific racism ­were on the decline. This hidden account of the chimpanzee is a critical missing link in the history of evolutionary discourses, providing an “African” ancestor who was not “black” by prevailing understandings of racial difference. The refiguring of the chimpanzee in this fashion thus provided the white primordial ancestor so long yearned for in the popu­lar imaginary, thereby easing the ac­cep­tance of Darwinian theories of evolution at a time when experts and the lay public alike labored intensively to discover any form of originary whiteness. By contrast, scientific and cultural discourses used the figure of the gorilla to maintain racist attitudes ­toward African biological and cultural “inferiority” by aligning the species with the rhe­torics of blackness, poor adaptability, and “devolution.” Not only does the story of the whitened chimpanzee and blackened gorilla demonstrate the deep connections between speciation and racialization, but so too does it help us understand the convergence and inseparability of the literal and symbolic when it comes to the bound­aries constructed between and among the terms of humanity and animality. The standards by which the chimpanzee was elevated, on the one hand, and the gorilla was subordinated, on the other, w ­ ere both deeply based upon the materiality of the body and the ephemera of the psyche. This duality is especially apparent Ocular Anthropomorphisms  57

in the visual repre­sen­ta­tions of ­these animals, which highlight par­tic­u­lar forms of physicality, while also illuminating par­tic­u­lar assumptions about subjectivity. In con­temporary scholarship, the role of the photographic and filmic gaze in the construction of the connectedness between species and racial knowledge is far from understood. This chapter seeks to address this connection, by reaching back in history to the interrelated legacies of evolutionary thought, primatological practice, and popu­lar cultural trends that featured nonhuman primates. In par­tic­u­lar, a focus on the work of Robert Mearns Yerkes, prominent eugenicist turned founding ­father of modern primatology, provides a win­dow into how the line between race and species shifted over time. Yerkes’s work with the speciation of higher order primates not only utilized the language of race to understand the differences between species but also relied heavi­ly on visual forms of repre­sen­ta­tion to parse the animals according to perceived variances. Yet the use of racialized language and visual practice in the origins of the field of primatology did not only operate in one direction. Instead, just as race became a mitigating force in the taxonomic pro­cess of speciation, so too did the speciation of higher order primates provide a framework for re­ imagining the contours of race. This was particularly significant in Yerkes’s era, when the movement t­ oward “whiteness” as a consolidating and binaristic force in racial politics was well underway, and, at the same time, when eugenics as a formal movement was already waning. This chapter thus contributes to a body of research that has been on the rise since the beginning of the twenty-­first ­century by scholars such as Laura Briggs, Wendy Kline, and Alexandra Minna Stern, which has importantly demonstrated how declining theories of racial science and eugenics found new iterations in other scientific fields and cultural discourses from the late 1930s onward.2 In general, t­hese works have focused broadly around the politics of reproductive health, illustrating how older paradigms of eugenic and dysgenic procreation became repackaged as a disinterested question of health in the post–­World War II era. When issues of race or ethnicity w ­ ere employed in t­ hese contexts, they w ­ ere carefully re­imagined in ways that did not recall the horrors of Nazi sterilization and euthanization programs. Yet unlike t­ hese arguments, this chapter imagines the role of nonhuman species as central to the rise of new racial ideologies. It further departs from Haraway’s originary and masterful work on the field of primatology, which focused on the bound­aries between h ­ umans and primates rather than on pro­cesses of speciation. This chapter examines the dualistic movement between pro­cesses of racialization and speciation to begin to rethink both: 58  Chapter 2

first, by interrogating the role of race and species in the history and historiography of ­human evolution; second, by examining Yerkes’s photographic archives; and third, by revisiting and rereading classic cultural texts of the early twentieth ­century, including Tarzan and King Kong. In each of t­ hese instances, a form of “ocular anthropomorphism” is employed, or a pro­cess of humanization deeply tied not only to the rhe­toric of visual repre­sen­ta­tion but also, and primarily, to the rhe­torics of sight, ocular consciousness, and the scientific gaze. This pro­cess can be seen in the history of evolutionary thought, which used physical appearance and “expert” forms of sight as visual evidence in the determination of racial and species difference; in the nascent language of primatology, which ­imagined and constructed ­human and nonhuman capacities for sight as part of a larger proj­ect of speciation; and fi­nally, in the realm of technology, from the deployment of photography as an essential component of the scientific gaze to the utilization of filmic sight in popu­lar cultural repre­sen­ta­tions of difference.

Missing Links

Following Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, dozens of theories arose as to the direction, stages, and termination of man’s evolutionary link to nonhuman primates.3 As such, being a “Darwinist” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not necessarily mean understanding the evolutionary schema exactly as Darwin had i­magined it. Rather, it simply meant believing that linear evolutionary tracks existed for nonhumans and ­humans alike. For many scientists, this did not implicate a “common ancestor,” as is often associated with Darwin’s claims.4 For t­hese reasons, ideas ranged from the notion that t­ here was in fact no evolutionary link between h ­ uman and nonhuman primates, that apes might have evolved from h ­ umans, and that the dif­fer­ent races could have evolved from local species of primates.5 Such schisms could exist within scientific opinion precisely b ­ ecause of the interdisciplinary nature of evolutionary science, as vari­ous bids ­were made from the fields of comparative anatomy, embryology, and paleontology. At the same time, each shared a common rhe­toric of “missing links,” which hypothesized the existence of intermediary races and species that could not be accounted for by prevailing anatomical and ontoge­ne­tic evidence. For over fifty years following Darwin’s publication, the fossil rec­ord could not be made to match what scientists saw with their own eyes in the bodies of con­temporary living organisms, enabling a virtual phantasmagoria of Ocular Anthropomorphisms  59

evolutionary scenarios.6 This was in large part due to impor­tant geo­graph­ i­cal divides between the assumed cradles of mankind (Eu­rope and Asia) and the clear nativity of higher order primates to the African continent. ­B ecause most scientists ­were unwilling to consider Africa as a pos­si­ble location of ­human origins, ­there remained a palpable silence between comparative anatomists working on the riddle of the con­temporary primate body and paleoanthropologists working on the riddle of the ancient h ­ uman body.7 In 1913 the discovery of the Piltdown skeleton in Sussex, E ­ ngland, confirmed what many American and Eu­ro­pean scientists already believed: that the “missing link” species so long sought ­after to fill the evolutionary gap between apes and modern man was, in fact, of Anglo-­Saxon origins.8 As can be seen in an evolutionary diagram published in the New York Times that same ­ uman evolution on the African continent year (figure 2.1), the possibility of h was literally foreclosed within the con­temporary framework, demonstrated by the chart’s movement directly from the chimpanzee, a species native to Africa, to the Ape Man of Java, Indonesia, and then to Germany, France, ­England, and France again. In this trajectory, the ape was understood to have become ­human at some point during an exodus from Africa, while African ­people, on the other hand, ­were understood to have evolved from a primitive strain of man who returned to the continent only to deteriorate.9 Importantly, this schematic did not account for a broader ­human history in Africa; rather, it ­imagined the chimpanzee as the primordial ancestor to the Eu­ro­pean races, a point to which this chapter ­will return shortly. Almost forty years would pass before the Piltdown Man was revealed to be a hoax perpetrated by British scientists, who had managed to literally fashion a white ancestor out of chimpanzee, orangutan, and h ­ uman bones.10 During the intervening years, scientists ignored the peculiar and ill-­fitting remnants of the Piltdown Man, which lay on display at the British National Museum for the folly of racial and national pride.11 Nor was the attempted erasure of African humanness significantly troubled once recent ­human ancestry was discovered on the African continent. In 1925 the unearthing of Australopithecus Africanus, vernacularly known as the “African Ape,” ruptured the presumed relationship between ­human and nonhuman primates, and remained a controversial discovery that many scientists refuted.12 ­Those who did believe in the veracity of the fossil argued that it challenged preexisting models of ­human and nonhuman primate classification, and remained fixed on the question of species, rather than of intrahuman difference. Reflecting on the register of recent discoveries, prominent physical 60  Chapter 2

F I G U R E  2 .1 .

Evolutionary chart, New York Times (1913).

anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey noted that “the usual subdivision of higher Primates into monkeys, apes, and man ­will no longer serve our purpose.”13 In the interest of creating a more accurate evolutionary discourse, a new zoological ­family was created specifically for Australopithecus known as Homosimiidae, which literally meant “man[-]ape” in scientific nomenclature. The liminality implied by this category was incredibly impor­tant, as it located the fossil as both manlike and apelike in its morphology, and was therefore understood to predate the existing fossil rec­ords of Eu­rope and Asia, which purportedly held the remains of “early man.” Indeed, scientists continued to hypothesize about the geo­graph­i­cal origins of the African man-­ape, suggesting, for example, that the finding did not implicate Africa as the only point of genesis. Instead, existing geological evidence that demonstrated the movement of missing link species between Asia and Africa was interpreted to suggest the possibility of polygenesis, or multiple origins, which in turn provided yet another rationale for imagining separate evolutionary tracks for Eu­ro­pean and African races.14 Yet even without ­these theories, the not-­ quite-­human quality of Australopithecus worked to mitigate the geopo­liti­ cal dimensions of the discovery. Imagining the fossil as less than ­human enabled a slip of hand in which it was not “black” by traditional standards, even though it was indisputably of African origins. In this way, the dehumanization, or re-­speciation, of man’s recent nonhuman ancestors mystified the potential continental and racial origins of man’s recent ­human ancestors. At the same time, the search for, and speculation surrounding, the missing link began to drain the category of humanness of its primacy of meaning. As the “­human” itself began to be defined in opposition to an ever-­changing terrain of anthropological discovery, scientists began to focus on two central markers in determining a fossil’s relative humanity—­brain size and tool-­making Ocular Anthropomorphisms  61

capacity—­which ­were thought to indicate relative intelligence.15 What did it mean to determine evolutionary hierarchy, and subsequently humanness itself, through an understanding of intelligence levels? To be sure, anthropology was not the only field responsible for using intelligence as a barometer of the h ­ uman. While the connection between intelligence and humanity was well established by earlier versions of racial science, the early twentieth ­century saw the formalization, standardization, and bureaucratization of intelligence as a determinant in ­human hierarchy. Throughout the 1910s, eugenicists working in the field of psy­chol­ogy began to create “universal” scales for immigration, military recruitment, and psychiatric institutionalization purposes. In par­tic­u­lar, eugenicist and psychobiologist Robert Mearns Yerkes became known for the development of the “Alpha” and “Beta” tests during his tenure as president of the American Psychological Association, exams that purported to mea­sure “sheer native ability” through visual modes of analy­sis.16 Like most eugenicists, Yerkes saw his work as assisting in the pro­cess of natu­ral se­lection by promoting the success and propagation of “superior” models of the ­human “race”; that par­tic­u­lar races, ethnicities, or classes bore the brunt of eugenic instrumentation was, officially, a m ­ atter of biological 17 coincidence. By the 1920s, however, ­these coincidences came u ­ nder fire, when prominent laymen such as journalist and po­liti­cal commentator Walter Lipp­mann began railing against eugenic intelligence testing, asserting that the tests mea­sured economic and racial privilege rather than “natu­ral” ability.18 In the wake of t­hese critiques, and as eugenic practices in their traditional forms began to decline in public popularity, Yerkes turned his attention ­toward mea­sur­ing the intelligence and other m ­ ental and physical capacities of nonhuman subjects. Although he had long had an interest in working with nonhuman primates, the cost of their transportation to the United States was extremely prohibitive, and funding agencies w ­ ere slow to be convinced of their use value.19 It was not ­until he had made a name for himself in the field of eugenic testing that he was able to receive the funding necessary to pursue his vision. By literally fashioning a new discipline out of the monetary and celebratory remains of an old one, Yerkes began to build an empire on the back of eugenic science that would reinscribe the politics of ­human racial difference on the bodies of a population that he understood to be “almost ­human.” As explained in the introduction, this book takes the root of its key term from Yerkes’s work, in which he uses the word infrahuman as an imprecise synonym for nonhuman primates, particularly chimpanzees and gorillas. 62  Chapter 2

While the term itself dropped out of usage in direct proportion to the development of new taxonomic forms, concerns surrounding the relationality between ­human and nonhuman primates only increased with time. Thus the liminal positionality implied by the “infrahuman” is an impor­tant site for considering why and how lines of difference become drawn, w ­ hether between or within species. At the same time, ­because ­there was no way to understand anthropoid evolution without attending to issues of geo­graph­i­ cal origin that complicated prevailing notions of racial purity, the racialization of higher order primates may seem like an almost inevitable story. Yet the absence of this story from normative histories of science—of how infrahuman primates ­were used to codify biological racial difference alongside biological species difference—­suggests that even from our current vantage point, the lines connecting proj­ects of racialization and speciation are far from clear.

Kinship

In 1914 Yerkes published his first article suggesting the importance of primatological research, in which he made a “plea for special and unique facilities for the systematic study of apes.”20 He ­imagined this endeavor to be of greatest consequence to “students of ge­ne­tics, eugenic investigators, and sociologists” seeking to grasp a “better understanding [of] h ­ uman nature.”21 By the early 1920s, Yerkes had garnered enough funds to begin what he called his “pet proj­ect”—­a venture that would come to require layer upon layer of colonial organ­ization—­from the observation of primate colonial practice in Havana, Cuba; to the establishment of an American scientific presence in the French African colonies; to the making of a “subtropical breeding fa­cil­ i­ty” in the rural outskirts of Jacksonville, Florida; and fi­nally, to the creation of a research metropole in New Haven, Connecticut.22 “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that education and all other forms of social ser­vice ­will profit immeasurably from experimental studies of the fundamental instincts of the other. . . . ​Our ge­ne­tic psy­chol­ogy as well as other historical or ge­ne­tic forms of biological description may be developed more rapidly and satisfactorily by the thorough study of the primates than by any other means.”23 In order to pursue ­these aims, Yerkes struck a cooperative agreement with the Pasteur Institute of Paris, whose Kindia Laboratories in what was then French Guinea, Africa, already held a considerable population of apes for clinical research.24 During ­later years, Yerkes would bring the animals back to the United States for further experimentation and breeding, but, in the Ocular Anthropomorphisms  63

early 1920s, he moved himself, his colleagues, and all their families to Kindia in order to observe the apes t­here. Housing some of the animals in large, open cages, and o ­ thers within his own home, he routinely walked them out to a clearing, provided them with rudimentary objects (such as wooden boxes or sticks), and observed their be­hav­ior. ­Later, when he transported the animals to the United States, he performed similar experiments in the closed environment of the laboratory. Importantly, this meant that he did not believe that life had to be observed within its “natu­ral habitat,” as l­ater primatologists would assert; rather, he understood primates to be empirically natu­ral subjects, ­free from the strictures of h ­ uman civilization.25 Yerkes’s faith in biological determinism spanned the entirety of his ­career, from his work with smaller laboratory animals, to h ­ uman eugenics, and fi­ nally, to higher order primates. He believed explic­itly in the essentialism of both the body and the mind, and he asserted this notion through the implementation of systems of classification and hierarchy. While ciphering the differences between the races had been critical to his work with intelligence testing, he pursued the same aims when working with diverse ape species. Speciation in and of itself became a central tenant of his proj­ect, and in 1929 he published the first book dedicated to the taxonomy of higher order primates, The ­Great Apes (coauthored with his wife, Ida M. Yerkes), which soon became a classic in the field. In this work and in o ­ thers, he argued that the classification of primates would prove useful across the scientific disciplines, and, at the same time, that it should ­matter to the lay public as well. Dismayed by the “superficiality of . . . ​[Americans’] lay knowledge” when it came to the question of their nonhuman relatives, Yerkes remarked that “most persons confuse the organ-­ utan [sic], chimpanzee and gorilla, for certainly ­these types of ape do not differ more obviously than do such subdivisions of mankind as the American Indian, the Caucasian, and the Negro.”26 This statement must be read with power­ful irony, as any good eugenicist—be he expert or pedestrian—­knew that the differences between such “subdivisions” w ­ ere indeed vast and meaningful. ­Here, ­these differences became reaffirmed through their connection to the essential nature of species difference. Throughout his written work, Yerkes continued to rely on categories of racial difference to explain and rationalize the logic of species difference, by setting up a triad between orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. Least interested in and familiar with the orangutan, Yerkes spoke of the species as one of the “middling races,” as e­ ither “Indian” or “Asiatic,” a conclusion that, while reductive, spoke directly to the species’ nativity in Indonesia and 64  Chapter 2

Malaysia. Of greatest interest in his research w ­ ere chimpanzees and gorillas, species that ­were both native to the continent of Africa, and it was in his comparison between t­hese animals that Yerkes mobilized the language of racial difference to negotiate the prob­lem of monogenic and monoracial origins. He wrote effusively about the “Caucasian skin,” “coarse straight hair,” and “white-­face” of the chimpanzee, as compared with the “black skin” and “wooly hair” of the gorilla. While he understood skin color variation in chimpanzees to be natu­ral, he used the term albinism to refer to lighter-­ skinned gorillas.27 Moving from the visual to the olfactory, he noted that the gorilla was known to “emit a pronounced odor . . . ​similar to that of the Negro,” a conclusion that he pulled from earlier Eu­ro­pean travelogues and claimed to have experienced himself.28 This observation fell u ­ nder what he called the “natu­ral history” of the primate, or the historiography of encounters with species of apes. In charting this historiography, he used both the accounts of foreign explorers as well as the “authority of the natives.” By mobilizing local forms of knowledge, he further naturalized distinctions between the species, noting that the very term gorilla was used ­because it was an “African name for wild and hairy men.”29 In his observations of the animals’ temperament and capacity for sociality, he noted a dichotomy that mapped neatly onto his analy­sis of their physical differences. While practices of drumming on trees and chest beating in chimpanzee populations w ­ ere interpreted as evidence of an interest in rhythm and ­music, ­these and other similar practices ­were understood as signs of aggression when displayed by gorillas. Yerkes also identified a similarity between chimpanzee and ­human community formation, noting that both ­were “very social,” “hierarchical,” and “proprietary.”30 By contrast, the gorilla was understood as a fantastic monster, a “creature of mystery” known only through hunting lore and “native superstitions.” Described as antisocial and hostile, the gorilla was thought to be “inaccessible, power­ful . . . ​[and] dangerous,” “difficult to capture and untamable,” “suspected of polygamy,” “especially susceptible to diseases,” and “relatively rare,” “suggest[ing] to investigators its disappearance and probable [near] extinction.”31 The language of “extinction” and the comparison between the waning gorilla population and the thriving chimpanzee population built upon con­ temporary theories of evolutionary fitness, which in turn mirrored concerns about the survival and extinction of the races. While the idea of an Anglo-­ Saxon “race suicide” was prevalent among con­temporary supporters of the eugenics movement, so too was the notion that African Americans ­were ­dying out, a concept that emerged in the wake of debates over slavery and Ocular Anthropomorphisms  65

emancipation and lasted well into the early de­cades of the twentieth ­century. In this formulation, while whites ­were i­ magined to be imperiled by their own lack of procreativity (a dearth associated with “hypercivilization”), blacks ­were ­imagined as prehistoric creatures, unable to keep up with the pace of modern industrial life.32 Both of t­ hese configurations i­magined intellectual capability to be the central prob­lem (i.e., ruled by their intellects rather than their corporeal desires, white families diminished, while black families did not have the intellectual facilities necessary to adapt to the changing times). This presumed connection between intelligence and survival was at the heart of analyses that envisioned gorillas as nearing extinction. For Yerkes and his colleagues, animal intelligence was determined by a species’ “degree of success in adapting to or modifying [its] environment,” as well as its ability to “solve logical prob­lems.”33 Carl Akeley, the famous naturalist and gorilla hunter, concluded that b ­ ecause “the gorilla makes no abode, has no clothes, uses no tools . . . ​it is still before the dawn of intelligence with him.”34 At the American Museum of Natu­ral History, where Akeley was known for providing dozens of gorilla “specimens” for display, curator Charles Hill-­ Tout noted similarly that the gorilla had managed to fall by the evolutionary “wayside . . . ​rely[ing] on muscle alone,” and “thereby totally changing his skull.” Hill-­Tout further observed that the “black skins and hairy bodies of the gorilla . . . ​­were developments which the ­human race avoided.”35 In this formulation, not only was the extinction of gorillas i­magined as inevitable, but so too was the attribute of “blackness” ­imagined to be literally inhuman. Likewise, many of Yerkes’s conclusions demonstrate how attributes associated with indigenous populations became plotted onto the proj­ect of speciation, and how in turn this proj­ect provided the means for the ongoing dehumani­ zation of African ­peoples (e.g., gorillas, like Africans, are “polygamous,” and both are inferior to chimpanzees and Eu­ro­pe­ans b ­ ecause of it, or so the logic went). Through this dichotomous rendering of chimpanzees’ abundant perpetuity and gorillas’ imminent demise, Yerkes managed to recast the prob­lems of race and species survival in a way that at once drew on past evolutionary claims (i.e., chimpanzees and gorillas as living prehistorical ancestors to the white and black races) and seemed to foreshadow the f­uture. Nowhere was the division between the two species more apparent than in Yerkes’s photographic rec­ord, which represents the animals in strikingly dif­fer­ent ways. Yerkes’s photo­graphs utilize the discourses of sociability, intelligence, and survival addressed thus far, while also focusing on the capacity of sight. Throughout Yerkes’s written work, sight becomes characterized by three 66  Chapter 2

f­ actors: (1) literal ocular consciousness, or the positioning of the eyes, forms of color vision, distance perception, and so on; (2) willingness to engage with the gaze of the scientist, or how the animal would behave upon being observed, ­whether it would meet the researchers’ gaze, and so on; and fi­nally, (3) interest in the pro­cess of photography, or attraction to the camera, the inclination to pose for photo­graphs, apparent photogenicity, and so on. In the first instance, Yerkes noted a clear similarity between the facilities and evolutionary uses of chimpanzee and ­human sight. “To see, in the visual way is by no means a ­simple ­matter,” he explained. Color vision and the use of binocular vision set both the chimpanzee and the ­human apart from other species.36 In the second instance, he compared the chimpanzee’s energetic engagement with the research pro­cess to the gorilla’s “relative inexpressive[ness],” “resentful[ness] of even the gaze of a stranger,” and refusal to “yield to h ­ uman curiosity.”37 Fi­nally, in the third instance, he used the conventions of photography to both make sense of and create the terms of species difference. Th ­ ese three tenets define the contours of what can be called a pro­cess of “ocular anthropomorphism,” whereby a species becomes humanized (or,  for that ­matter, dehumanized), in ways dependent on its perceived ability to see, to be observed, and to engage with visual technology. This last point became significant in a moment when debates about the eugenic properties of sight abounded. Unlike other eugenic categories, which stressed perfection of the physical form, poor eyesight was understood to be the mark of intelligence and civilization. Keen eyesight, by contrast, was an aptitude reserved for wild animals and wild ­peoples, prey and predators, all of whom required power­ful forms of “telescopic vision” to survive.38 The series of images that follows is drawn from Yerkes’s archives, scrapbooks, and published works, and is representative of the roles sight and photography played in his understanding of the differences between chimpanzees and gorillas. The first three images (figures  2.2–2.4) demonstrate how Yerkes’s portrayal of chimpanzees emphasized their closeness to humanity by naturalizing their place within h ­ uman schemes of domesticity. In the first image (figure 2.2), a child of one of Yerkes’s colleagues flirts with the camera, clutching a young chimpanzee to her chest as though he ­were a doll. In another image (figure 2.3), Louise Mumpoting, one of Yerkes’s assistants, poses in a scene of pristine domesticity, her white dress and comfortable lap providing a refuge for Chim and Panzee, Yerkes’s first chimpanzee “pets.” A third image (figure 2.4) shows a chimpanzee infant photographed at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden in 1925, when the successful breeding of Ocular Anthropomorphisms  67

Child with chimpanzee at Kindia Station (1923). Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Department, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

FIGU RE   2 . 2 .

“Miss Louisa Mumpoting, With Panzee (left) and Chim (right)” (1922). Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Department, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

FIGU RE   2 . 3 .

“Infancy. A male Chimpanzee, one day ­after birth,” at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden (1928). Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Department, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. F I G U R E  2 .4 .

apes in captivity was still a fairly new and uneven scientific feat. ­Here, the swaddling cloths, the palpable cry of the baby, and the ­angle of the photo­ graph all suggest the care and interest of a proud parent.39 The familial connection conceived of through t­ hese images is more opaquely referenced in the final two images (figures 2.5 and 2.6), an example of Yerkes’s chimpanzee portraits, where the repre­sen­ta­tion of the ­whole body, instead of just the face, signals the conventions of ­children’s photography. The story told by Yerkes’s chimpanzee photo­graphs produces an effect similar to that which theorist Marianne Hirsch has termed the “familial look,” a photographic gaze that is at once “affiliative and identificatory,” repudiating difference in ­favor of “stability and ­union, stasis and monolithicality,” and ultimately promoting a sense of “universal comprehensibility” across lines of difference.40 Such photographic work was critical to Yerkes’s anthropomorphization of his chimpanzee subjects. Not only did he imagine them as part of his own quotidian, domestic visual field, but he felt certain they ­imagined him in the same way. At a moment, and on a continent, in which anthropological photography was often ­imagined to be met with “native” re­sis­tance, repre­sen­ta­tions of the chimpanzee’s “almost ­human” sight, Ocular Anthropomorphisms  69

“Fin” (1940). Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Department, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

F I G U R E S   2 . 5 – 2 .6 .

as well as its engagement with the camera, worked to establish the species as presciently modern, to naturalize the use of technology by creatures of a certain evolutionary order, and to mark the chimpanzee as an empirical subject unaffected by the kind of magical thinking that made the camera an object of fear.41 It was not without context or consequence, then, that Yerkes chose to represent gorillas distinctly as objects, rather than subjects, of the photographic gaze. Indeed, Yerkes’s portrayal of gorillas is far from familial. The next two images (figures 2.7 and 2.8) provide impor­tant counterpoints to figures 2.3 and 2.4. Unlike the carefully coddled chimpanzee infant captured in figure 2.4, figure 2.7 depicts the “Reichenow gorilla,” being held by a Guinean ­woman who is referred to in a similarly obscure manner, as “foster nurse.” Although the obstruction of her face by the camera suggests that she is not the proper subject of the photo­graph, her presence is nonetheless necessary for the interpolation of the gorilla’s subjectivity. Far from the serene, holistic, and naturalized image offered by Louise Mumpoting’s lap in figure 2.3, the repre­sen­ta­tion of the young gorilla with his surrogate nurse in figure 2.7 is strikingly fractured. That the “foster nurse” is never referred to by name is 70  Chapter 2

“The Reichenow gorilla, aged five months” (date unknown). Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Department, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

FI G URE 2 .7 .

unsurprising, and given the location of the primate colony, which was quite literally a colony within a colony, it is certainly pos­si­ble that her l­abor was conscripted against her ­will. But what­ever the conditions of her “fostering,” the “nurse” is not credited properly for her care of the animals, illuminating the ways in which the proj­ect of primate species knowledge was built upon the back of racial ideologies. Just as Yerkes’s photo­graphs of chimpanzees naturalized the species’ connection to the terms of white kinship, so too did his images of gorillas with African persons, and ­women in par­tic­u­lar, operate along similar lines (elsewhere, even, another “foster nurse” is shown literally breastfeeding an infant gorilla).42 Emerging from this peculiar crossing of species and race came both a coherent sense of connectedness between certain species of apes and certain races, as well as an even more profound sense of difference between whiteness and blackness. Yerkes’s photography thus mobilized the terms of species difference to widen and reessentialize the perceived gulf between the races. A compilation of photo­graphs provided on a page of Yerkes’s photographic a­ lbums (figures  2.8, 2.9, 2.10, and 2.11) offers multiperspectival repre­sen­ta­tions of the cages in which he secured his gorilla research subjects. In the first image, a research subject is tied to a tree with a chain, while offering a peculiarly artistic rendering of the gorilla’s captivity.43 Thus, while Yerkes’s gorillas belonged to the colonial languages of surrogacy and spectacle, his chimpanzees w ­ ere ­imagined to be equally at home within the white domestic space, in the realm of modern technology, and ultimately the Ocular Anthropomorphisms  71

FIGU RE S   2 . 8 –2 .11.

Yerkes’s gorilla research subject with gorilla enclosures (1923). Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Department, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

laboratory. As ­will be explored in the next section, ­these discourses eventually became self-­fulfilling prophecies, which turned gorillas into beasts to be feared and chimpanzees into objects of affection and cultural appreciation. The dichotomous repre­sen­ta­tion and treatment of t­hese species—­from the construction of “appropriate” artificial habitats (from the cage to the home), to the provision or denial of necessary socialization opportunities—­shaped their minds and bodies in starkly dif­fer­ent ways, such that it is impossible to separate out Yerkes’s “findings” from his presuppositions. Yet ­these presuppositions ­matter in ways that far outstrip the s­ imple history of primatology. Instead, they worked to create, and at the same time draw on, con­temporary attitudes ­toward racial difference and biological essentialism.

Species/Race

The racialization of chimpanzees and gorillas during the 1920s and 1930s was not a pro­cess isolated to the realm of research. Rather, such crossings ­were also evident throughout popu­lar cultural repre­sen­ta­tions of the species. Within both scientific and popu­lar cultural understandings, the special interest in the whiteness of the chimpanzee and blackness of the gorilla mirrored a broader paradigm shift within the production of con­temporary racial thought, which, as scholars such as Matthew Frye Jacobson have noted, increasingly subsumed the plurality of ethnic identities u ­ nder the rubric of a white/black dichotomy.44 It was precisely at this moment of significant racial consolidation that the chimpanzee emerged as the hero of interlocking stories of whiteness and biocultural evolution, both across the scientific disciplines and within U.S. popu­lar culture. Building upon anthropological understandings of the fossil rec­ord—­namely, of Australopithecus as a “man-­ ape,” whose ambiguous speciation provided a way out of traditional continental racial categorizations—­the whitened chimpanzee provided yet another nonhuman ancestor of African nativity who could also be ­imagined outside the par­ameters of blackness. The remainder of the chapter ­will consider the ways in which ideas surrounding the relationship between species, race, and higher order primates made their way into mainstream popu­lar culture, and moreover how they aided in the gradual ac­cep­tance of Darwinian theories of evolution as the ­century progressed. As we have seen, the complicated relationship between the categories of species and race throughout the early twentieth c­ entury created a wide spectrum of opinion regarding the nature of ­human evolution. On the one hand, the adoption of certain evolutionary princi­ples through the rise of social 74  Chapter 2

Darwinism provided an impor­tant narrative framework for the logic of eugenic science, aiding in the ascent of its popularity. On the other hand, the ­actual details of anthropoid evolution ­were strongly resisted by both the scientific community and the lay public. Darwin himself predicted this opposition, writing in The Descent of Man in 1871 that “the main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-­organised form, ­will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons.”45 In the end, it was not only the idea of evolving from “lowly” creatures that caused disagreement; rather, it was also the implications of such reasoning, which included the problematic story of an African genesis, as well as the possibility that the “­human” itself was not a fixed category. In other words, if it was pos­si­ble to “evolve” out of Africa and up the species ladder, might it also be pos­si­ble to move in the other direction? Through the alignment of species with race, discourses surrounding the whiteness of the chimpanzee and the blackness of the gorilla provided a narrative of evolutionary fixity that quelled anx­ie­ ties about the possibility of devolution. In par­tic­u­lar, this anxiety became worked out in the realm of culture, where apes ­rose as figures of considerable interest within the worlds of lit­er­a­ture and film. Like Yerkes’s and his colleagues’ work, popu­lar cultural repre­sen­ta­tions of t­ hese animals tended to focus on the purported humanness of the chimpanzee and bestiality of the gorilla. While the former became a media darling and was ­imagined as a playful younger sibling who could be dressed up and taught to perform, the gorilla emerged as an untamable monster to be feared, pursued by skilled marksmen, and ultimately taxidermied. ­These repre­sen­ta­tions can be seen in major cultural works of the early twentieth c­ entury, such as Tarzan of the Apes and Tarzan the Ape Man (1912 novel and 1932 film), Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle series (1920–52), King Kong (1933), as well as in displays at zoos, circuses, and museum exhibits. Though apes of all sorts had long been fodder for literary imaginations within the Western world, the birth of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan series in 1912, a phenomenon that continues even into the current moment, marked a new era in the cultural significance of primates within the U.S. popu­lar consciousness. The story of an abandoned white child raised by apes in the jungle, Tarzan features two types of primates: gorillas and the unspecified group that cared for Tarzan. While the gorillas are ­imagined as “the deadly enemies of [Tarzan’s] tribe,” the apes that raise Tarzan are described as “kind,” “intelligent,” and “splendid, clean-­limbed animal[s].”46 By the time Burroughs’s tale made it to the big screen in 1932, Tarzan’s unnamed benefactors became chimpanzees, and importantly, the title shifted from Tarzan Ocular Anthropomorphisms  75

of the Apes to Tarzan the Ape Man, mirroring the scientific reformulation of the missing link as a “man-­ape.” Several occurrences between the years 1912 and 1932 contributed to this change. First, throughout the early twentieth ­century, chimpanzee “actors” emerged as the stars of short films played prior to feature-­length production. ­These actors appeared by name in film advertisements at a time in which nonwhite actors still did not receive credit for their own work in artistic production. In the popu­lar press, chimpanzees ­were lauded for possessing a level of “intelligence that astounds science” and for being “more h ­ uman than some p ­ eople.”47 To be sure, t­ here seemed ­little question as to which “­people” w ­ ere being ­imagined as less than h ­ uman; as Yerkes himself remarked in 1925, it seemed “an odd fact that Africa, a continent rich in relatively primitive va­ri­et­ies of the ­human species [was] also home to the highest types of anthropoid ape.”48 This unfavorable comparison also emerged in popu­lar lit­er­a­ture of the time. The notion that chimpanzees held greater m ­ ental faculties than p ­ eople of the same continental origin was evident in the Doctor Doolittle novels, a ­children’s series written by British author Hugh Lofting and pop­u­lar­ized in the United States between 1920 and 1952. The Doolittle stories feature the adventures of a “doctor” who speaks the “language of the animals” and travels to “foreign parts.” One of the central characters in the series is Chee-­Chee, a precocious chimpanzee assistant. In the first of the series, the Doolittle ­house­hold travels to Africa to work with Chee-­Chee’s “relatives” to treat a continent-­wide “monkey epidemic” that manages to elude the indigenous ­people. Continually represented as an obstacle to the implementation of proper colonial medicine, the locals must fi­nally be tricked by the chimpan­ ere pres­ zees into allowing Dr. Doolittle to cure them.49 Similar themes w ent in the 1931 novel His Monkey Wife; Or, Married to a Chimp, by popu­lar author John Collier, which tells the story of a British schoolmaster working in the “Upper Congo” who becomes involved with a “civilised” female chimpanzee. Known for having “devoured a good number of Victorian classics,” and thereby “naturally be[coming] imbued with some of the softer virtues of Nineteenth C ­ entury womanhood,” Collier’s chimpanzee also continually outsmarts the “pickaninnies” at the local school.50 This formulation of chimpanzees as superior to nonwhite persons and more appropriately aligned with white society was cemented in the 1932 filmic adaptation of Tarzan. First, the casting of the film reinforced the anthropomorphization of chimpanzees as well as their familial relationship with white humanity, both by employing real chimpanzees to portray the young chimpanzees and by enlisting ­human actors to play the adult chimpanzees. Unlike 76  Chapter 2

Burroughs’s original tale, the film also adds a chimpanzee sidekick for Tarzan named Cheeta, who becomes an impor­tant part of the narrative. Cheeta, like all the chimpanzees in the film, is consistently represented as more “civilized” and intelligent than the native population. Within a m ­ atter of days, both Tarzan and his ape ­family have picked up significant portions of En­glish, while the natives remain incomprehensible throughout the story. As he learns the language, manners, and values of the “modern” world, Tarzan emerges as an evolutionary icon capable of African nativity and whiteness through a sort of trans-­species identification, much like Australopithecus’s determination as the originary “man-­ape” and Yerkes’s whitened chimpanzees. (Tarzan’s name, a­ fter all, is said to mean “white ape.”) H ­ ere, the figuration of infrahumanity enables a rewriting to evolutionary scripts. This logic is most overtly demonstrated in the film’s closing scene, when Tarzan, Cheeta, and Jane climb to the top of a rocky cliff and the camera fades out; ­there, they stand like a light upon a hill, the f­uture of an uncertain race.51 The decision made by Tarzan’s colonial love interest, Jane, to stay rather than return to “civilization,” as well as Tarzan’s uncertain birthright, further provide a con­ve­nient logic of white origins in the jungle, in which metropolitan whiteness can be i­magined as having traveled to the primitive world, providing support for evolutionary theories that described similar patterns of movement in their conceptualization of polygenesis. Conversely, the native population and their savage gorilla remain tethered to perverse economies of stasis and devolution. The symbolic connection between ­these two groups becomes most clearly evident in a scene where Jane falls subject to a cruel form of local entertainment. Cast into a deep pit where a lone gorilla is kept, she strug­gles for survival as the natives sadistically cheer. The piercing whiteness of Jane’s limp body against the dark terror of the gorilla and applauding natives pres­ents a proverbial image of predatory blackness, serving to rewrite the structural vio­lences of the colonial system to which she belongs. A similar formulation was also at play in the 1933 King Kong film, which features an overgrown gorilla living on an island peopled by primitive “natives” and a variety of paleontologically inaccurate “prehistoric beasts” from the “dinosaur age.” Sought ­after by a money-­ grubbing filmmaker who hoped to display him as a freak show, Kong spends the majority of the film attempting to possess another “golden ­woman,” Ann Darrow, played by Fay Wray, whom the natives peg as his potential “bride.” In both Tarzan and King Kong, the striking visual construction of imperiled white womanhood mobilizes what filmmaker Billy Wilder once called a “flesh impact,” a multisensorial effect that crosses the bound­aries of the Ocular Anthropomorphisms  77

ocular into the tactile, or “flesh which photo­graphs like flesh. You feel you can reach out and touch it.”52 Lois Banner has pointed out that the concept of a flesh impact is used only in reference to very white ­women, and that it often stands in for the cele­bration of whiteness itself.53 Ironically then, in addition to crossing the senses, the notion of a flesh impact also poses a contradiction to common visual cultural critiques of whiteness as ethereal and even anticorporeal.54 In the cases of Tarzan and King Kong, this boundary-­breaking impact is determined not only by the contours of race but also by a par­ tic­u­lar vision of speciation. In Tarzan, Jane’s whiteness is both highlighted through Tarzan’s and Cheeta’s relative whiteness and against the ­gorilla’s opaque darkness. In King Kong, the racial logic is similarly explicit, in which the structures of colonialism and sexual my­thol­ogy appear in familiar ways. At the same time, however, this logic becomes species specific in its articulation, both through Kong’s construction as gorilla and through the alignment of the nonwhite natives with the gorilla. Throughout the film, the natives’ ritualistic donning of gorilla costumes and per­for­mance of gorilla dances, in which participants beat their chests and feign quadrupedism, demonstrate that their symbolic unification with Kong has every­thing to do with the fact that he is ultimately a gorilla, rather than simply big, black, and monstrous.55 Four years a­ fter the film played to packed h ­ ouses, a “real” King Kong materialized in the form of “Gargantua,” a 460-­pound gorilla displayed by the Ringling ­Brothers Circus. Upon first acquiring Gargantua, the com­pany sought the assessment of Robert Mearnes Yerkes, then known as the nation’s foremost authority on higher order primates. Yerkes found Gargantua to be in “perfect condition” for display, in spite of his unusual levels of aggression, physical disfigurements, and chronic susceptibility to pneumonia.56 Like Kong, Gargantua was represented as a grotesque mutant. Having “started life in an African jungle, without even a name,” he became known for his permanent “snarl” effected by an “accidental” acid burn. Gargantua’s physical deformity was marketed as being matched by his equally depraved personality. As a feature article in Life magazine cautioned, “a single purpose occupies all his waking hours . . . ​[and] that purpose is murder.” Gargantua’s perpetual “bad mood” therefore became a “mixed blessing”: although difficult to h ­ andle, the “frightening” exhibit was so popu­lar that it managed to save the circus from an impending bankruptcy.57 Thus from novels, to film, to live entertainment, cultural forms that aligned gorillas with blackness and chimpanzees with whiteness taught the public impor­tant lessons about the nature of biological difference. At a time 78  Chapter 2

of purported racial pro­gress, when the formal eugenics movement had already deteriorated and older modes of scientific racism no longer held expert opinion, the discourse of black gorillas and white chimpanzees enabled a reaffirmation of biological essentialism in which race could be read through the lens of species difference. This equation should be understood as significant for a number of reasons. First, it illuminates how the knowledge formation surrounding the categorizations of species and race cannot be separated. Second, it demonstrates that far from being stable and ahistorical, species differences w ­ ere (and are) subject to the same fundamental contextual variables as other categorizations of difference. Third, and more specifically, it illuminates other, opaque sites of racial discourse in a moment of official eugenic decline. Unlike previous treatments of this phenomenon, this argument stresses the realm of the nonhuman as a primary location on which the ­battle of ­human and interhuman difference has been waged. Perhaps most significant to this ­battle has been both the ac­cep­tance and deployment of Darwinian theories of evolution, theories that ­were required to guide eugenic thought and that ­were easily co-­opted to prejudicially think through racial distinctions. While scientists had generally accepted the veracity of Darwin’s claims about fitness and evolutionary survival by the turn of the ­century,58 his belief in an African primordial ancestor remained a heady issue well into the ­middle of the twentieth c­ entury. Intellectual history never provides a strict chronology, and, in the case of Darwin’s conceptualization of Africa as the single ancestral homeland for all of humankind, it is difficult to know when exactly the tide turned. Nonetheless, in this context, the blackening of the gorilla and the whitening of the chimpanzee provided a dual rationale. On the one hand, it enabled the perpetuation of a “white” ancestor even ­after the story of African origins was accepted. On the other hand, it reinforced the gulf between the races as profoundly deep, at a moment when, on the surface of ­things, po­liti­cal and social discourse was moving ­toward the possibility of greater equality. If, then, as Ann Laura Stoler has remarked, the Eu­ro­pean colonies served as “laboratories of modernity” for metropolitan life and knowledge in the Global North,59 then it might similarly be said that the primate colonies and their attendant cultural forms acted as laboratories of a very American form of modernity.

Ocular Anthropomorphisms  79

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3. On Alien Ground E X T R AT E R R E S T R I A L S I G H T I N G S , AT O M I C W A R FA R E , A N D T H E U N D O I N G O F T H E ­H U M A N B O D Y

I told the truth; namely, that the accounts of medical experimentation on h­ uman beings by the Nazi Doctors produced revulsion in me but not hate. ­After reading the Nuremberg transcripts my feeling was not so much one of loathing for the Germans who ­were responsible as it was a feeling of sickness and shame for being a member of the ­human race. ­After all, the [war] crimes . . . ​­were not committed by invaders from another planet. They ­were conceived and carried out by ­people. It was too easy to seek catharsis by hating the Germans; the big prob­lem was to make peace with oneself for belonging to the same species. The stain was large enough to include us all. —­  N O R M A N C O U S I N S , “Dialogue in Warsaw”

Since the fall of Nazi Germany, thinkers across continents and disciplines have ­imagined the ways in which the close of the Holocaust signaled a profound and unalterable rupture in the history of ­human consciousness and materiality. Theodor Adorno, Jean Améry, Zygmunt Bauman, Judith Butler, Primo Levi, and Sven Lindqvist, to name a few, have envisioned this moment as the beginning of postmodernity, in which aesthetic, philosophical, and spiritual claims became seized by the end of the subject as it was known.1 “A number of positions are ascribed to postmodernism,” Butler explains; “discourse is all ­there is, . . . ​the subject is dead, I can never say ‘I’ again; t­ here is no real­ity, only repre­sen­ta­tion.”2 Within this framework, it is the unpre­ce­dented, industrial vio­lence of the camps, located in the very heart of “lightness,” that is thought to have created a cross-­cultural psychic break, in

which notions of the “­human,” predicated on Enlightenment conceptualizations of humanist subjectivity, ­were shown to be inadequate. To be sure, the trauma of World War II as a ­whole cannot be underestimated. The complete disregard for and ultimate loss of millions of civilian lives, through massive bombing campaigns, nuclear warfare, and starvation, transformed the meaning of war across the globe. The sheer scale of the war, as well as the use of new forms of industrial vio­lence, set it apart from other past conflicts. For the United States, ­these atrocities w ­ ere laid bare through the development of war­time photography. As George Roeder Jr. has demonstrated, photographic repre­sen­ta­tions of the first and second world wars differed drastically. During World War I, governmental censorship of war­time photo­graphs protected the American public from experiencing the vio­lence of the first global industrial conflict. Po­liti­cally, this move forestalled potential public dissent. At the onset of World War II, the same policies remained in effect. However, as the government became increasingly invested in the potential need for U.S. involvement, gory images ­were used as propaganda to encourage support for the draft and war­time privations on the home front.3 ­Toward the end of the war, photo­graphs of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany had a particularly strong impact. Reflecting on her first encounter with Holocaust photography, cultural critic Susan Sontag wrote about the images as a personal point of no return: “Nothing I have seen—in photo­graphs or in real life—­ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw t­ hose photo­graphs (I was twelve) and a­ fter.”4 Indeed, the images w ­ ere so shocking, so unfamiliar, that the viewing public often declared disbelief, assuming that the photo­graphs must have been produced in a studio for marketing the war. The sheer animalism and dehumanization of the starving, naked camp victims stacked on aluminum bunks, waiting in line for gas chambers, or piled half-­dead at dumping grounds, clashed with known understandings of anthropocentric life in the modern world. In their very improbability, Holocaust images created a new visual real­ity.5 In part this new visual real­ ity was due to the rise of photojournalism during the 1940s, a point in time when photography became regarded as a professional language of truth and war­time knowledge. Seeing technologically advanced warfare for the first time through the lens of the camera thus created a fundamental relationship between war, vio­lence, and photographic technology, between the practice of public imagination and the concept of a war twice-­removed. Creating a 86  Chapter 3

form of au­then­tic sight, war­time photography and the atrocities of combat became indistinguishable visions of postmodernity. Since ­these images are so well known in U.S. popu­lar culture at this point in time, they are not provided in this book. Following from Anne Fausto-­ Sterling’s work on Sara Baartman, which advocates for a critical absence of sensitive images that are so well known that their presence can serve to further exoticize or exploit their subjects, this absence is both an ethical strategy and an epistemological decision, in a chapter that considers the amorphousness of public visual culture. As Fausto-­Sterling writes, the compulsion to “look” at visual repre­sen­ta­tions of exploited persons in the name of fact-­ finding diverts attention away from “the construction and constructors of scientific knowledge” that originally produced the terms of their denigration.6 While we might say that all analyses of visual culture beg ­these types of ethical questions, Fausto-­Sterling’s point holds particularly true in cases where the images in question are iconic and widely available for public consumption. At the same time, scholars including Sven Lindqvist and Barbie Zelizer have written about how the visual repre­sen­ta­tion of the whiteness of Nazi Holocaust victims played a key role in global responses to the genocide, often at the expense of acknowledging larger histories of colonialism, medical experimentation, and genocidal practices first directed ­toward nonwhite ­people in the Global South.7 Weary of ­these dilemmas, I do not seek to unduly avoid the visual repre­sen­ta­tions at stake, but instead, rely on their standing as culturally ubiquitous. Their absence also serves a functional role, emphasizing the pull of t­ hings once seen that then become impossibly unseeable. Moving forward from ­these events, this chapter considers the significance of this photographic culture in relation to a simultaneous development in the U.S. public sphere that has yet to be treated seriously: the explosion of “alien sightings” in the post–­World War II years. I argue that this phenomenon is deeply tied to the panic over Holocaust photography; both tell a story about the nature of midcentury visual culture, both are concerned about the bound­aries of ­human embodiment, and both question the futurity of humanity. Existing scholarly treatments of midcentury extraterrestrial narratives link the issue to Cold War paranoia. Indeed, ­there is a rich tradition in American studies and film studies that has worked to connect midcentury alien “sightings,” the rise of popu­lar science fiction films depicting extraterrestrials, and mass panic over the infiltration of communist subjects and ideologies into the United States. In ­these assessments, the alien, ­whether spotted by a passerby or appearing on the big screen, is i­ magined as a parallel On Alien Ground  87

figure, standing in for the abduction of the demo­cratic soul u ­ nder the evils of communism. Yet one of the issues that remains uninterrogated is how vastly dif­fer­ ent the aliens are portrayed in ­these two scenarios. While aliens on the big screen tended to be large, monstrous, and even superhuman, aliens “sighted” by the U.S. public w ­ ere small, quasi-­human, and frail. To put it another way, if the U.S. public was being fed images from film and tele­vi­sion depicting aliens in a par­tic­u­lar way, would it not follow that reports of so-­called sightings would follow suit? Would they not have traded on existing repre­sen­ta­ tions and discourses? The fact that they did not suggests that something e­ lse was at work in the imagining of “real” aliens. This chapter seeks to answer for the discrepancy between ­these two visualizations of extraterrestrial life by situating their occurrence within narratives of disfigurement, nuclear war, biomedical intervention, and species extinction that accompanied the traumatic losses of the war, and that structured U.S. understandings of post-­ Holocaust life. From alien “sightings,” to the unforetold effects of nuclear warfare, to the reconceptualization of medical consent, and fi­nally, to the all-­too-­often overlooked alien/monster films of the period, this chapter examines the transformation of the “­human” in the wake of unparalleled forces of dehumanization.

Alienation

In June  1997 the United States Air Force published a report that “closed the case” on claims that an extraterrestrial spaceship with alien bodies had crashed in Ros­well, New Mexico, fifty years earlier. Instead, the report asserted, the remnants at the crash site belonged to a covert seismetric balloon operated by the U.S. government, which held crash test dummies in large, temperature-­resistant sacks that may have resembled body bags to troubled onlookers. One by one, the report disputed and even justified the observations recalled by witnesses at the crash site, attempting to reconcile the material remains of the incident with the purported impossibility of its alien origins.8 Nonetheless, the circulation of the report managed to create an even greater confusion about what exactly had happened in the New Mexico desert. When images of the crash test dummies w ­ ere revealed (figures 3.1 and 3.2), it was clear that they did not match the physical descriptions provided by ­those who had claimed to have seen ­actual alien corpses. While the former ­were made of a pale tan material with a sort of prototypical Anglo-­American 88  Chapter 3

face and w ­ ere six feet tall and two hundred pounds, the latter ­were recalled as having had a gray skin tone, bulbous heads, and large eyes, and ­were four feet tall with skeletal bodies.9 Although the discrepancies between ­these stories may never be fully resolved, the story of Ros­well and the “alien” ship that crashed ­there is a critical moment in the history of U.S. public culture. Historically, the description of the Roswellian aliens and their vari­ous incarnations, also known as “short grays,” represented a new type of alien body, one that would come to dominate narratives of extraterrestrial sightings by the 1960s but, importantly, did not appear in the science fiction lit­ er­a­ture or films of the period. This chapter seeks to account for this new type of embodiment by understanding it in relation to the technological advances and photographic cultures that emerged from World War II and w ­ ere then reformulated during the Cold War. For while many historians have considered aliens as paradigmatic figures of the secrecy, domestic subterfuge, and Soviet threat pres­ent throughout Cold War public culture, the ­actual materiality of the aliens in and of themselves often remains unremarked upon.10 Similarly, while ­there is a rich lit­er­a­ture on the history of Holocaust photography, ­there is oddly l­ittle scholarship that acknowledges the long-­ term effects of these images on the public consciousness. ­These absences appear to be an issue of disconnected periodization, in which, from a historiographic perspective, scholars tend to move very quickly out of the World War II period into the Cold War period, linking all the paranoia and cultural strangeness of the 1950s and 1960s to the panic over Communism instead of lingering fears or anx­ie­ ties about World War II. Yet the culture of alien “sightings” speaks to a need for connectivity, in which the legacy of war­time photography in general, and Holocaust photography in par­tic­u­lar, provides a spectacular visual repertoire for the imaginings of extraterrestrial life as a species of “short grays.” Following their first appearance in the Ros­well accounts, short grays became the most widely reported form of alien life to have been witnessed across the nation throughout the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.11 In 1961 the Betty and Barney Hill case became one of the most famous short gray encounters, in which the ­couple claimed to have been abducted while driving on an abandoned highway. A ­ fter reporting the incident to the local air force base, they ­were put ­under hypnosis, where they both recalled having seen aliens with “large craniums, diminishing in size . . . ​­toward the chin . . . ​eyes [that] continued around to the sides of their heads,” with “grayish, almost metallic looking” skin, and without “any hair.” At first the Hills could not recall any mouths at all, but they ­later described them as “much like when On Alien Ground  89

FIGU RE   3 . 1 .

in storage.

Ros­well dummies

F I G U R E  3 .2 .

Ros­well gurney and body bag used to transport dummies (1947).

Artwork produced by David G. Baker in consultation with Betty and Barney Hill (1961). Courtesy of the Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library.

F I G U R E  3 .3 .

you draw one horizontal line with a short perpendicular line on each end” (figure 3.3).12 The physicality of the short gray alien—­the hollowness of the eyes; the shrunken cheeks, nose, and mouth; the protrusion of the large head over the emaciated body; the apparent nudity and baldness; the androgenization—­ indicates a symbolic connection to the alien forms of h ­ uman embodiment that appeared in Holocaust photography. Most of all, the aliens’ gray skin color suggests that ­these creatures ­were always already photographic remnants, public “sightings” or “visions” of the traumatic and theretofore unseen, images offered by their own media. They became embodied forms of war­time memory, living in the visual my­thol­ogy of repetition and melancholia created by the culture of atrocity. As Ulrich Baer has argued, ­there exists a critical relationship between the operative effects of photography and the psychological logic of trauma. “Traumatic events,” he writes, “exert their troubling grip on memory and on the imagination ­because they w ­ ere not consciously experienced at the time of their occurrence. Just as the photo­ graph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially . . . ​ trauma results from experiences that are registered as ‘real­ity imprints’ or, as psychiatrists have phrased it, recorded ‘photographically,’ without integration into semantic memory.”13 Since the early 1990s, many psychiatrists have begun to connect purported alien encounters to past experiences of physical trauma, while still ­others have compared the acquisition of “False Memory Syndrome” to the brainwashing effects of extraterrestrial narratives that circulate within groups of so-­called contactees.14 In this understanding, the encounter with the alien is itself a product of individual and collective memory, where the alien stands in for a sublimated experience and becomes a form of remembering, or where the alien becomes falsely implanted as a commemorative fiction, which the individual understands to be true.15 In the case of post–­ World War II sightings, the figure of the alien can be interpreted similarly, representing the irrepressibility of traumatic sight in the wake of unpre­ce­ dented and violent war­time photography. The year of the Ros­well “crash” also marked the first year that a civilian ­reported witnessing a ufo in the sky, followed by nearly thirteen thousand accounts over the next twenty years, matched by a series of military-­ scientific efforts to understand the phenomenon.16 The term Unidentified Flying Object had been coined earlier during the war itself, when peculiar hovercrafts, as well as a bright, flashing ball of light, ­were reported by both allied and axis pi­lots flying over Eu­ro­pean and Japa­nese land.17 U.S. pi­lots 92  Chapter 3

also began referring to ­these mysterious sightings as “foo fighters,” reappropriating a racist slur used to denote the purportedly erratic and unskilled flying abilities of the Japa­nese. By 1947 the U.S. Air Force created Proj­ect Sign (also known as Proj­ect Grudge and Proj­ect Blue Book) in order to study reports of ufo sightings, and concluded that the “ ‘flying saucer’ situation is not all imaginary or seeing too much in some natu­ral phenomenon. Something is ­really flying around.”18 The government continued to treat ufo incidences with seriousness throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when diverse government organ­izations became dedicated to their capture and, as ­will be explored in the following chapter, when scientists attempted to encounter life in outer space. Thus, in 1952 the cia or­ga­nized the Robertson Panel to address the pos­si­ble interference of ufos with national communications security; in 1961 the Brookings Report was commissioned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) and submitted to the House of Representatives in order to consider the existence of extraterrestrial life; and in 1966 the Condon Committee analyzed the sweep of ufo reports.19 Looking back on this moment, con­temporary scientists have called attention to the high incidence of sightings in the New Mexico desert area, suggesting that civilians may have in fact witnessed the goings-on of covert aeronautic experiments headquartered near Alamogordo, New Mexico, close to the test site of the Manhattan Proj­ect and the covert development of aeronautical equipment prior to the space race. Many of t­ hese experiments ­were headed by German scientists brought over by the U.S. government during the postwar years u ­ nder Proj­ect Paperclip and Operation Overcast. Trading war crime p ­ ardons for scientific prowess, the U.S. government hoped to absorb earlier German successes in the field of rocket physics. (Similar efforts w ­ ere dispatched by the Soviets, who also recruited several German scientists to their space program at the same moment.) Germans ­were known for an almost prescient skill in aeronautics and rocketry, largely due to the fact that their domestic airport runways ­were bombed by allied pi­lots in the final years of the war, and inquiries into vertical launching tactics became understood as critical to the survival of the German air forces.20 Yet throughout investigations into the sources and nature of ufos, ­there remained an aura of secrecy around the researchers and their findings. As is well known, the 1960s was a period marked by widespread accusations of government secrecy and cover-­ups. For this reason, the mass publication of the findings of the Condon Committee—written by nuclear physicist Edward Condon and introduced by popu­lar New York Times reporter Walter ­Sullivan—­quickly became a best seller. The Complete Report Commissioned On Alien Ground  93

by the U.S. Air Force: Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (1969), a nearly one-­thousand-­page book, concluded that ­there was always a rational explanation for a ufo sighting, ­whether it be an unusual meteorological occurrence or a form of man-­made technology.21 Once again, photography played a critical role in the pro­cess of imagining alien life, but this time, it served as proof of the existence of ufos. Dozens of photo­graphs ­were presented by civilians and members of the armed forces, the bulk of which Condon located in a “residual group of unidentifieds” that ­were “inconsistent” and did not “yield sufficient evidence to establish a hypothesis.”22 The very presence of ufos on camera film seemed to make it impossible to doubt their materiality, and so conclusions ­were drawn to support, rather than preclude, the possibility of unidentified, but not unidentifiable, flying objects. Yet even while the Condon Report worked to establish the bound­aries of normative “sightings” and to parse out their potential sources, public and expert skepticism remained a constant, creating a dual real­ity in which ufos ­were both fact and fiction, determinable and indeterminate. As Time reported in 1969, “ufos seem[ed] more than ever to be a product of terrestrial imaginations.”23 When asked to comment on the midcentury “saucer epidemic,” psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung noted similarly that “something is being seen. . . . ​What is seen may be, in the case of a single observer, a subjective vision (hallucination). In the case of several or many observers, it may be a collective vision. Such a psychic phenomenon . . . ​could be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to the pres­ent conscious situation: the fear of an apparently insoluble po­liti­cal situation in the world. . . . ​At such times eyes turn heavenwards . . . ​and miracle forebodings of a threatening or consoling nature appear from on high.”24 Unconvinced by the military’s treatment of the prob­lem, and of the media’s irresponsible tendency ­toward excess, Jung did not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial arrivals but questioned the short-­sighted and provincial responses of U.S. and Eu­ro­pean authorities. Should the origin of the phenomenon turn out to be an extraterrestrial one . . . ​it would prove an intelligent interplanetary link. The impact of such a fact on humanity is unforeseeable. But, without doubt, we would be placed in the very questionable position of ­today’s primitive socie­ties that clash with the superior cultures of the white race. All initiative would be wrested from us. As an old witch doctor once said to me, with tears in his eyes: We would “have no more dreams.” Our sciences and technology would go to the junk pile. What such a catastrophe would mean morally we can gauge by the pitiful decline 94  Chapter 3

of the primitive cultures that takes place before our eyes. The capacity to manufacture [interplanetary space ships] points to a technology towering sky high over ours. Just as Pax Britannica made an end to tribal warfare in Africa, so our world could roll up its Iron Curtain and use it for scrap. . . . ​ This might not be so bad. But we would have been “discovered” and colonized.25 Damned from within and damned from without, Jung illustrated the ways in which the “­human race” stood l­ittle chance either against its own delusions or against the tribalism of a new interplanetary world order. The f­ uture of man could, in ­these terms, only become anachronistic, a sentence that would bear out the continual repetition of past horrors. Yet, as frightening as the prospect of extraterrestrial life might be, so too was the possibility that ­there might not be any significant or comparable biological ­matter beyond Earth. Logically, popu­lar scientific opinion asserted the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets and in other galaxies. That this life form had not made itself known to Earth could only mean two ­things: that it was no more advanced than humanity in its efforts ­toward space flight; or that it had already become extinguished, possibly through nuclear accident. “It is perfectly conceivable that some intelligent race meddled once too often with nuclear laws and blew themselves to bits,” reasoned Dr. Otto Struve, in 1958. Head of the Department of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, Struve was known for his attribution of supernovas (stellar explosions) to unnatural ­causes.26 For ­these reasons, attitudes ­toward extraterrestrial life remained vexed; while its existence would call for a reimagining of h ­ uman dominance, its absence would serve as a premonition of the dangers of nuclear warfare.

Monstrosity

Even as the government unleashed previously unseen images of industrial vio­lence during World War II, it also maintained a ban on images of the Pacific Theater ­until the end of its occupation of Japan in 1952.27 The paradigmatic rendering of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ­were ultimately as much a form of silencing as they ­were a form of repre­ sen­ta­tion, offering proof of the war without evoking its ­human casualties. In contrast to the history of Holocaust iconography, ­these power­ful though obscure visual referents have yet to be fully displaced by images of ­actual On Alien Ground  95

victims. Rather, the visual language that was created to articulate the experience of war in Japan was a language of inevitable destruction. Perhaps ­because of ­these oppositional visual economies, the pictorial imagination that accompanied the psychological trauma of the atom bomb has typically been rendered in a more abstract, or nonreferential fashion, and in fact dominates much of the alien-­themed films produced during the Cold War era, in which the “aliens” at stake are typically mutant creatures created through pro­cesses of radiation and nuclear warfare. The inability to deal with the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the nonexistence of an iconic ­human victim, was as much about the American public’s unwillingness to see itself as a perpetrator of vio­lence as it was a question of racial and national difference. In recent years, historians of technology have debated the inevitability of the atomic bombs’ use in Japan, in contrast to the more conventional bombing campaigns launched in Eu­rope. While some scholars have declared this issue a moot point (understanding it purely as a m ­ atter of chronology in the history of technological innovation, which did not ready the bomb u ­ ntil 1945), o ­ thers have suggested that their use in Japan was a choice that was racially motivated.28 Throughout the war, U.S. military propaganda was particularly harsh in its portrayal of Japan, in spite of the comparatively larger scope of German atrocities. While popu­lar repre­sen­ta­tions of the Germans ­were most likely to be associated with the paradigms of mechanical precision and technological overstep, depictions of Japan rendered the nation’s p ­ eople as animalistic and crudely violent.29 Po­liti­cal cartoons and war­time propaganda depicted the Japa­nese as overgrown vermin infecting the globe, as half-­animal–­half-­ human creatures clawing their way to world dominance. War­time “informational” films commissioned by the military, such as Frank Capra’s Know Your ­Enemy: Japan (1945), pointed out the “peculiarity” of the Japa­nese mind and body. In par­tic­u­lar, the uncanny survivalism of the Japa­nese ­under untenable conditions stirred anx­ie­ ties among t­hose who sought to defeat them; of par­tic­u­lar focus was the nation’s seeming ability to survive “purely on rice” if necessary.30 Reports on the treatment of U.S. pows in Japa­nese war camps bemoaned the withering of American soldiers’ bodies ­under the restrictions of the “Oriental” diet. Meanwhile, Japa­nese Americans who suffered internment within the United States ­were forced to consume a meat-­ heavy “American” diet, which many internees found unpalatable.31 The internees ­were of course “aliens” of a dif­fer­ent sort, who found themselves reterritorialized by the U.S. government. Many Americans fought the transplantation of internees into their communities. Like many of the ficti96  Chapter 3

tious extraterrestrials that appeared in Cold War films, internees ­were most likely to be relocated in the middling states, and to appear without warning next to insular suburban neighborhoods.32 Perceived as “invaders,” ­people of Japa­nese ancestry became understood as a unique e­ nemy culpable of greater evils than a fascist government and an alliance with Hitler. ­Imagined as a less-­than-­human race, they could only be expected to behave in less-­than-­ human ways. That the first atomic bomb was detonated on Japa­nese soil, then, was an act of ­great significance. Rather than being an aberration in the trajectory of the war, it was instead consistent with the United States’ approach toward the Pacific front, and ­toward the Japa­nese ­people. And though the United States could never have predicted the exact effects of the bomb, scientists did know enough to understand that it could permanently alter the physiology of the survivors. Following the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States obsessively searched Japa­nese bodies for the effects of nuclear warfare rendering the bombs an “experiment” that tested the biological consequences of atomic radiation. At the same time, however, ­there was g­ reat speculation as to w ­ hether the effects of the bomb ­were peculiar to the Japa­nese “race.”33 In 1948 the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (abcc) was formed by the National Acad­emy of Sciences and the National Research Council u ­ nder a directive from President Harry S. Truman, in order to assess the full scope of the destruction. The abcc worked in uneasy cooperation with Japa­nese scientists, whose own research facilities and systems of bureaucratic organ­ ization had been ruined by the bombing. Due to the po­liti­cal and economic disadvantages that faced Japa­nese scientists attempting to conduct their own studies of the bombs’ aftermath, many ­were forced to comply with U.S. research procedures and protocols u ­ nder the strictures of U.S. military occupation. Historian  M. Susan Lindee has called the instrumentation of U.S. research in postwar Japan a form of “colonial science,” and it was indeed a formulation of power and knowledge that would long affect understandings of the bombs’ histories, as well as the role of the abcc in the reconstruction of postwar Japan.34 In the years that followed, many Japa­nese citizens protested that they ­were treated like “guinea pigs” rather than given proper medical care.35 When it was first commissioned, the abcc was charged with examining the nature and extent of radiation damage among the survivors. The immediate interests of scientists involved ­were symbolically oppositional—­ burn scarring and ge­ne­tic mutation. ­These concerns represented both the vis­i­ble and invisible manifestations of radiation exposure, a dichotomy that On Alien Ground  97

resonated with Cold War ideologies that located forces of danger both outside and inside the body politic.36 The panic over invisible dangers, be they Communist infiltrators or ge­ne­tic mutations, became an impor­tant topos for con­temporary understandings of ­human perpetuity. As one editorial for Time magazine remarked, “modern man can wander unheeding into strong radiation that he cannot feel, see, hear, smell or taste. And ­unless he carries an artificial radiation sense (a Geiger c­ ounter, ionization chamber, e­ tc.), he may get a fatal dose without suspicion of alarm.” Scientists could only hope, the article continued, “that some higher animals—­perhaps even man—­have a latent radiation sense that might be trained to warn them against Atomic Age hazards.”37 The point, to be sure, was that the ­human body was not equipped to deal with the “Atomic Age.” In an era of mechanical intervention, organic life continually proved insufficient. Anx­i­eties that accompanied ­these deficiencies created a postwar culture that continually sought to rebuild the h ­ uman body from within and without, exemplified by the rising fields of plastic surgery and ge­ne­tic engineering. Perhaps the most famous lay response ­toward the damages wrought by the bombs, and the interest of rehabilitating the postwar body through the implementation of plastic surgery, came from newspaper man Norman Cousins, who, along with the Japa­nese Christian minister Kiyoshi Tanimoto, arranged for the “Hiroshima Maidens Proj­ect” to bring twenty-­seven of the bombs’ female victims to the United States for reconstructive medical treatment during the 1950s.38 ­These treatments followed the poorly planned U.S. “Operation ­Castle Bravo,” a thermonuclear test conducted at the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands. Intended as a covert military operation, the detonation of ­Castle Bravo was revealed when several Japa­nese fishing boats, as well as their catches, ­were severely poisoned by radioactive contamination that spread far beyond scientists’ predictions, forcing the United States to pay Japan a two-­million-­dollar settlement.39 The Hiroshima Maidens Proj­ect was similarly a small but symbolic gesture, which provided reconstructive surgeries and psychological counseling to a handful of severely disfigured bomb victims, whose corporeal deformities ­were said to produce social ostracization in their native nation.40 Historiographically, the Hiroshima Maidens Proj­ect is typically understood in the context of other humanitarian postwar efforts on the part of the U.S. government, public aid organ­izations, and even individual citizens, who brought Japa­nese ­women and ­children into their homes as war brides and adoptees. In the latter case, such adoptions could be literal (in which an ­actual child was brought into the fold of a typically white, middle-­class ­family), or, dur98  Chapter 3

ing the years prior to the ­legal immigration of such persons, the adoptions could be symbolic, as in the case of the “moral adoptions program,” which was also or­ga­nized by Cousins, and connected the readers of his publication, Saturday Review, to a specific Japa­nese child through regular financial donations and written correspondence.41 As such, ­these efforts have been interpreted as signposts in a new era in U.S. foreign policy, which attempted to construct a false sense of security amid the complicated and seemingly threatening events of midcentury domestic and international race relations. For example, Christina Klein has demonstrated how ­these humanitarian claims ­were indicative of a postwar climate of inclusion, in which U.S. policy attempted to bring certain “aliens” into the folds of the “­free world”: “The Hiroshima Maidens Proj­ect shows how the postwar global imaginary did not depend exclusively on a logic of exclusion, of keeping communists out of the U.S. and out of the ‘­free world.’ Rather, it also depended on a logic of inclusion, of strengthening the ‘­free world’ by inviting many nations and p ­ eoples into its protective embrace. Cousins ­imagined a hybrid, all-­encompassing ­family that could tame previously threatening differences by incorporating them rather than containing them.”42 Klein’s remarks on the cultural valences of postwar inclusivity echo t­ hose made by other scholars of the Cold War, who have explored the closed system quality of midcentury politics. Yet the concept of a “closed world” was at best a fantasy—­not ­because it was of course impossible to create an “all-­ encompassing f­ amily” but b ­ ecause the postwar period saw the birth of new forms of biocultural difference that could not be contained ­under existing cultural rubrics. In par­tic­u­lar, the profound and unfathomable alterations of the h ­ uman body witnessed in postwar Germany and Japan, as well as the growing corpus of scientific and popu­lar lit­er­a­ture that predicted quite literally a war of the worlds, established greater stakes than the containment of postwar ­enemy forces. This alternate and complementary history becomes exposed depending entirely on context. Indeed, throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Cousins worked on two other aid proj­ects, which involved a similar attempt to rebuild ­human bodies that had been disabled by war and disease, and, as in the case of the Hiroshima Maidens, called on the American public for sympathy and financial support. First, in 1958 and 1959, Cousins worked with the Hiroshima Peace Center Associates of New York to bring thirty-­five Polish w ­ omen from the Ravensbrück, Germany, concentration camp to the United States for medical treatment.43 Known as the “Ravensbrück Lapins” (vernacularly, rather than On Alien Ground  99

in strict translation, the “Ravensbrück guinea pigs”),44 the w ­ omen experienced extensive bodily injury during the course of an experiment involving sulfanilamide, a drug aimed at treating deadly bacteria, such as streptococcus, gas gangrene, and tetanus. In order to test the drug, reported the court transcripts of the Nuremberg Medical ­Trials, “wounds ­were deliberately inflicted on the experimental subjects. . . . ​Circulation of blood was interrupted by tying off blood vessels at both ends of the wound to create a condition similar to that of a battlefield wound. Infection was aggravated by forcing wood shavings and ground glass into the wounds.”45 The sulfanilamide experiments caused permanent scarring, chronic illness, and the disablement or loss of limbs.46 ­After traveling to Warsaw to meet with the survivors of the Ravensbrück camp, Cousins brought a series of documents and photo­graphs to the collective of doctors and volunteers who had worked on the Hiroshima Maidens Proj­ect. He noted the disbelief and shock of the group when shown an image of “what remained of a ­human leg,” in a language that recalled victims’ own testimonies of their imprisonment; as survivor Jadwiga Dzido-­Hassa remarked, “we ­were told ­every day that . . . ​we had to forget we w ­ ere ­human beings.”47 Like the Maidens, the Ravensbrück ­women received vari­ous surgical procedures, some plastic, some functional, as well as psychological counseling for the purposes of rehabilitation.48 Then, in 1964, Cousins worked to collect funds to aid British orthopedic surgeon Paul Brand in his efforts to treat leprosy patients in Vellore, India.49 Although Brand had first traveled to India to perform a procedure he had developed that reconstructed patients’ nerve-­damaged hands that curled like “claws,” he quickly became fascinated by peculiar features of the disease’s etiology and, consequently, its drastic social consequences of stigmatization and quarantine.50 Of par­tic­u­lar interest was the way in which vari­ous body parts seemed to “vanish”; fin­gers and toes often went missing without a trace, while patients’ noses slowly appeared to recede into their naval cavities.51 Brand worked to restore functionality to his patients’ bodies, though many had already lost entire limbs. Cousins was taken by Brand’s work, and though it was far from the industrial camps of Germany or the sites of atomic warfare in Japan, it illustrated a similar effort at rebuilding the ­human body, ravaged by unthinkable conditions. As David Serlin’s study of post–­World War II disability and the use of prostheses has demonstrated, the artificial animation of the ­human body was a per­sis­tent concern as thousands of dismembered veterans returned home.52 ­There was a sense in which the prosthetic at once represented the promise of modern science to restore 100  Chapter 3

the war-­torn body, and yet it was also a constant reminder of the fragility of “natu­ral” h ­ uman corporeality. Nonetheless, the dehumanizing effects of war ­were combated through the imperfect sciences of plastic surgery and prosthetic implantation. The use of technology to transform the ­human body at midcentury was further seen in the establishment of a series of transnational organ­izations and ethical standards for the medical treatment of ­human bodies beginning in the late 1940s. In 1947 the Nuremberg Code set new standards for ­human experimentation, and the World Medical Association (WMA) was founded by physicians in the interest of creating international guidelines for healthcare, medical ethics, and medical education. In 1948 the World Health Organ­ization inaugurated a new era of demo­cratic goodwill and nation building through the propagation of public health initiatives, while the Declaration of Geneva revised and “modernized” the Hippocratic Oath to include the “utmost re­spect for h ­ uman life,” to prohibit the use of “medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity,” and, ultimately, to make explicit the humanitarian mission of medical science.53 In word and in practice, t­hese events attempted to counteract the profound acts of dehumanization perpetrated by Nazi Germany. At the same time, they began to remake the demo­cratic liberal citizen in the image of the rehabilitated subject, creating a sort of citizen-­subject/citizen-­patient. As the rest of the chapter w ­ ill address, the reformulation of the h ­ uman—­and its alien o ­ thers—at midcentury rewrote the terms of agency, individuality, and democracy through the reassembling of the h ­ uman body. This can be seen in the consecutive establishment of the Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights (udhr) by the United Nations in 1948 followed by the adoption of the Declaration of Geneva and the International Code of Medical Ethics in 1949 by the wma, protocols that mirrored the udhr’s concern over the sanctity of ­human life.54 ­These concerns played out on the national level as well. In 1949 President Truman proposed the “Fair Deal,” a policy that sought to provide Americans with a variety of social ser­vices, including universal medical care.55 Truman was unsuccessful in implementing his vision, largely ­because of its pejorative association with Soviet medicine.56 Republican politicians warned that the plan would lead to the broader instantiation of a “socialist state,” while a conservative faction of the American Medical Association fought for the right to keep their practices privatized.57 Invoking the titular language of Roo­se­velt’s “New Deal,” Truman’s plan declared that “­every segment of our population and ­every individual has the right to expect from his Government On Alien Ground  101

a fair deal.”58 Frederick A. Virkus, delegate to the Republican National Convention, remarked on the similarities between Truman’s 1948 State of the Union address and the 1932 treatise “­Toward Soviet Amer­i­ca,” by William Z. Foster, Communist Party of the U.S.A. (cpusa) General Secretary; he highlighted both plans’ call for federal aid in housing, education, social security, and medical ser­vices.59 Virkus accused the Demo­cratic party of its current “socialist trend” and attacked his own party’s leadership for “me-­tooism,” wryly remarking that “the fact appears to be that since the last sham b ­ attle (the 1948 elections) our party leadership is as completely disor­ga­nized as if an atomic bomb had hit it, which is about what did happen.”60 Virkus was not far off the mark. Both the renewed interest in social ser­ vices and the anx­i­eties that surrounded their potential “socialist” execution ­were effects of the postbomb world. In par­tic­u­lar, the nascent interest in universal medical insurance indicated the ways in which the Truman era seemed to demand an even more heavy-­handed approach to public aid than had been seen during previous administrations, even though the Fair Deal was never approved. Riding the line between conceptualizations of socialist medicine and the recuperative health efforts required by any postwar period, the Fair Deal’s medical proposal was impor­tant insofar as it raised, for the first time, the prob­lem of health insurance on the federal level, an effort that would not be formally revisited ­until President Lyndon Johnson’s G ­ reat 61 Society Plan, with the advent of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. The broad humanism of the postwar period—­exemplified through the rise of multinational relief efforts, the construction of the United Nations, and the revision of the Hippocratic Oath—was therefore a result of the peculiar tragedies of World War II. Reflecting on U.S. intervention in Japan, President Truman remarked with pride, “­We’re the only country in the history of the world that a­ fter a war has helped the country that was defeated. . . . ​ When you run a war the objective is to win. I think we have shown that we keep no ­bitter feelings.”62 Illustrating the logic of Cold War humanitarianism, Truman’s words erase the painful damages of the conflict by imagining the United States as a neutral ambassador of goodwill. International aid efforts that placed a premium on physical health—­including the distribution of clean ­water, good food, and proper medical treatment—­relocated, rebuilt, and reappropriated the body as a site on which the rights of the individual could be re-­created. The new world order was thus predicated on notions of charity and rehabilitation that rewrote transnational histories of exploitation and domination. What was also clear, however, was the critical difference that was ­imagined between U.S. involvement in international health relief 102  Chapter 3

efforts and what the nation chose to provide its own citizens. At the national level, such assistance was i­magined as undemo­cratic, while at the international level, medical aid was understood to be the proper responsibility of beneficent First World nations. This gap between local and global conceptualizations of health practice was in part due to U.S. investment in imagining the wounds of the nation as already healed, the just victor in an unjust war. Such fantasies ­were of course far from true.

Extracorporeality

At the same moment that war­time photography and postwar medical rehabilitation created new visual discourses of embodiment, personhood, and trauma, so too ­were other linguistic forms taking shape. Although the term alien had been used to denote persons of foreign origin since the f­ ourteenth ­century, it was not used to refer to extraterrestrials u ­ ntil 1944, when it appeared in a science fiction periodical and quickly became pop­u­lar­ized.63 Importantly, it was a word that existed on the cusp of two science fiction cultures: the golden age of science fiction lit­er­a­ture, which lasted throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and the golden age of science fiction films, which lasted from the 1950s to the 1970s.64 The concept of the extraterrestrial as “alien” thus became mobilized as science fiction became reinterpreted through the filmic gaze, yet the epistemological work of the term continued to exist in complicated relation to its earlier incarnations. Indeed, much of the scholarly work that has been performed on the alien texts of the Cold War has demonstrated the ways in which the figure of the “alien” likely symbolized concerns about the incompatibility of transnational ideological difference in the age of nuclear technology. The most common example is The Invasion of the Body Snatchers model, in which pro­cesses of corporeal duplication, revision, and exchange instrumented by “alien” invaders are understood to stand in for narratives of Communist brainwashing, the eradication of the individual in the face of ruthless socialism, and, in the end, the sheer inhumanity of t­ hose who choose not to live u ­ nder the province of liberal democracy.65 To be sure, t­here ­were always direct links between the prob­lem of extraterrestrial life and the prob­lem of Soviet power. While the “space race” was conceived of as a quest for intergalactic national dominance, space stations ­were ­imagined as the hopeful military bases of the f­ uture.66 Yet the dangers of using space as “another focus for the arms race” w ­ ere perceived to be significant. In his 1960 address to the United Nations General Assembly, On Alien Ground  103

President Dwight D. Eisenhower railed against the “national appropriation” of “celestial bodies,” while ambiguously advocating the “develop[ment of space] for the benefit of all mankind.”67 What and whom U.S. astronauts might encounter in their quest for space colonization was an additional ­matter of concern for ­those who hoped the territory would be open, and would therefore provide yet another outpost for the theater of Cold War geopolitics. Perhaps one of the most overlooked features of midcentury popu­lar and scientific cultures was the extent to which outer space was considered as a site of ­future habitability. What would happen in the event of a massive nuclear detonation? What if the Earth’s resources ­were damaged beyond repair? In the early years of space science and space exploration, researchers ­were hopeful about the possibilities of extraterrestrial inhabitation. nasa commissioned artists to render sketches of ­these i­magined new worlds, complete with high-­tech farming systems and oxygen production. In all of ­these pictorials, the lush blue and green call to mind anything but previous renderings of outer space, which typically presented gray barren planets, red fiery planets, and rings of noxious gas. Instead, ­these new pictorials by nasa re­imagined outer space as potentially Earthlike. The Jetsons is the clearest example of how fantasies about life in outer space carried a positive valence, and ultimately permeated popu­lar culture. A cartoon produced by Hanna-­Barbera Studios between 1962 and 1963, The Jetsons portrayed a nuclear (white) ­family, complete with robotic maid, who lives in a space colony called “Orbit City.” Yet in The Jetsons, this change of location does not substantively alter the quality of American life. If anything, the show offered a hyperreal portrayal of the fifties and sixties, when the popularization of ­house­hold appliances and the culture of con­ve­nience foods (dehydrated, frozen, canned, and freeze dried) inserted a sense of technological affinity into daily domestic life. In The Jetsons, the appliances are more advanced and personalized, but they are, nonetheless, products of a very par­tic­u­lar moment in American consumer culture. The Jetsons’ companion show, The Flintstones (1960–66), offers a similar portrayal of prehistoric life, utilizing “stone age” materials and animals as machines to replicate the frontier of technological advancement. Both shows’ upbeat renderings of h ­ uman life in other times and places, fashioned out of unfamiliar materials but similar modes of being, suggest the possibility of an alternate existence, a naturalized ­future vision without conflict or danger. At the same time, however, the issue of extraterrestrial life, and how the h ­ uman race might compare, compete, or coexist with alien neighbors, 104  Chapter 3

remained a central anxiety for the American public throughout the mid-­ century. Diverging from current scholarship on Cold War popu­lar culture, this section addresses how ­these concerns became manifest in midcentury film culture—­taking alien for alien, man for man, and every­thing ­else in between for just that. By treating t­ hese texts as more than a meta­phor for concerns over the “Communist threat,” this section considers the prob­lem of extraterrestrial embodiment as a repre­sen­ta­tion of the permeable, mutable, and fleeting nature of ­human corporeality in an era of profound technological advancement and interplanetary expanse. Embodiment in the popu­lar films of the Cold War era is a cruel force and, at times, an utter impossibility. Besieged by aliens from outer space, monsters from beneath the sea, and cyborg technologies gone awry, the h ­ uman body is made to perform a series of dubious transformations from which it never truly recovers. This is in large part ­because the presence of a body in itself relies on the simultaneity of space and time, yet the speculative and futuristic quality of Cold War science fiction films obliterates the coalescence of bodily materiality. At the same time, the films are preoccupied with traces of history, and as such pres­ent a clear duality between the past and the ­future: t­ here are dinosaurs alongside atomic “death machines”; technologically savvy aliens landing in provincial suburban row h ­ ouses and rural towns; artificially intelligent robots coexisting with the remains of Victorian material culture; and The Jetsons flanking The Flintstones during Sunday cartoons. In a sense, t­here is no ­there ­there in these representations, and the body becomes lost in both symbolic and literal realms. The alienation of the h ­ uman body during the Cold War years was achieved both symbolically and literally through the deterioration of the bound­aries between human/mechanical life and terrestrial/extraterrestrial existence. Through ­these paradigms, the ­human race was i­magined to be imperiled by both the damaging effects of nuclear power and the arrival of alien beings. Monster films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), It Came from Beneath the Sea! (1955), Godzilla, King of Monsters! (1956), and Godzilla sequels (1957–75), featured prehistoric, radioactive monsters “awakened” by the detonation of the atom bombs, while alien films such as The ­Thing from Another World (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), The Creeping Terror (1964), Invasion of Astro-­Monster (1965), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), and The Incredible Invasion (1968) featured extraterrestrial creatures that attempt to dismember and annihilate the Earth’s On Alien Ground  105

population. Even throughout this genre, however, the prob­lems of radiation exposure and atomic weaponry loom large; Geiger c­ ounters are used to determine the location and nature of alien life, while alien bodies are typically ­imagined to surpass their h ­ uman counter­parts in their ability to inhabit chemically polluted environments. Throughout ­these films, the h ­ uman body is shown to be uncomfortably fragile, imperfect, and ill-­equipped to deal with the challenges of the nuclear and space eras. When, in one of the most prevalent paradigms of the period, ­human bodies are “invaded,” they are typically found to be inadequate, and are continually overhauled by their new inhabitants. As one alien character in I Married a Monster from Outer Space remarks to another of his new host body, “The design is pretty lousy. . . . ​I’ll say one ­thing for ­humans . . . ​their bodies fall apart in a ridiculously short time. . . . ​Personally I find [them] disgusting.”68 In contrast to the failures of ­human corporeality, the alien body is typically demonstrated to be sturdier, enabled by vari­ous forms of cyborgian mechanization. The notion that t­ hese beings might represent, as the protagonist notes in Invaders from Mars, “mankind developed to its ultimate intelligence,”69 is an ambiguous prophesy that raises questions about h ­ uman survivalism and the consequences of hypertechnologization. In t­ hese ruminations on extraterrestrial life, the figure of the infrahuman is rendered alien: part self, part other. At the same moment Hollywood saw an outpouring of alien science fiction films, a series of po­liti­cal thrillers w ­ ere produced that took up similar issues of ­human conflict and survival in the postnuclear era. Made fifteen to twenty years ­after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, films such as On the Beach (1959), Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Fail-­Safe (1964), and Seven Days in May (1964) addressed with new insight and greater forthrightness the critical paradoxes of nuclear warfare. In On the Beach, Gregory Peck’s character, Commander Dwight Lionel Towers, notes that although the United States had “expunged” e­ nemy forces, “we d ­ idn’t do such a bad job on ourselves. With the in­ter­est­ing result that the background level of radiation in this very room is nine times what it was a year ago . . . ​ ­we’re all doomed you know . . . ​doomed by the air ­we’re about to breath. We ­haven’t got a chance.”70 ­Whether “doomed” to extinction, or to some unpredictable pro­cess of mutation, the h ­ uman race in t­ hese films is made alien through the unfolding of untenable choices, the outstripping of humanity by its own technologies. In times of crisis, the dichotomy between ­enemy and self is i­magined to be set askew; longtime foes may become 106  Chapter 3

critical partners, strangers are made familiar, and allies are sacrificed out of necessity. In Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1964 production, Dr. Strangelove, ­these anx­ie­ ties came to fruition in the accidental detonation of a “doomsday device,” which sets in action a series of events culminating in a plan to borough underground—an extraterrestrial colony in its own right. Speaking to U.S. President Merkin Muffley, Dr.  Strangelove, a German expatriate scientist with high governmental rank, suggests the following: dr.  strangelove: Mr. President, I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of ­human specimens. It would be quite easy. . . . ​ At the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts, radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep . . . president muffley: How long would you have to stay down t­ here? dr.  strangelove: . . . ​I would think that possibly, one hundred years. president muffley: You mean ­people could actually stay down ­there for a hundred years? dr.  strangelove: Would not be difficult, Mein Führer! Nuclear reactors could, heh, I’m sorry, Mr. President, nuclear reactors could provide power almost in­def­initely. Green­houses could contain plant life, animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of the available mine sites in the country, but I would guess that ­there would be dwelling space for several hundred thousand of our ­people . . . . president muffley: I would hate to have to decide who stays up and who goes down. dr. strangelove: That would not be difficult, Mr. President, it could easily be accomplished with a computer, and a computer could be set and programmed to accept ­factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-­section of necessary skills; of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required princi­ples of leadership and tradition. . . . ​With the proper breeding techniques, and the ratio of, say, ten females to each male, I would guess that I could [make] our way back to the pres­ent gross national product within, say, twenty years. On Alien Ground  107

president muffley: But look ­here, doctor, ­wouldn’t the nuclear survivors be so grief stricken and anguished that they would envy the dead and not want to go on living? dr. strangelove: No sir, no sir, when they go down into the mine, every­one would still be alive. ­There would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion would be one of nostalgia for ­those left ­behind, combined with the spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead. Throughout his conversation with President Muffley, Dr. Strangelove strug­ gles to control his right arm and hand, which frequently launches into a Heil Hitler position, and violently attempts to strangle his own throat. At the time when the film was first released, Strangelove’s automated hand was assumed to be a prosthetic, a vestige of Nazi fervor imprisoned within a dismembered and disabled body. Yet Strangelove’s arm was not, in fact, intended as a mechanized limb. Rather, it was a comedic gesture conceived by Kubrick and actor Peter Sellers during the course of the filming, prob­ably misunderstood in the context of the mass amputations and prosthetic implants that characterized postwar veteran medical culture.71 In the years that followed the film’s release, the term Dr. Strangelove hand became ­adopted by neurologists researching a phenomenon known as the “alien hand syndrome,” in which an individual’s hand moves in “meaningful” ways, seemingly of its own accord.72 ­Whether a mechanical implant or simply an “alien” force within an alien body, Strangelove’s unruly hand is a troubling presence in the film, one that has every­thing to do with his role as “scientific advisor” to a set of impossible circumstances. Within his very person can be seen the possibilities and limitations of scientific pro­ gress; ­human knowledge, in the end, cannot sustain or rebuild the h ­ uman body once broken. The moment had arrived at which biologic, mechanized control over ­human perpetuity could truly be accomplished in ways that had been previously unimaginable. As Purdue University biology professor Boyd  R. Keenan remarked the same year that Dr.  Strangelove hit theaters, “recent developments in ge­ne­tics and molecular biology pres­ent social prob­lems and possibilities for government control which even Hitler ­didn’t dream about.”73 Keenan’s remarks allude to the fact that the prob­lems raised by Nazi science and politics ­were still pres­ent in the decades that followed. Indeed, conversations about the ­future of the ­human race—­post-­ Holocaust, post-­eugenics proper—­were not easily had. Throughout the first four de­cades of the ­century, scientists and phi­los­o­phers alike had debated 108  Chapter 3

the eugenic value of war. On the one hand, some felt that war was “nature’s usual way of solving the prob­lem of which body of organisms is best fitted to survive within a certain set of circumstances,” encouraging “natu­ral” se­ lection, and preserving “the nation possessing the best brains and the best bodies.”74 Yet as the “circumstances” of war became transformed by the development of industrialized and nuclear weaponry, the association between the “fittest” and the “best” broke down. “Biologically speaking,” one researcher explained, the term fittest is meaningless except in relation to some par­tic­u­lar environment, natu­ral or social. . . . ​When man and pathogenic bacteria occupy the same ecological system, the death of the former and the survival of the latter is indubitably an instance of the survival of the fittest; but only on the most gloomy view of h ­ uman nature could it be regarded as satisfactory proof of the survival of the best. . . . ​In a world which regards war as desirable and its frequent occurrence as inevitable, the more aggressive and insensitive types have the best chances of ultimate survival. They are able to devote themselves to the congenial tasks of perfecting the weapons of destruction, while their more imaginative neighbors engage in the suicidal occupation of adding to the amenities and fullness of life.75 In addition to encouraging the propagation of brute vio­lence, war posed a supplementary eugenic prob­lem even when the “best” triumphed. Within the framework of eugenic thought, physical and ­mental disabilities w ­ ere maligned conditions; within the framework of military recruitment and operations, they ­were grounds for dismissal discovered through eugenic entrance exams. Such reasoning was complicated by the profound destruction of the h ­ uman body by industrial and nuclear warfare, which gave way to a nation of men enfeebled in body, mind, and spirit. For a science that relied on concrete notions of innate biological essentialism, ­these transformations ­were deeply troubling.

On Alien Ground  109

4. Inner and Outer Spaces E X O B I O L O G Y, ­H U M A N G E­N E­T I C S , A N D T H E DISEMBODIMENT OF CORPOREAL DIFFERENCE

What do we seek in space? Not astronomical numbers. Emptiness multiplied is at most very ­little. The journey does give us two unique rewards: a perspective on our own planet and a prospect on other worlds. . . . ​Among our objectives, the discernment of other life is the most subtle and demanding, for it insists: “Know thyself.” —­ J O S H U A L E D E R B E R G , 1960

In 1958 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) was founded with the motto “For the benefit of all.” It was a curious statement that cited neither race nor creed, nation nor state. Th ­ ese ­were peculiar omissions in an age in which even the broadest of humanitarian goals ­were couched in triumphant narratives of liberal individualism, patriotism, and demo­cratic ascendancy. This universalism was indicative of a moment in which frameworks of difference became rethought in the context of the transformation of ­human life through the promise of ge­ne­tic science on the one hand, and the search for extraterrestrial life on the other. This chapter examines the relationship between t­ hese discourses by looking at the c­ areer of Joshua Lederberg, a critical figure in each field, whose work with bacterial ge­ne­tics changed the course of the biomedical sciences. By comparing discourses surrounding the alteration of the h ­ uman genome to t­ hose concerning alien life, this chapter examines how conceptualization of personhood, corporeal difference, and environmental habitability began to shift during the “space age.” At the same time, this chapter considers how concerns over the

development of biological warfare on Earth became ­imagined relationally alongside the new threat of emergent and mobile “extraterrestrial diseases” that panicked the scientific community. Ultimately, this chapter is about the spatial reimagining of ­human embodiment as a prob­lem that was tightly bound to the nascent internal mappings of difference (i.e., ge­ne­tic science) as well as to external forces that could potentially reorder the hierarchy of life as it was known. Th ­ ese narratives build on ­those offered in chapter 3, demonstrating the ways in which concerns about life in outer space w ­ ere not only limited to issues of war, military takeover, or mutually assured nuclear destruction. Rather, for scientific researchers considering the prospects of life in outer space, the issue of cross-­planetary contamination took center stage. Far more likely than encountering ­little gray men was the prospect of colonization in miniature, via extraterrestrial bacteriological transfer.1 Joshua Lederberg was at the helm of this new field of research. A ­ fter winning the Nobel Prize in 1958 for a series of discoveries—­including the facts that bacteria replicated itself through sexual conjugation, rather than through cell division as was previously thought, and that bacteria could transfer ge­ne­tic information, thereby providing an answer to the question of antibiotic resistance—­Lederberg’s name carried far in the world of scientific funding.2 His discoveries had virtually remade the field of ge­ne­tics, explaining the mechanisms of bacterial evolution and adaptation, and illustrating the importance of bacteria for the ­future of ge­ne­tic research. Between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, Lederberg also served as a frequent contributor to the Washington Post and the New York Times, acting as a critical public voice in the transformation of midcentury molecular biology and ge­ne­tics.3 Throughout the late 1950s, Lederberg suggested the importance of the application of terrestrial bacterial research to the nascent space program. In 1960 he coined the term exobiology to encompass increasing research gains related to the conditions and origins of extraterrestrial life. Yet b ­ ecause t­ here ­were no a­ ctual extraterrestrial specimens to examine, exobiology became an entirely speculative field.4 This idiosyncrasy garnered widespread criticism from the scientific community; as physicist William G. Pollard remarked, exobiology was indeed the only “branch of science so far without content.”5 Another unusual aspect of the field was the absence of biologists, and the predominance of chemists and physicists. This was likely due to the receptive nature of the latter fields to proj­ects without definite evidence or required proofs.6 The suspension of belief required to work within a field with no physical specimens, but which, at the same time, took corporeality to be Inner and Outer Spaces  111

a central point of inquiry, transformed the nature of evolutionary theory at midcentury. Whereas the minutia of fossil differentiation remained the critical foundation of biological anthropology, the intangible question of “life as we do not know it” provided the focus of what had come to be known as “celestial evolution,” or the evolution of life across celestial bodies. Biologists joining the field of exobiology often joked about being “ex-­biologists,” as ­there was a fundamental incompatibility between the methodology of biological research and the study of extraterrestrial life in its absence.7 Further, ­because its development followed on the coattails of the popu­lar cultural alien craze, t­here was already a sentiment among both scientists and the lay public that the field was part fact, part fiction.8 In the early years of exobiological research, Lederberg’s reputation as a world-­renowned ge­ne­ticist lent critical legitimation to a field that was plagued by expert and lay skepticism, securing a division of “life sciences” at the newly founded nasa.9 For Lederberg, the imperative to pursue “the orderly, careful, and well-­reasoned extension of the cosmic frontier” was ­great, as “the introduction of microbial life to a previously barren planet, or to one occupied by a less well-­adapted form of life,” could result in drastic transplanetary geochemical and ecological disturbances.10 Astronomer Carl Sagan echoed Lederberg’s concerns, noting that “the contamination of the Moon would represent an unparalleled scientific disaster, eliminating promising approaches to such prob­lems as the early history of the solar system, the chemical composition of ­matter in the remote past, the origin of life on Earth, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.”11 Throughout the 1960s, technical and lay periodicals alike reported on the possibility of celestial “flues,” comparing the potential devastation to that of the “Black Plague in the New World” during the early seventeenth ­century. As one Time magazine article cautioned, indigenous “­peoples w ­ ere reduced to remnants by plagues and measles and smallpox brought by explorers from Eu­rope.”12 Yet b ­ ecause it remained unclear who, in this new transplanetary world, would hold which position in the schemes of colonialism and contagion, the question of “adaptation” was equally pressing for considerations of life on Earth, as h ­ uman bacterial re­sis­tances, long-­developed over the course of centuries, may not have held up in the face of “organisms that lack the proteins and carbohydrates by which they could be recognized as foreign.”13 Lederberg feared that the ­human body could be destroyed by a disease that it could not recognize, an infiltrator that it could not fight ­because it was invisible to the body’s defenses. 112  Chapter 4

­ ese concerns could only be allayed through the comparative study of Th the conditions of the origins of extraterrestrial and terrestrial life, which researchers hoped would prove more similar than dif­fer­ent. Two main theories ­were developed about the nature of celestial life forms. The first involved the 1953 discovery of chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, who managed to produce organic life out of a mixture of inorganic gases. Miller and Urey’s experiment demonstrated the possibility of in­de­pen­dent, spontaneous generation, suggesting that planets with similar atmospheres might ­house similar life forms.14 Miller and Urey’s work represented one of two prevalent theories about the pos­si­ble origins and likenesses between celestial life forms, which mirrored early twentieth-­century arguments regarding monoge­ne­tic and polyge­ne­tic anthropoid evolutionary schemes. The second theory involved the controversial, and some said outdated, concept of “panspermia,” first suggested in 1900 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who argued that the seeds of life, typically ­imagined as germs or spores, “might have germinated first in a single site in the universe, then spread to other locations” through interstellar radiation.15 In this sense, the theory of panspermia did not precisely account for the true origins of life but merely for its dispersal.16 Panspermia received renewed attention in the early 1960s, when organic geochemist Bartholomew Nagy began to reexamine samples of the Orgueil meteorite, a piece of carbonaceous chondrite that fell nearly a ­century earlier in Orgueil, France. Nagy found markings on the samples that indicated fossil remains, and so he proposed that the meteorite ­ thers, evidenced extraterrestrial life.17 Nagy’s studies tipped off a series of o in which researchers located plant fragments, seeds, and coal embedded within samples of the meteorite, as well as “compounds with no known biochemical significance.”18 Speculations arose as to the pos­si­ble contamination of the meteorite ­after its original discovery, particularly when some of the plant materials ­were demonstrated to belong to a species endemic to France.19 Then, in 1969 a meteorite fell near Murchison, Victoria, Australia, and upon examination, a group of nasa scientists declared the presence of amino acids, the building blocks of organic life, igniting yet another reexamination of the Orgueil samples.20 To this day, the Orgueil and Murchison meteorites remain contentious specimens that above all illustrate prevailing scientific arguments about the presence of extraterrestrial life. For Lederberg, the origins of extraterrestrial and terrestrial life ­were impor­tant ­because of their potential value for the evolving field of molecular biology, a discipline that sought to understand the “genesis and function” Inner and Outer Spaces  113

of life at the cellular level, and which achieved increasing consolidation in the 1950s in light of advances in ge­ne­tic science.21 The spread of bacteria, ­whether through intentional or unintentional means, had been shown time and again to redirect the course of h ­ uman existence; unlocking the secrets of the birth of terrestrial life could prove invaluable in the pro­gress of h ­ uman ge­ne­tic research and disease prevention.22 “Do the Martian organisms use dna and amino acids as we do, or are t­here other solutions to the basic prob­lem of the architecture of evolution?” he queried.23 ­These ­were issues that ­were raised by the new possibilities presented by ge­ne­tic engineering. Lederberg knew that the world of science was still reeling from the medical missteps of Nazi Germany, but he also was a strong proponent of eugenic science. He had been t­here at Cold Spring Harbor in the 1930s and 1940s when U.S. scientists met before and a­ fter the war to discuss the ­future of ­human ge­ne­tics, and his faith in the promises of artificial evolution remained unshaken. “Eugenics, the conscious betterment of man’s ge­ne­tic quality, has fascinated many idealistic thinkers. Like other noble aims it has been perverted to justify unthinkable inhumanity; which does not help to assess its validity and feasibility by ethically proper means,” he reasoned.24 Lederberg knew that science may not be ready for a true reconsideration of eugenics, nor was he certain how it might be implemented in such a way as to ensure its ethicality. In the meantime, however, he proposed the concept of “euphenics,” which involved “the modification of development, influencing the character of single organisms, in contrast to the populational impact of eugenic mea­sures.’ ”25 Euphenics would include every­thing from preexisting advances in the fields of organ transplantation and the development of artificial prosthetic organs, to the heights of ge­ne­tic alteration, including the manipulation of genes to prolong life spans, “the modification of the developing ­human brain through treatment of the foetus or infant,” and “clonal reproduction,” which “would have an enormous impact on predetermination of sex; on the avoidance of hereditary abnormalities, as well as positive traits; on cultural acceleration through education within a clone; and on more far-­reaching experiments on the reconstitution of the ­human genotype.”26 The primary difference between eugenics and euphenics is conceptually similar to the relationship between the ideas of the genotype (the ge­ne­tic makeup of an individual or population) and the phenotype (the observable expression of ge­ne­tic makeup of an individual or population).27 Rather than manipulating ­human ge­ne­tics through universal, standardized methods (such as selective mating, abortion, and euthanasia), Lederberg proposed alterations on an individual basis. He argued that euphenics represented a 114  Chapter 4

more sophisticated, almost posthuman eugenic vision. “In a word,” he cautioned, “man, ­unless he grows less ‘­human,’ may destroy himself.”28 Reflecting on the outstripping of humankind by technological advance, he noted how scientific improvements had been applied to virtually ­every other aspect of life, except ­human evolution.29 Accounting for both intrauterine prob­lems as well as accidents that may occur during an individual’s life, euphenics would provide the means for continually improving and rebuilding the h ­ uman body. While eugenics provided a long-­term solution to the prob­lem of h ­ uman imperfection, euphenics could aid in the fight against the immediate dangers of the postatomic space age. And though the term itself never caught on, its undergirding philosophy became critical in the history of postwar ge­ne­tic science. At the same moment, as the Cold War turned hot in ­Korea and Vietnam, the use of biological and chemical weaponry by the United States, including bacterial pathogens, herbicides, and defoliants, marked additional unpredictable ge­ne­tic hazards.30 Many of ­these agents ­were developed as a direct result of advances in the field of bacterial ge­ne­tics. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, scientists across the country mobilized against the use of bioweapons, not only b ­ ecause of the peculiar dangers created by this new form of artillery but also ­because of its potential accessibility. As Lederberg cautioned in a 1969 speech before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs: We are in somewhat the same position as the nuclear physicists who foresaw the development of atomic weapons. ­There is, however, a crucial difference. . . . ​Nuclear weaponry depends on the most advanced industrial technology. It has then been monopolized by the g­ reat powers long enough to sustain a de facto balance of deterrence and to build a security system based on non-­proliferation. Nuclear power has thus, ironically, become a stabilizing ­factor tending to reinforce the status quo in parallel with established levels of economic and industrial development. Germ power w ­ ill work just the other way. . . . ​My main fears about bw [biological warfare] have to do with the side-­effects of its proliferation 1) as a technique of aggression by smaller nations and insurgent groups and 2) by the inadvertent spread of disease.31 Lederberg further predicted the devastating effects of untreatable diseases in “­under developed countries”; according to his analy­sis, “no situation could be better designed for the evolution of serious new viruses than the existence of crowded, underfed ­human populations in which foci could . . . ​ spread with a minimum of medical control.”32 Inner and Outer Spaces  115

For this reason, Lederberg advocated the acceleration of public health research and ser­vices in developing nations, anticipating a pos­si­ble “Black Death II” from which it could be impossible to recover. In an increasingly globalized world, localized infectious diseases would be uncontainable.33 Biological weaponry had the power to reverse the entire global order; not only did the ability to manufacture and disperse deadly bacteria require few technological or economic resources but so too ­were they beyond the reaches of modern medicine. In 1972 the United Nations, in conjunction with the United States, the Soviet Union, and more than one hundred other nations, called for multilateral disarmament at the first Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.34 While the agreement illustrated the urgency of ceasing the expansion of the arms race, prohibiting “possession of deadly biological agents except for defensive work like research into vaccines, detectors, and protective gear,” “it was only a pledge . . . ​[with] no formal means of enforcement and plenty of room for activities that ­were ambiguous as to ­whether they ­were defensive or offensive.”35 Indeed, the convention’s vague language bespoke the virtual impossibility of monitoring bacteriological weapons through existing channels of surveillance, calling into question the very nature of global geopo­liti­cal divisions predicated on the spatial, economic, and psychological distance between “worlds.” While the Cold War provided the nascent language of First, Second, and Third Worldism, it is impor­tant to note that it did so in the context of the space age.36 “Other worlds” w ­ ere no longer the province of science fiction, nor ­were their alien races. For just as the term alien itself underwent revision in the context of growing multinational interests in extraterrestrial life (bringing the “extraterrestrial” ­under the rubric of ­human “aliens”), so too did the discourse of the Cold War extraterritorialize certain states through the division of worlds, creating a new terminology of difference as once salient geographic schisms became less meaningful. In scientific and popu­lar understandings of alien life, the Earth was continually i­magined as the “First World” to the ­human race; should other life-­bearing planets be discovered, they would always exist relationally: second, third, and so on. The use of Second and Third Worldism was a gesture that not only dehumanized certain nations in the sociopo­liti­cal sense so well understood; it literally placed them outside the confines of ­human life, a divisionary rhe­ toric that grew in tandem with the dichotomy presented by understandings of terrestrial and extraterrestrial life. This exteriorization was particularly meaningful in the case of Third World nations, whose status as ­free agents in an age of global alliances 116  Chapter 4

marked a frightening strangeness. Unaligned with the forces of “good” and “evil,” ­these nations w ­ ere not only lacking in their po­liti­cal affiliations but also stood out as problematic territories beleaguered by the economic and sociopo­liti­cal legacies of failed imperialism and unsteady in­de­pen­dence. Born out of the languages of estrangement and affinity associated with the global and galactic power strug­gles of the Cold War, the Third World became yet another alien ground.

Rebirth

The unstable in­de­pen­dence of the Third World was often i­magined in relation to issues of global and local health, centering on population growth and control. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, popu­lar news sources, po­liti­cal pundits, and scientific researchers bemoaned the “overpopulation” of the planet at precisely the moment in which domestic ge­ne­tic science was on the rise. Lederberg was among the most vocal ge­ne­ticists on the issue, advocating federal intervention to redress the “gloomy . . . ​facts of ­human reproduction,” including “the stratification of fecundity by economic status, the new environmental insults to our genes, [and] the sheltering by humanitarian medicine of once-­lethal defects.”37 For Lederberg, the relationship between hereditarianism, the new challenges posed by the rapidly changing environment, and the recuperative efforts of modern medical science critically positioned the ­human species at a point of no return.38 Though guided by the rise of new technologies, the improvement of the “­human race” went hand in hand with a familiar attitude t­oward species survival and national social control, which in practice attempted to reduce reproduction rates among the lower classes and communities of color. As scholars such as Dorothy Roberts and Wendy Kline have pointed out, residues of eugenic thought paved the way for the racial and class castes of the massive birth control reforms of the 1960s, including the continuation of illicit mass sterilizations, the wide dispersal of medically controversial birth control programs through Medicaid and Planned Parenthood initiatives, and the rise of both illegal and l­egal abortions. All o ­ f these initiatives disproportionately affected impoverished ­women and ­women of color.39 Plans for population control raised in Congress during the early 1970s centered largely on the reduction of welfare assistance programs, proffering similar consequences.40 The new emphases of ­these programs rested clearly on the potential of individual responsibility. As Lederberg noted, it was critical to create a “new Inner and Outer Spaces  117

ideology . . . ​for influencing reproductive be­hav­ior consistent with our central ethical princi­ple of individual liberty.”41 “The difficulty t­ oday, in [Lederberg’s] view,” the New York Times reported, “is that p ­ eople are ‘undermotivated.’ The man in the street, he said, could bring marked improvements ‘if he only knew the power he had.’ ”42 Yet such an “ideology” would rely not only on the compliance of the individual, as had been required ­under the strictures of earlier eugenic regulations. Instead, the ability to control corporeal excesses and imperfections at the individual level of molecular biology provided new visions of population management, inviting scientists quite literally into the bedroom, and for that m ­ atter, into e­ very space of habitation. In par­tic­u­lar, as the links between ge­ne­tic heredity and disability became elucidated in the wake of reproductive reform mea­sures, the call to individual improvement and reproductive self-­regulation began to transform the social location of mentally and physically disabled persons. Lederberg and his colleagues envisioned the impending extinction of genet­ically based disabilities through intrauterine manipulation of the embryo. “I would not be very patient with any view of our pres­ent prospect that minimizes the importance of humane care of our existing load,” Lederberg remarked in an already nostalgic manner, of what he i­ magined to be a d ­ ying breed.43 Through the implementation of euphenic mea­sures, the disabled body would be yet another surpassable node in the quest for population improvement. In the absence of such techniques, however, the solution to disabled life was clear: selective termination of the unfit fetus. Many scholars have connected emergent discourses on fetal euthanasia to the rise in new visual technologies that enabled prenatal diagnosis. First, in 1956, the development of ultrasound imaging enabled the detection of macro-­health prob­lems as well as sex determination. In 1972 the development of ultrasound-­guided amniocentesis enabled the detection of ge­ne­tic defects through the analy­sis of amniotic fluids for chromosomal abnormalities and neural tube prob­ lems.44 From the onset of its utilization, amniocentesis was ­imagined as a pre-­elimination technology, hailed by the New ­England Journal of Medicine in 1970 as “the most impor­tant advance so far attained in the prevention of the births of infants with irreparable ge­ne­tic m ­ ental defect and fatal ge­ne­ 45 tic disease.” Critics of the technology have noted the uneasy relationship between amniotic diagnoses and the rationalization of late-­term selective abortion. As anthropologist Rayna Rapp has bluntly noted: “a diagnosed fetus is potentially an aborted fetus.”46 This technology had the potential to affect approximately 5 ­percent of the total infant population born in the United States. Numerically, this translated into an average of 250,000 infants 118  Chapter 4

per year, with 20  ­percent of “abnormal births” caused by “environmental ­factors during pregnancy—­drugs, disease (rubella), or radiation,” 20 ­percent caused by “ge­ne­tic defects alone,” and the remaining 60 ­percent caused by a combination of environmental and hereditary f­actors.47 Conversations about selective termination became further complicated by the question of compulsory abortion in cases where the fetus was deemed severely disabled. In effect, the arrival of amniocentesis had the capacity to extend the effects of compulsory sterilization laws that had been set forth in the early twentieth ­century, and which, by midcentury, had begun to be repealed across the country.48 Strikingly, the repeals of ­these laws ­were followed by an increase in national sterilization levels, due to trends of medically recommended “voluntary sterilization” as a form of contraception.49 While t­ hese practices resided ­under new discourses, their demographic effects remained largely the same. The sterilization of disabled persons, for instance, remained ­legal. Poor ­women and w ­ omen of color also continued to be pressured into accepting sterilization as a means of birth control by healthcare providers and welfare agents. By 1976 “30 ­percent of all widowed, divorced, and separated ­women and single ­mothers aged fifteen to forty-­four in the United States had been surgically sterilized”; ­these w ­ omen ­were disproportionately of African American, Latina, and Native American descent.50 The rise of amniotic diagnoses and “voluntary” forms of sterilization was also an impor­tant precursor to the 1973 verdict of Roe v. Wade, which drew on the language of fetal fitness and viability. As scholars of reproductive technologies have pointed out, the diverse points of “viability” established by specific advances in neonatal medicine have created a hazy and easily appropriated category of survivability.51 In the 1970s, viability was generally located between twenty-­four and twenty-­eight weeks, with external aid (breathing devices, feeding tubes, and constant monitoring). Prior to this point, the fetus was not considered to be a ­legal “person” protectable by the ­fourteenth amendment. Yet in ­those middling weeks—­and occasionally beyond them—­the rights to personhood became determined by the possibility of individual fitness and survival. Belief in the capacity for fetal survival has impacted the ethics of reproductive choice decisions,52 while guidelines for selective termination remained similarly ambiguous. As ­legal scholar Jane Friedman noted in 1974, b ­ ecause “the line of demarcation between the normal and abnormal is often unclear . . . ​the potential abuse of such a system would be awesome.”53 By the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the rise of ge­ne­tic counseling, defined as “a communication pro­cess which deals with the h ­ uman prob­lem Inner and Outer Spaces  119

a­ ssociated with the occurrence, or the risk of occurrence, of a ge­ne­tic disorder in a ­family,”54 created yet another classification of personhood by enabling ­women to selectively abort “unhealthy” fetuses. ­Legal missteps in the field of ge­ne­tic counseling would then result in “wrongful life” suits, in which physicians could be held accountable for the birth of undiagnosed or improperly diagnosed disabled babies, whose parents would have opted for abortion. Th ­ ese “wrongful lives” w ­ ere in a sense the living dead: never meant to have been carried to term, improper models of h ­ uman life, and profoundly unwanted, they became the specters of scientific knowledge in the nascent age of ge­ne­tic engineering.55 For a brief period in the 1960s, the term wrongful life was also applied to cases where ­children ­were born out of wedlock—­legal “bastards”—­ illustrating a critical connection between ideas of physical disability and social illegitimacy.56 Culpability for the “wrongful life” of a bastard could be levied against a wayward ­father, or, in the case of artificial insemination, the physician who implanted sperm at a w ­ oman’s request. Even u ­ ntil 1964, U.S. courts ruled that artificial insemination was “contrary to public policy and good morals, and considered adultery on the m ­ other’s part. . . . ​ A child so conceived, was born out of wedlock and therefore [would be] illegitimate. As such, it is the child of the m ­ other, and the f­ather has no rights or interest in said child,” regardless of his consent to the procedure.57 By the 1970s, however, the explosion of artificial reproductive technologies—­ from the legalization of surrogacy, to in vitro fertilization, to experiments in cloning—­cracked open mainstream conservative sensibilities about proper reproductive sexuality.58 ­These new advances in reproductive science w ­ ere accompanied by an onslaught of repre­sen­ta­tions of the fetal body in popu­lar media. As several feminist critics have argued, t­ hese images characteristically focused on the interiority of the womb, representing the fetus as an in­de­pen­dent subject, without any portrayal of the pregnant ­woman’s body.59 Alice Adams argues that prior to the photographic visualization of the womb, the fetus was always imaginatively “connected” to the maternal body. Fetal photography, however, worked to sever this connection. Appealing to cultural values of individualism and self-­creation, such images portray the fetus as an active explorer in an undifferentiated “­mother environment.”60 The most salient example of t­hese images was Lennart Nilsson’s 1965 Life magazine spread. By manipulating colors in a series of fetal photo­graphs, Nilsson was able to highlight the whiteness of the womb against the darkness of the ­mother’s body, which he rendered as a starry sky. The fetus is clearly intended to 120  Chapter 4

represent a floating astronaut, recalling the imagery of recent developments in space flight.61 Nilsson was not the first to make the analogy between h ­ uman inhabitance in the womb and in outer space. As Edward  C. Hughes, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, remarked in 1963: “we could say that life within the uterus . . . ​pres­ents almost the same conditions as t­ hose of the astronaut in outer space.”62 Both subjects needed artificial sources of oxygen, both had to account for differing atmospheric pressures, and neither could survive alone. Theorists have predominantly interpreted Nilsson’s photo­graphs as a foreboding sign of the emergence of fetal personhood at the expense of the ­mother’s body and rights. ­After all, the ­mother is literally excised from the photo­graph. At the same time, however, Nilsson’s repre­sen­ta­tion of in­de­pen­dent fetal corporeality is ambiguous. In a moment seized by the prospect of intergalactic hazards, a naked baby floating in an orb may also have indicated a certain sense of fragility about the par­ameters of ­human life itself (figure 4.1). Even the language of Roe v. Wade, ongoing in the midst of visual reconceptualizations of fetal life, incorporated prevalent understandings of the ­human body as always already fractured, determining “viability” not by the autonomy of the fetus but instead by its ability to survive “with artificial aid.” It was a caveat for the age. Whereas early twentieth-­century understandings of survivalism required the strengthening of the h ­ uman body through “natu­ral” means, midcentury visions attempted to surpass the h ­ uman body altogether through the incorporation of technological assistance. This was a necessary logic in the face of environmental changes wrought by nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare. In 1960 neuroscientists Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline coined the term cyborg to account for the immanent fusion of organic life and inorganic technology required by man’s foray into outer space.63 From the 1950s onward, the anatomy of the ­human body was continually re­imagined in the quest to create effective space suiting: helmets and oxygen tanks provided new lungs; flexible, sterilizable materials provided new skin; and heavy weights recalibrated the body’s mass (figure  4.2). Like the astronaut with his oxygen pack and space suit, the viability of the fetus was not contravened by the requirements of cyborgian “artificial aid.” Stanley Kubrick’s cult classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) suggested just this, by closing with a replication of Nilsson’s glowing fetal orb, the conclusion to a surreal plot filled with treacherous robots, perilous missions, extraterrestrial disease, and the ­future downfall of humankind (figure 4.3). Inner and Outer Spaces  121

F I G U R E  4 .1 .

Lennart Nilsson, “A Child Is Born.”

­Human anatomy in the space age: “Apollo spacesuit” and “Apollo portable life support system,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration (1960). F I G U R E  4 .2 .

F I G U R E  4 .3 .

Still image from the closing scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969).

­ ese proj­ects held parallel aspirations to the burgeoning field of nanoTh technology, or the manipulation of m ­ atter on extremely small scales (atomic, molecular, and supramolecular). Nanotechnology promised the creation of high-­functioning artificial limbs and organs, mechanized spare parts for the ­human body re­imagined as literal cyborg. Prior to the practical ability to implement this vision, scientists proposed that certain species of purebred animals be artificially produced for transplantation purposes.64 According to Joshua Lederberg, “The technical prob­lem of overcoming the immune barrier would be im­mensely simplified if the [organs] . . . ​came from a genet­ ically constant source,” created through “a vigorous eugenic programme, not on man, but on some non-­human species, to produce genet­ically homogeneous material as sources for spare parts.”65 This nonhuman eugenic vision of eugenics—or, perhaps it should be said, a return to the founding ideology of eugenics, strategic agricultural breeding—­offered yet another forum for the rearticulation of desires for ge­ne­tic engineering (the outcome of which is analyzed in chapter 6 of this work). ­Whether prosthetic or cross-­species, the creation of a “spare parts” industry had the profound power to break down the bound­aries between the species, between man and animal, between inorganic ­matter and organic life. For Lederberg, the implosion of this last division was an inevitability, already being facilitated by the rise of computer programming; ultimately, he foresaw the creation of a race of computerized robots that would lead to new understandings of ­human society. “What ­will then qualify ‘man’ for the aspirations of humanistic fulfillment, apart from the other robots born of ­human thought?” he asked, predicting the “digitiz[ation]” of ­human society.66 Lederberg’s hopeful visions worked in opposition to con­temporary social critiques that railed against the man-­as-­machine model. Many midcentury popu­lar writers, including sociologist and journalist William H. Whyte, observed that industrialization had come at the cost of social conformity and the dehumanization of modern man, concerns that w ­ ere linked to the threats of communism and fascism, and to the deterioration of U.S. democracy.67 In his 1956 critique of the rise of corporate capitalism, The Organ­ization Man, Whyte wrote: “What of the ‘group life,’ the loss of individualism? Once upon a time it was conventional for young men to view the group life of the big corporations as one of its principal advantages. T ­ oday, they see it as a positive boon. Working with o ­ thers, they believe, w ­ ill reduce the frustration of work, and they often endow the accompanying suppression of ego with strong spiritual overtones.”68 Yet for Lederberg, the mechanization and computerization of society had the power to reinforce the ethic 124  Chapter 4

of individual agency, as the standardization of bodies would not preclude the ongoing individuation of minds within certain normative par­ameters.69 He pointed out that corporeal “individuality is the bar to spare-­part medicine,” and thus the “bar” to immortality.70

The Posthuman

The impending arrival of ­human ge­ne­tic engineering, the manipulation of fetal life, and the call for a spare part species w ­ ere all part of an emergent discourse of posthumanism. Brought to popularity in the early twenty-­first ­century by Francis Fukuyama’s speculative work of philosophy, Our Posthuman ­Future (2002), the term posthuman actually dates back to the beginning of the twentieth ­century. Two years ­after Yerkes coined the term infrahuman in 1914, sociologist Maurice Parmelee published Poverty and Social Pro­ gress, which detailed the question of poverty from a eugenic perspective. His usage of the term in the following passage marks its first appearance in the En­glish language.71 But even though it is not pos­si­ble, at pres­ent at any rate, to do much to improve the quality of the h ­ uman stock by eugenic means, it is in­ter­ est­ing and profitable to consider what would be the result if socially undesirable types could be eliminated entirely or in large part, and the quality of the ­human stock could be considerably ­improved. . . . ​ It is evident . . . ​that it is inconceivable that ­human nature could be changed to the extent that is contemplated by [eugenicists’] theory of perfectibility. Such changes would bring into being an animal no longer ­human, or for that m ­ atter mammalian, in its character, for it would involve the elimination of such fundamental ­human and mammalian instincts and emotions as anger, jealousy, fear, ­etc. But  even if such a post-­human animal did come into existence, it is difficult to believe that it would carry on the necessary economic activities without using a certain amount of formal organ­ization, compulsion, ­etc.”72 ­Here, Parmelee uses the term to refer to the penultimate eugenic subject, honed ­after years of population improvement techniques. The posthuman in this context is movement beyond limitations of natu­ral ­human evolution. It is cyborgian only in the sense that it is the end product of scientific practice, but not ­because it has been literally hybridized with inorganic technology, as would be ­imagined in ­later years. Like the infrahuman, the posthuman was Inner and Outer Spaces  125

not a term that took off, though in substance, it had been the stuff of science fiction imagination for generations. As a philosophical concept, the ideology of posthumanism breaks into mainstream conversations during the 1970s—­prior to the revival of the term posthuman. This peculiarity is possibly due to the wide range of definitions accorded to posthumanism. In the 1970s, posthumanism was understood to be about the expansion of the moral community beyond the bound­aries of the ­human. It was a concept frequently advocated by animal rights activists such as Peter Singer, in his pathbreaking Animal Liberation (1975), where he argues for a reconceptualization of both h ­ uman and nonhuman 73 bioethics. Singer’s understanding of posthumanism decenters the ­human subject (hence the “post”), while curiously remaining faithful to humanist frameworks of life hierarchies. Singer’s valuation of qualities such as intelligence, rationality, and consciousness enable him to make an argument for the elevation of certain nonhuman animals to the ­legal status of personhood (namely higher order primates), while also, controversially, advocating for the removal of certain ­human subjects from its par­ameters (­people with certain disabilities, infants, and fetuses). It is also in Animal Liberation that Singer pop­u­lar­ized the concept of “speciesism,” first introduced by Richard Ryder in 1970, which pushed the contours of con­temporary civil rights discourses—­feminism, race-­based rights, and so on—­into the realm of nonhuman life. As a movement, “posthuman” animal rights gained strength from existing conversations about ­human prejudice and cruelty. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s famous story “The Letter Writer,” published in 1968, compared the lives of animals to ­those of the Jews during the Nazi Holocaust. In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who, b ­ ecause of him, had left this earth. What do they know—­all t­ hese scholars, all t­ hese phi­los­o­phers, all the leaders of the world—­about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures w ­ ere created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all ­people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.74 This was of course not the first time that rhe­toric comparing animals to marginalized h ­ uman groups was utilized in the fight for nonhuman justice. As explored in chapter  1, late nineteenth-­century animal activism ­rose in tandem, and in association with, antislavery campaigns, ­women’s liberation, 126  Chapter 4

and child protectionism. However, midcentury animal advocacy was a very dif­fer­ent beast than Henry Bergh’s “pitiable cur in the street.” Infused with the radicalism of the recent social movements, combined with increasing concern over the use and abuse of animal subjects in ­human research, animal activism from the 1960s onward was concerned with both protections and rights. Curiously, this bid for a posthumanist reconceptualization of ­legal enfranchisements existed in problematic relation to the very movements it stood beside and drew upon. Namely, the issue at stake was the deconstruction of humanist thought at the precise moment that the fight for ­human rights gained strong traction. Although the concept of h ­ uman rights is quite storied, it was r­ eally not ­until the international denunciation of the Nazi Holocaust, followed by the penning of the international Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights (1948) and the assemblage of the Geneva Convention (1949), that rights based on a perceived common humanity w ­ ere widely expected. In the wake of decolonization and other antiracist efforts around the world, minoritized groups worked hard to hold their countries accountable to the newly publicized, global standards for ­human welfare and equality. In the United States in par­tic­u­lar, as Mary Dudziak has argued, African Americans fighting for equality used international pressures to shape their campaigns and push for change.75 Members of the civil rights movement, alongside other feminist and minority nationalist movements, thus demanded membership in the category of the h ­ uman, a category from which they had long been excluded. In this framework, the ­human was a term that stood in for the ideas of re­ spect, valuation, and sociopo­liti­cal entitlement—­the “­human” of traditional humanist philosophy.76 It is therefore impor­tant to ask how and why posthumanism came to fruition immediately following the l­ egal concretization of h ­ uman rights on both international and domestic levels. In the case of discourse surrounding the cyborgian posthuman, the h ­ uman itself was revealed as feeble, unevolved, and, worse yet, ­under threat of extinction; in the case of the nonhuman posthuman, humanist thought was ­imagined as a lie, which, once truly pushed to its final logic, would work to elevate certain animal species and denigrate certain h ­ uman groups. In each circumstance, the h ­ uman is decentered, and newly ­imagined as insufficient, underdeveloped, and even irrelevant to conversations about rights and equalities. If anything, being h ­ uman in the context of the crises in nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, the rise of molecular science, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the push for nonhuman rights was continually proven to be an insufficient position from Inner and Outer Spaces  127

which to claim subjectivity. ­Human sentience and corporeality ­were already outdated modes of existence, as hazardous conditions on Earth and in space seemed to demand euphenic and cyborgian transformations. While the demand for inclusion within the terms of formal and informal modes of po­liti­cal and cultural citizenship was sustained by the claim to ­human rights and humane treatment, the rise of the posthuman as the new pinnacle of biopo­liti­cal subjectivity worked against the nature of such assertions. Seizing on the animal/human boundary, in the name of rejecting and overriding histories of exploitation and degradation typically associated with ­human uses of the nonhuman world, civil rights activists and feminists attempted to c­ ounter discourses of racism and sexism but, critically, stayed within the framework of humanist thought at the precise moment in which both the subject of the ­human and the conceptual structure of humanism had begun to unravel. B ­ ecause the lines of “­human” inclusivity ­were already being redrawn by the mechanisms of scientific advancement and cultural understanding, claiming owner­ship over the category of the “­human” would ultimately prove insufficient. This juxtaposition makes it all the more in­ter­est­ing that white second wave feminists ­were the only ones fighting for rights that, at least in part, embraced the posthuman. To be sure, the feminist movement believed in the strug­gle for h ­ uman rights (­after all, Simone de Beauvoir’s radicalizing call on behalf of the “second sex” made headlines the same year as the assembling of the Geneva Convention).77 But ­there was nonetheless a certain flexibility in feminist rhe­toric, through the cele­bration of w ­ omen’s reproductive capacities, that enabled a favorable connection with the nonhuman. This connection was seen plainly in the discourse of “ecofeminism,” which honored a “natu­ral” tie between ­women and the earth, positioning ­women as special stewards in the fight for environmental change. On the surface, this chosen association might seem odd, given the historical denigration of ­women’s bodies based on the very presumption of their less evolved “nature,” a sort of animal baseness that begins with the biblical narrative of Eve and her poisonous apple. The appeal of ecofeminism is often explained in its dual reclamation of the female body and the natu­ral environment, both of which had been imperiled by patriarchal technologies of being. And yet, could this not also be understood as a certain imbrication with the posthuman question of the day? Was this par­tic­u­lar h ­ ouse not built of the “master’s tools,” to employ the words of Audre Lorde?78 The ability of second wave feminism to reclaim the natu­ral—­and to reclaim ­women’s reproductive capacities as a site of empowerment—­spoke to 128  Chapter 4

the terms of its racial exclusivity. For feminists of color, and for members of the civil rights movement, reclaiming the natu­ral or animal self was hardly an ideal strategic move. While second wave feminists advocated for the positive salvaging of w ­ omen’s bodies (pro-­choice, pro–­sexual plea­sure, pro-­ self-­knowledge), feminists of color w ­ ere struggling to move beyond t­ hese perceived forms of “liberation.” They rebuked the reproductive manipulation of their bodies through sterilization and abortion, they demanded an entry point in mainstream culture that was not always already ­imagined as hypersexualized, and they eschewed the incredibly base associations of nonwhite embodiment with a sort of hyperbolic corporeality. For ­these groups, proximity to a “natu­ral” self was hardly desirable, given their profound animalization throughout U.S. history.79 Very recent scholarship in critical race studies has begun to attend to ­these difficult and intertwined legacies of race and animality. In par­tic­u­lar, Alexander Weheylie’s 2014 Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the H ­ uman offers a road map for beginning to think about the enormous and undervalued contribution black feminist theory has made to the field of biopolitics. Weheylie argues that black feminist evaluations of the body and the dehumanizing effects of racial caste systems are elucidative of the h ­ uman’s precarity as a model for social equity. A. Breeze Harper has similarly examined the voices of ­women of color to consider the politics of food justice, l­abor rights, and environmental degradation. Her assessment of the neoliberal whiteness of green capitalism and vegan activism offers insight into the relationship between p ­ eople of color and the category of the natu­ral, particularly as it pertains to animality. For Harper, the denigration of animals is a sort of projected disempowerment, in which the shoring up of nonwhite humanity has relied on the complete rejection of animal subjectivities, both symbolic and real.80

An Endangered Species

Though Weheylie’s and Harper’s works are most concerned with the pres­ent moment, they do provide impor­tant frameworks for reevaluating the past. For instance, how can we begin to rethink the racial politics of earlier environmental activism, or, for that ­matter, of ­human survival? Throughout the 1950s, noticeable ruptures in the planet’s ecology—­including radioactive rainfall, polluted fogs, and oceanic detergent “clouds”—­appeared across the globe, contributing to anx­i­eties about the habitability of the planet in the postnuclear age. During the following de­cades, environmental activists, often drawn from Inner and Outer Spaces  129

the pools of largely white student groups committed to social justice ­causes, worked to educate the public and to call for the conservation of endangered species, natu­ral resources, and what ­were presumed to be virgin lands in the “Third World.”81 In this formulation, species survival or decline was directly related to the condition and proper maintenance of the natu­ral world, or habitat preservation. Rachel Carson’s 1962 work, ­Silent Spring, catalyzed this line of thinking by explicating the connections between con­temporary technological advances, the deterioration of the environment, and the impending decline of ­human health.82 It was also at this moment that the discourse of “endangered species” ­rose within popu­lar vernacular. In 1966 Congress passed the first Endangered Species Act (esa), based on the presumption “that each life-­form may prove valuable in ways not yet mea­sur­able and that each one is entitled to exist for its own sake.”83 The esa followed the publication of the Red List of Threatened Species (1963), created by the Species Survival Commission (ssc) of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natu­ral Resources (iucn, founded in 1948 as the “world’s first global environmental organ­ ization”).84 By cata­loging the conservation status of plant and animal species across the globe—­“least concerned, near threatened, conservation dependent, threatened, vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered, extinct in the wild, and extinct”—­the Red List and the research b ­ ehind it closely examined and re­imagined the relationship between species survival and natu­ral habitat. Many near-­extinct species ­were subsequently brought into captivity and bred, bringing them back from a certain death.85 This proj­ect was significant on numerous levels, and it resonated with the concerns of a postnuclear world, which had already posited humankind as an “endangered species” in its own right. Issues of perpetuity, survival, and peaceable coexistence with foreign species and p ­ eoples had been raised during previous de­cades in the contexts of global and galactic strife. ­Here, the resuscitation of endangered species offered a beacon of hope amid the dour prospects of h ­ uman conflict, and it was a task that could only be accomplished through eugenic mea­sures. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, captive breeding programs emerged in zoos across the United States. Aimed at repopulating shrinking species, t­ hese programs took regeneration for granted as an empirical good. In 1981 the American Species Survival Plan, developed by the Association of Zoos and Aquar­iums, aimed to produce genet­ically diverse populations that could potentially be reintroduced to “natu­ral” environments.86 130  Chapter 4

Anx­i­eties about depopulation, ­whether caused by terrestrial or extraterrestrial hazards, created an ambience in which the rejuvenation and necessary implementation of eugenics, and its midcentury counterpart euphenics, could achieve newfound scientific, popu­lar, and po­liti­cal ac­cep­tance. ­These connections w ­ ere not lost on communities of color who most feared the mounting use of state biopower, with regard to both environmental protections and reproductive freedoms. At the First National Congress on Optimum Population and Environment convened in Washington, DC, in 1970, the Black Caucus lamented that “the elimination of dangerous species such as rats, roaches, and other vermin is of more immediate concern to Black ­people than the preservation of brook trout, buffalo, and bald ea­gles.”87 This aim was not entirely at odds with mainstream understandings of preservation, which had ­little to say about the ongoing elimination of animals—­ particularly pests—­whose de-­speciation was itself understood as a necessary feature of modern, hygienic life. But it did speak to a dif­fer­ent way of approaching the question of animals, in which competition for resources (space, food, and so on) was ­imagined as the primary definition of the species line. It painted an oppositional picture; far from the pristine images of preserved lakes and forests needed to protect the endangered species offered by conservationist organ­izations, the Black Caucus called attention to the b ­ itter and embattled conditions of postindustrial urban habitation. Throughout the course of the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, advocated for the reformation of urban slums, stressing the effects of congestion, crime, and parasitic infestation in spaces inhabited by the black “underclass.” In contrast to the visions of ecological paradise so sought a­ fter by members of the green movement, the slums ­were polluted, unfit spaces that endangered their inhabitants’ lives. For t­ hese populations, so-­called nuclear age concerns over clean ­water, healthy food, and proper living conditions had long been realities.88 ­These issues l­ater formed the basis of the environmental justice movement that galvanized during the late 1970s and early 1980s, addressing the vast inequalities that had come to shape the lives of so many impoverished p ­ eople.89 As the conditions of racialized ghettos declined during the course of urban renewal initiatives that effectively pushed poor communities of color further ­toward the margins of habitable geographies, and as public policies that focused on “voluntary” sterilization, birth control, and anti-­procreative tax incentives continued to target ­these same populations, many black Inner and Outer Spaces  131

a­ ctivists began to talk of a “race genocide.” Speaking against “inhuman living conditions, ‘police murders,’ rat bites, frequent fires and accidents brought about by dilapidated h ­ ouses,” the “legalized murder” of abortion, as well as the government’s refusal to address the sickle cell crisis and the perceived racial bias of the Vietnam War draft, the Black Panther Party cautioned that the state was only interested in the lives of black p ­ eople when it wanted to 90 use or eliminate them. For this reason, the issue of abortion in par­tic­u­lar, both as a mea­sure of population control and as an impor­tant issue in the strug­gle for ­women’s rights, was a hugely controversial subject among many African American activists, who feared the return of compulsory reproductive hygiene mea­sures.91 As comedian Dick Gregory remarked in his 1971 Ebony editorial “My Answer to Genocide,” “For years they told us where to sit, where to eat, and where to live. Now they want to dictate our bedroom habits. First the white man tells me to sit in the back of the bus. Now it looks like he wants me to sleep u ­ nder the bed. Back in the days of slavery, black folks ­couldn’t grow kids fast enough for white folks to harvest. Now that ­we’ve got a l­ittle taste of power, white folks want us to call a moratorium on having ­children.”92 To be sure, the selective encouragement of birth control mechanisms within communities of color and, at the same time, the rise of ge­ne­tic counseling and artificial means of reproduction advocated and utilized by predominately white, upper-­middle-­class ­couples, created a stark barrier between the meanings of scientific advancement for diverse segments of the population. In 1972 the passage of the Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act muddied the ­waters of reproductive freedom and biological racial divisions. A ­ fter de­cades of activism by black communities across the country, the legislation attempted to resolve the prob­lem of state negligence in the widespread occurrence of sickle cell disease among African Americans.93 For many, the unchecked proliferation of the disease indicated yet another face of ethnic cleansing.94 At the same time, however, national responses to the crisis indicated the ways in which ge­ne­tic knowledge had already begun to transform the category of race, imaginatively detaching racially specific diseases from the populations they infected. As states began to pass mandatory screening laws for sickle cell,95 the legacy of reproductive coercion that had so long haunted black Amer­ic­ a became recast in a new language of “defective ge­ne­tic traits” that ­were coincidentally the province of black blood. The potential disassociation between race and racially specific diseases was highlighted in the controversial remarks of two-­time Nobel Laureate and molecular biologist Linus Pauling, who suggested in 1968 “that t­ here should be tattooed on the 132  Chapter 4

forehead of e­ very young person a symbol showing possession of the sickle-­ cell gene or what­ever other similar gene . . . ​that he has been found to possess in a single allele. . . . ​If this ­were done, two ­people carry­ing the same seriously defective gene in a single dose would recognize this situation at first sight, and would refrain from falling in love with one another.”96 Pauling’s remarks indicated that race alone could not suffice in determining a disease’s carrier. ­Whether this was ­because sickle cell did not affect the entire black population or because it was a sign of the racial climate of the times (as immediate associations between race, biological essentialism, and discrimination ­were already ­under fire), Pauling’s proposal of a ge­ne­ tic “tattoo” illustrated how recent scientific advancements had provided the means for the disembodiment of race and disease, even as methods of ge­ne­ tic screening, prenatal testing, and selective abortion traded on older models of eugenic thought. The physical marking and stigmatization of carriers suggested the birth of a new schematic of biological, social, and po­liti­cal differentiation, one that required a sort of remarking. As is demonstrated in the following two chapters, this unhinging would become incredibly meaningful during the rise of local and global health epidemics and the ongoing progression of ge­ne­tic science t­ oward the attempted containment of h ­ uman diseases and defects.

Inner and Outer Spaces  133

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5. Of Sodomy and Cannibalism D I S G U S T, D E H U M A N I Z AT I O N , A N D T H E R H E ­T O R I C S O F S A M E - ­S E X A N D C R O S S - S­ P E C I E S C O N TA G I O N

On March 18, 1986, in the midst of the early years of the aids crisis, Harvard law professor and po­liti­cal commentator Alan Dershowitz published an influential column in the New York Times. Calling for the removal of “personal moralism” from debates about the ongoing contagion, he noted that “the time ha[d] come to take the . . . ​politics out of the debate over aids,” cautioning that pro­gress would only emerge from the “unpolluted . . . ​flow of scientific information.”1 Dershowitz was not alone in his thinking. Indeed, by the mid-1980s, public health policy makers and bioethicists w ­ ere widely advocating a retraction of the virulent prejudice directed t­ oward carriers of the disease that had characterized the early phases of the epidemic. ­These mea­sures ­were not altruistic in their nature; rather, they ­were cast as pragmatic responses to the specificities of the disease and its etiology. From the onset of the pandemic, aids was linked to stigmatized populations, particularly gay men and intravenous drug users.2 The unfortunate collusion of marginalized groups with a deadly, contagious disease gave rise to assumptions about the nature of morality as a significant imperative in the spread of the virus. The grave silence that surrounded the growing epidemic during the early 1980s signified the fact that many Americans, including ­those in the Reagan administration, ­were content to let the disease take its course. Within a few years, however, the realization that the virus had become pres­ent in the nation’s blood supply, as well as the emergence of cases

in the broader population, required a reevaluation of the disease’s origins and spread. It became evident that the moral stigma that accompanied the diagnosis was impeding the containment of the virus. ­There ­were several aspects of the disease that made its management a complicated issue, from its incubation period, to its appearance within already stigmatized groups that often avoided encounters with the medical establishment, and fi­nally, to the fact that no cures or treatments ­were available. In par­tic­u­lar, sexual contact tracing, a form of legalized medical surveillance used to link and treat known sexual partners during episodes of venereal disease outbreaks, seemed virtually impossible, ­because ­there was no incentive for patients to come forward.3 In the climate of discrimination and hostility that accompanied the rise of aids, individuals ­were reluctant to volunteer their own status or that of t­hose they cared for. B ­ ecause ­there ­were no drug therapies available at the time, such public health mea­sures could only serve as points of information exchange, marking hiv-­positive persons without providing meaningful health ser­vices. Yet this information would be critical in understanding how the disease was spread, and it therefore became necessary to motivate patients to come forward. First and foremost, the primary incentive was a demoralization, or perhaps a remoralization, of the disease itself. By remoralization, I mean to suggest a reordering of the disease’s moral valuation, particularly with regard to causation and culpability. This remoralization was accomplished through rigorous public health campaigns, celebrity endorsements for aids programming and education, and new forms of publicity. At the same time, another critical turn of events in the epidemic guided this pro­cess of remoralization. By 1986 it had become clear to research scientists, and consequently to the lay public, that the disease had not originated within the ­human population. Instead, it was found to have emerged from within chimpanzees, a species native to the continent of Africa. Once African apes ­were targeted as the host species for hiv, a new discourse began to materialize about the means of contagion. The aids virus was suddenly understood as a zoonosis, a cross-­species disease, and questions ­were soon raised about how, why, and when aids had jumped the species barrier. The accompanying answers quickly began to create a new moral panic, this time, about the consumption of chimpanzee meat by West African ­peoples. Concern over this unfamiliar food source then reconfigured the prob­lem of contagion. This chapter argues that a paradigm shift has occurred in the didactics of the epidemic, from a narrative of sexual impropriety to one that also includes the issue of dietary impropriety. This shift has taken shape around 140  Chapter 5

a par­tic­u­lar politics of literal and figurative dehumanization, from the condemnation of queer sexuality as a causative ­factor, to the cruel physical symptoms and eventual bodily breakdown effected by them, and fi­nally, to the search for the disease’s “roots” in a nonhuman host population, the chimpanzee. This politics of dehumanization has relied on a very specific conceptualization of the “natu­ral,” in which “unnatural” sexualities and “unnatural” dietary habits have both become seen as the vehicles of disease and the undoing of the animal/human boundary. While imperialist ideologies have long used the figure of the animal to imagine non-­Western, nonwhite subjects as bestial subhumans without access to rational empirical thought, so too has the animal come to stand in for the feminized subject, or the subject defined by corporeality. As feminist scholars have argued, the tethering of ­women to their bodies through sex-­ specific experiences (pregnancy, menstruation, hysteria) has often provided the means to imagine ­women as less than fully ­human subjects.4 To be ruled by the body, to be unbounded, to be penetrable always results in profound forms of biopo­liti­cal disenfranchisement, precisely b ­ ecause it links certain subjects to the animal world, marks them as less than ­human, and brings them ­under broader rubrics of gendered and ethno-­racial prejudice. In the case of the aids epidemic, while the exact bodies at stake changed over time, the ideologies of contagion w ­ ere continually maintained through a dichotomous rendering of the ­human and inhuman. By exploring changing mores surrounding the comportment of the body in the age of aids, this chapter considers how new theories of the h ­ uman have emerged at the thresholds of corporeality and contagion. To this end, I examine the significance of the aids epidemic to the history of gender and the h ­ uman, particularly the emergence of aids as a “gay” disease and the persecution of certain sexual practices and identities. I explore the prob­lem of dehumanization through the lens of the devastating effects of the disease on the ­human body, and the denial of basic ­human rights and protections to ­those affected by the epidemic. I then turn t­ oward the disease in U.S. neo­co­lo­nial imaginings of Africa and evaluate the prob­lem of dehumanization through the lenses of species hierarchy, h ­ uman and nonhuman interaction, and dietary choice. From the recrimination of alternative sexuality to the recrimination of non-­Western dietary practices, the chapter considers the relationship between gender and the ­human by bringing together two primary, yet often segregated, scholarly approaches. Typically, when we think about the idea of gender in relation to the idea of the h ­ uman, both as symbolic sociopo­liti­cal categories and as literal Of Sodomy and Cannibalism  141

biological categories, we move in two directions. First, we imagine the symbolics of gender as a broader ­human rights issue. To put it bluntly, as Catharine MacKinnon has asked: “are ­women ­human?”5 ­Here, MacKinnon is not literally questioning ­whether w ­ omen meet the requirements of the species boundary but instead is querying the rights and entitlements endowed within the category of the ­human, thereby making an argument about the denial of basic h ­ uman rights to w ­ omen (i.e., if one does not receive h ­ uman rights, can one be considered “­human” within the framework of the law?). Similarly, Miriam Ticktin has questioned why gender-­based vio­lence is so often not covered ­under the rubric of ­human rights.6 ­These arguments about dehumanization rely on a common understanding of the h ­ uman as a sociopo­liti­cal category, the idea of the ­human as a rights-­bearing subject, and ultimately, the notion of the ­human as ungendered in theory and yet male in practice. The second relationship between gender and the h ­ uman that is often identified in con­temporary scholarship is the naturalization of sex and gender roles through the complex interlocution of biological “fact” and cultural knowledge. From Judith Butler’s and José Esteban Muñoz’s works on theories of gender performativity, to Fausto-­Sterling’s and Londa Schiebinger’s works on the medical and scientific history of the sex/gender matrix, we have seen how the meaning of gender as a corporeal category has changed over time.7 This framework of thought has illuminated the pervasive belief in the biological truth of, and connection between, sex and gender, no ­matter how hard feminist theory has worked to separate the two. The biological ­human—­the species, the body, and the relationship between the two—is thus always already gendered. As Butler writes, “gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natu­ral sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a po­liti­cally neutral surface on which culture acts.”8 This chapter brings together t­ hese two approaches—­the ­human as a symbolic, sociopo­liti­cal category and the ­human as a literal, material, and biological category—to think about why they remain isolated, and to consider what is lost in the gulf between them. In order to understand the relationship between gender and the ­human, we must first and foremost understand each as a real­ity and a figuration; we must not take the first for granted as a cultural construct and the second for granted as a literal biological category. We know from the histories of dehumanization, both in the United States and across the globe, that ­things are not nearly so s­imple. This chapter tells a piece of this story through the lens of the aids epidemic, which mobilizes rhe­torics 142  Chapter 5

of infrahumanity through the policing of both gender/sexuality and dietary practice. It suggests that in order to fully comprehend the meaning of humanness and its interlocution with other categories of difference (gender, sexuality, race, and so on), attention must be paid in new ways to the convergence of the symbolic and the literal at the site of the infrahuman. Neither ­human rights theory nor aids lit­er­a­ture as we know them have made clear this connection.

“One Body”

The historiography of aids begins in the mid-1980s, when classic works such as Cindy Patton’s Sex and Germs: The Politics of aids (1985); Allan Brandt’s No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (1987); Simon Watney’s Policing Desire: Pornography, aids, and the Media (1987); and Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox’s aids: The Burdens of History (1988) located the disease within a broader lineage of modern venereal epidemics.9 In t­ hese treatments, syphilis served as the primary historical model for thinking about the intersections of sexuality, moral panic, and epidemiological practice. Written in the wake of ongoing discovery, ­these early works focused on the question of same-­sex contagion, stigmatization and, to a lesser extent, intravenous drug use as a part of i­ magined “alternative” lifestyles.10 By the late 1980s, once aids was linked by researchers to the continent of Africa and once large infection rates began to plague U.S. minority populations, the historical lit­er­a­ture turned ­toward ­matters of race. In works such as Renee Sabatier’s Blaming ­Others: Prejudice, Race, and Worldwide aids (1988), Patton’s Inventing aids (1990), Steven Epstein’s Impure Science: aids, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (1996), and Paula Treichler’s How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of aids (1999), issues of sexuality and race merged in the controversy over anal sex.11 While anal sex was thought to be a causative ­factor in the disease’s emergence and transference among gay men during the early years of the epidemic, Western researchers also connected it to “foreign” sexual practices, claiming that its “high prevalence” among heterosexuals in Africa was linked to the growing rates of aids across the continent. Po­liti­cal pundits and religious figures alike in both the United States and Africa also used the rhe­toric of “unnatural” sexuality to decry the spread of the disease. A 1987 editorial about promiscuity and aids, written by a group of ­Kenyan Catholic bishops and published in the ­Kenya Times, for example, warned that “nature has its own law of retribution.”12 Of Sodomy and Cannibalism  143

­TAB L E   5 . 1 .

​Snapshots in HIV/AIDS history and research

Date

Discovery/Event*

1981

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc) note the emergence of Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis among gay men in the United States cdc uses grid (gay-­related immune deficiency), gay cancer, and aids to refer to the growing epidemic Four “at risk” groups established by cdc: homosexuals, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians Gay Men’s Health Crisis founded Researchers isolate and name hiv aids linked to existing virus in Africa Ryan White expelled from school for being hiv positive First hiv test approved by the fda aids linked to nonhuman primates in Africa Ronald Reagan publicly acknowledges aids for the first time azt, first antiretroviral drug, approved by fda act up (aids Coalition to Unleash Power) founded hiv-­positive immigrants excluded from entering the United States cdc holds first National Conference on hiv and Communities of Color The Black Leadership Commission on aids and the National Minority aids Council form unaids declares that hiv-­positive ­women outnumber hiv-­positive men in sub-­Saharan Africa New cases among blacks outnumber ­those among whites in the United States aids prevention campaigns aimed at minorities are launched in the United States Karl Amman begins to document the bushmeat trade Magic Johnson announces that he is hiv positive Rapid hiv test developed by fda hiv immigration exclusion policy signed by President Clinton And the Band Plays On airs on hbo haart treatment implemented New hiv cases within the white U.S. population decline for the first time Minority aids Initiative founded cdc singles out African American and Latino men with same-­sex partners as having a higher incidence of hiv than white men in the United States Obama administration lifts ban on hiv-­positive immigrants

1982

1984 1985

1986 1987

1988

1991 1992 1993 1995 1996 1998 2000 2009

* This ­table is not intended to be inclusive of all impor­tant aids discoveries, but rather offers a timeline for the issues raised in this chapter, with information gathered from sources provided throughout.

From the onset of the epidemic in the United States, the Christian Right, led largely by Jerry Falwell’s newly founded po­liti­cal organ­ization, the Moral Majority, claimed that aids was a divine or “natu­ral” intervention, sent to right the wrongs of queer sexuality. As conservative Patrick Buchanan remarked, “the poor homosexuals . . . ​have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”13 Similarly, psychiatrist Paul Cameron of the right-wing F ­ amily Research Institute argued for the castration of gays “to prevent them from cheating on nature.”14 Even the mainstream medical community ­imagined the disease to be endemic to the queer body. In 1981 and 1982, respectively, hiv was initially termed the “gay cancer,” and then “Gay Related Immune Deficiency,” or “grid.” The high incidence of the disease within the gay male population was undeniable, largely ­because of the pronounced physical symptoms of the disease (lesions, wasting, and so on) in the years before treatment was available. Thus for many onlookers outside the queer community, hiv seemed to literalize centuries-­old anx­i­eties about the pos­si­ble “contagion” of sexual perversity.15 The symbolic fears mobilized by the disease, coupled with its material pariah markings, provided fodder for right-wing critics, who proposed the expulsion of hiv-­positive persons to a former leper colony in Hawai‘i.16 In all ­these ways, the epidemic brought together concerns over morality, be­hav­ior, and embodiment. Throughout the early phases of the epidemic in the U.S. context, politicians, physicians, and public health officials alike debated the proper means of managing the disease. Ideas ranged from the segregation of aids patients, both inside and outside hospital environs, to physicians’ rights to decline treatment to aids patients,17 to the removal of infected c­ hildren from public schools,18 to the l­egal termination of seropositive individuals from their place of employment, to the ongoing instatement of sodomy laws as a justifiable mea­sure of “prevention,”19 to the denial of health and life insurance policies to persons with aids.20 One of the most controversial proposals involved the possibility of an aids quarantine, which gained momentum by the mid-1980s. Although the development of the Elisa and Western Blot Tests began to enable the detection of the virus by 1985, knowledge about the disease’s transmission remained hazy. Research demonstrated its communication through blood and sexual fluids, but the number of exposures necessary for infection remained unclear. For t­ hese reasons, many believed that a quarantine was critical to contain the disease.21 In 1986 conservative po­liti­cal pundit William F. Buckley went a step further and suggested the concept of an aids tattoo. Buckley proposed that “every­one detected with aids should be tattooed in the upper forearm to Of Sodomy and Cannibalism  145

protect common-­needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”22 The idea of branding aids patients quickly drew outcries from within the gay community. In the months that followed the publication of his proposal, Buckley was harangued by gay activists to retract his remarks. Prompted by pressure from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (glaad) and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (gmhc), Buckley quipped that his plan might have been “impolitic” and “impractical,” but he refused to “admit the basic inhumanity to tattooing ­human beings for any reason.”23 Within recent Western history, the conceptual framework available for understanding and contextualizing compulsory tattooing was, of course, Nazi Germany. Through activist and media discourses that surrounded aids, the meta­phor of the Holocaust resonated strongly, ­whether in reference to Buckley’s tattoos, to the more widely accepted proposals for quarantine, or to the profound negligence of the government. In 1987 the aids activist organ­ization act up (aids Co­ali­tion to Unleash Power) began using the symbol of the pink triangle forcibly worn by queer concentration camp victims, accompanied by the slogan “Silence = Death.” In 1989 act up cofounder Larry Kramer published Reports from the Holocaust: The Making ­ itter ironies of being both of an aids Activist, in which he explored the b gay and Jewish in the 1980s.24 Echoing Hannah Arendt’s 1966 treatise on the workings of bureaucracy and totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Kramer wrote that he believed a queer “genocide” was u ­ nder way. “Certainly,” he noted, “a holocaust does not require . . . ​deliberate intentionality on the part of . . . ​a bureaucracy to be effective. Holocausts can occur, and prob­ably most often do occur, ­because of inaction. . . . ​How does one accuse a bureaucrat of looking the other way . . . ​when he can ­counter—as Adolf Eichmann did . . . ​‘I was only ­doing my job as best I could’?”25 Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, t­ here remained an impor­tant connection between discourses of the Holocaust and discourses of aids. Not only did the themes of genocide and fascism permeate cultural works that dealt with the epidemic, but so too did the rise of Holocaust revivalism provide a backdrop against which narratives of ill health, dehumanization, and a queer genocide came to unfold.26 While most aids activists who utilized the language of the Holocaust traded on Arendtian ideas of indifference and inaction, the power­ful tropes of purity and contamination that guided Nazi thought in the early twentieth c­ entury also provided an impor­tant point of reference. As scholars such as Hugh Raffles, Uli Linke, and Robert Proctor have pointed out, schemas of infection and infesta146  Chapter 5

tion, impure blood, and hygiene, respectively, marked Nazi biopolitics in the years leading up to the “final solution.”27 During the aids epidemic, as in Nazi Germany, ideas of quarantining and tattooing spoke to a desire for bodily identification, fantasies of segregation and purification that ­were tragically impossible. Yet while Nazi policies ­were often designed to ferret out “­others” from within a phenotypically homogenous population, the interest in branding aids patients was, in a sense, superfluous; in the years before drug therapies became available, the disease itself had become its own form of branding. From the literal breakdown of the body to the symbolic sociopo­liti­cal breakdown of ­human rights and protections, aids enabled profound and multifaceted pro­cesses of dehumanization. The subsequent reassertion of fundamental ­human rights in the wake of the epidemic would come to depend on an unlikely collaboration between the public health community and the aids activist community,28 a co­ali­tion built out of the realization that the disease demanded new understandings of corporeal morality. In his 1986 article “Morality and the Health of the Body Politic,” health policy advocate Daniel Beauchamp argued that the best course of action would be a “policy resting on the right to be dif­fer­ent in fundamental choices and . . . ​ ‘one body’ in ­matters of common health,” which would rely on a “mutual trust and a willingness to accept the burdens of citizenship . . . ​[within] the demo­cratic community.”29 The movement for the ac­cep­tance of rational scientific knowledge and surveillance by the broader public was augmented by the rise of testing procedures that required a new relationship between the medical establishment and the individual. Biomedical researcher and hiv co-­discoverer Robert Gallo reflected that while the initial “reaction of some ­people [to the test] was, ‘My God, this is like World War II, when Jewish ­people got the stamp,’ ” within a ­matter of months, a change took place, and the public began to understand “that the way we could save ­people’s lives was by testing blood.”30 The notion of being “one body,” in which individual acts and compliances could “save lives,” effected a new decoupling of corporeal life from socio­ po­liti­cal life that came to hold an impor­tant position in aids discourse in the late 1980s. Activists argued for it on the basis of a claim to ­human rights and as an antidote to the dehumanizing effects of the disease, while public health policy makers i­ magined it as a ­matter of “common health” and “demo­cratic” practice. Through this alliance of means and ends, new understandings of biopo­liti­cal citizenship worked to naturalize the obligations of the individual to health and hygiene. This normalization in turn helped produce Of Sodomy and Cannibalism  147

the remoralization of the epidemic, by emphasizing scientific “truth” and by necessarily moving away from homophobic prejudice. This series of events—­the push away from discourses of quarantine and punitive marking, and the pull ­toward encouraging the public to become a part of the solution without forcible measures—­made pos­si­ble the notion that one could si­mul­ta­neously be a responsible, law-­abiding citizen and hiv positive. It was perhaps for this reason that activists within the gay community who had already borne the brunt of the disease’s stigma latched onto testing as a m ­ atter of paramount significance, and at the same time began to focus on physical fitness as an impor­tant indicator of corporeal health.31 Facilitated in part by the development of successful hiv drug therapies that provided patients with a better quality of life, the early 1990s witnessed the rise of a new culture of exercise and health within the gay male population that evidenced new beliefs in bodily hygiene. The beautification of the body—­rituals of cosmetic practice that signaled health and welfare on the outside, while perhaps hiding one’s disease status on the inside—­became an impor­tant way to resist pro­cesses of dehumanization. This movement enabled the reconfiguration of ideologies that w ­ ere once tied to discrete identities and bodies (e.g., gay or queer) into moral economies of embodiment and biopo­liti­cal citizenship (e.g., gay but monogamous; safe-­sex-­practicing queer, hiv positive and healthy, and so on). As historians and theorists of sexuality have documented, the idea of nonnormative, nonheterosexual practices and identities has been antithetical to the claims of modern citizenship. ­Whether b ­ ecause many queer persons fail to participate in the rites of the state (marriage, nuclear ­family life), have less investment in procreation, or are understood to threaten normative gender identities, they stand outside the requirements of true national belonging.32 Yet the trajectory of conservatism that began in the late 1980s offered vari­ous ways to be gay and, ostensibly, to be a “good”—or at least a “better”—­citizen. This is not to say that unprotected sex was eradicated within the entire gay community (in fact, we know that in recent years aids is again on the rise within portions of the gay community),33 nor is it to say that discourses of shame and disgust surrounding gay sex no longer persisted. Rather, the prevailing narrative—­within both scientific and popu­lar discourses—­provided an entrance point into the polity that did not previously exist. This entrance point worked hand in hand with the emerging conceptualization of the “innocent victim,” a figure epitomized by the 1985 Ryan White case, in which a ten-­year-­old hemophiliac boy was expelled from school 148  Chapter 5

a­ fter contracting the virus from a contaminated blood transfusion. As Harriet Washington and ­others have suggested, the idea of the “innocent victim” itself always implied that ­others who suffered from the disease ­were somehow “guilty.”34 Like the idea of the “good” versus “bad” gay citizen, innocence versus guilt in the aids epidemic was determined by the moral valuation of certain be­hav­iors. At the same time, the real­ity that the innocent victims ­were likely to be straight, white, and of a certain socioeconomic background reinforced the claims of normative citizenship. The simultaneous emergence of ­these dichotomies—­good gay / bad gay, innocent victim / guilty victim—­also became impor­tant in reshaping the place of queer persons generally in U.S. society. While the gay liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s had taken queer visibility to a new level, the aids epidemic, as a queer disease in the early 1980s, pushed this visibility even further, while also providing the catalyst for the continuation of radical activism in an emergent period of national conservatism. The power of hiv testing as a method of prevention, ­human rights, and citizenship enabled a reconfiguration of the illness itself. Ironically, then, at the precise moment that revolutionary activist groups such as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and act up fought for the care and protection of aids patients, the stakes had never been higher for certain forms of conformity within the mainstream medical establishment. It was in this trade-­off between health and illness, inclusion and exclusion, that a space for a new type of gay identity was carved out. Critically, this transformation happened in the wake of scientific discovery that began to link the disease to the continent of Africa.

Animal Appetites

By the late 1980s, once the disease had been traced to Africa, forms of xenophobia and ethno-­racism also came to shape the discourse and politics surrounding the aids crisis. In 1985 and 1986 the discovery that a similar strain of hiv existed within chimpanzee populations animated vast conjecture about the nature of the “blood-­to-­blood” contact that had taken place between ­human and nonhuman primates.35 Speculation extended to the “strangeness” of African sexual habits, including allegations of bestiality and “some type of bizarre act with the spreading of monkey blood on vari­ous parts of the body.”36 Like the purported prevalence of anal sex among Africans, t­ hese ideas, coupled with a new assertion professed by Western scientists that certain aids-­related genital ulcers ­were endemic to the continent of Of Sodomy and Cannibalism  149

Africa, created a problematically vague narrative, covering diverse nations and ­peoples ­under a single vision of biological essentialism and sexualized racial difference.37 Local African governments responded in a variety of ways to the epidemic and to the accusations by the Western medical establishment. In South Africa, the nation with the highest hiv/aids rates, President Thabo Mbeki gained international attention by disputing Western hypotheses about the development of the disease. ­Until 2000, Mbeki objected to the links between hiv and aids, and to this day he continues to question the safety of Western phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, including the well-­known antiretroviral azidothymidine (azt). While many perceive Mbeki’s opinions to be ill founded and irresponsibly disseminated, one cannot help but look to the longer history of colonialism and the exploitation of African bodies by Western scientists to understand his suspicions.38 Many African researchers also point to the ongoing devaluation of local knowledge and medical practice. Dr. Sam Mhlongo, chief of ­family medicine at the Medical University of South Africa, observed recently that Western doctors and health organ­izations often refuse to include the perspectives of entire communities of local medical professionals in their haste to address the prob­lem of aids in Africa. Mhlongo also noted that in the early years of hiv/aids discovery, Western researchers dismissed long-­held findings by African physicians who had already taken note of a group of symptoms now associated with hiv, impeding a research pro­cess that has yet to find any solution for the disease.39 Mhlongo and ­others suggest that even in the most benign manifestation, the implementation of Western medical practices throughout the Third World is a proj­ect of colonialism. The systematic devaluation of non-­Western medical knowledge relies on presumptions of ignorance, irrationality, and incompetence that mirror attitudes ­toward African sexuality (as discussed above), and dietary habits (as discussed below), all of which fall ­under a broader ideology of primitivism that operates around the animal/human boundary. Historically, the relationship between animal life and ­human communities has often served as an invisible barometer of civilization and modernity. In par­tic­u­lar, how a society has used, and continues to use, animals for purposes of food, companionship, and ­labor marks its place on Western scales of pro­gress. The animals that we ­will eat and ­those we w ­ ill refuse to eat, the animals that we readily live with and t­hose that we w ­ ill not, the animals that we w ­ ill use to carry out our aims and t­ hose that we would not consider for such purposes—­all point to the fact that the animal/human interface serves as a symbology for 150  Chapter 5

larger moral, ethical, and sociopo­liti­cal choices. The confusion of ­these categories (for instance, the use of a “food” animal for companionship), as well as the abuse and torture of animals, the consumption of unfamiliar creatures and body parts, and the lack of technological resources that in turn create a dependence on animal power, all conspire to deem a ­people or a society as “primitive” in Western eyes. Appropriate engagement with the animal world is thus at the heart of what determines the “­human.” In the tradition of Enlightenment philosophies that carry out fantasies of empiricism and rationality in the name of the h ­ uman itself, the per­for­mance of proper contact with the animal world provides an opportunity to demonstrate one’s humanity through rituals of distance and proximity40—­a reformulation of Beauchamp’s “one body.” Yet even prior to t­hese debates, constructions of the animal/human boundary provided an impor­tant backdrop for the story of aids. By the time that hiv was traced to Africa, t­ here was already much ongoing deliberation about the status of animal life across the continent. In the United States, domestic wildlife advocacy took off in the 1960s and 1970s but turned ­toward Africa by the 1980s. Increasing pressure was brought to bear on African poaching and hunting practices by a wide variety of Western conservationist organ­izations, and as debates on banning the ivory trade raged, the list of “at risk” species narrowed in on t­ hose native to the continent of Africa, including elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, gorillas, and chimpanzees.41 In 1989 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice officially pronounced that chimpanzees ­were to be considered an “endangered species” in Africa—­and nowhere ­else.42 Effectively, the declaration pardoned the use of the animals in Western breeding facilities, at biomedical research centers, and, to a lesser extent, on display at international zoos, while criminalizing local uses of the animals in the bushmeat trade. At stake was a form of soft colonialism that used animal welfare as a justification for geopo­liti­cal intervention; profoundly, this intervention occurred in the era of official decolonization. Attention to African wildlife in the 1980s also ­rose in tandem with the popularization of African primates in U.S. public culture, beginning with the media sensationalism surrounding Koko, the trained, sign-­language-­ speaking gorilla with a pet cat, and continuing as a product of publicity surrounding the changing field of primatology.43 ­Under the guidance of anthropologist Louis  S. B. Leakey, a team of primatological researchers had already begun to descend on the African jungles prior to the first identification of aids. All of Leakey’s protégés ­were white and female. He chose them specifically ­because he believed that w ­ omen w ­ ere somehow closer to nature Of Sodomy and Cannibalism  151

and would be most effective in their observations and interactions with their almost ­human subjects.44 It was during the early 1980s that scientists such as Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, and Jane Goodall (known by turns as “Leakey’s angels” and the “trimates”) began to receive international attention for their work with gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees. Each w ­ oman also pursued conservationist work.45 The transformation of the field of primatology during this time period was incredibly impor­tant to the U.S. public’s understanding of African personhood. Frequently, the Western media represented higher order primates as gentle, ­family oriented, and peaceful, in contrast to the ­human inhabitants of the continent, who w ­ ere represented as violent, inhumane, and barbaric. At the center of ­these repre­sen­ta­tions was the question of the right to the land and the right to life. When the resource needs of African animals and African ­peoples came into conflict, an odd framework of co-­inhabitance emerged, in which Western conservationist organ­izations argued that Africans should cede portions of the land and trade that affected nonhuman primates’ lives.46 ­These ideas ­were indicative of a broader push ­toward ecofeminism that began to characterize the trajectory of second wave feminism by the 1970s and 1980s. Scholars and activists such as Françoise d’Eaubonne and Marti Kheel began to argue for a clearer parallel between critiques of male domination and critiques of environmental and nonhuman domination. The notion of “endangerment” resonated with many feminists who asserted that the sexual violation and oppression of ­women and their bodies could be compared with the “rape” of the land and the abuse of animals.47 From that point onward, this logic has been applied with par­tic­u­lar frequency to the question of higher order primates, whose presumed intelligence and consciousness levels have inspired many to fight for their rights. On a more subterranean level, interest in primates has often had to do with the use value of the animals at hand and our need to preserve them for our own purposes.48 In the case of Africa’s waning primate population and the global interventions that have taken place since the late 1980s, the question of extinction has posed two issues. First has been the threat to Western biomedicine, which has relied on the bodies of nonhuman primates as experimental subjects. In par­tic­u­lar the chimpanzee subspecies Pan troglodytes troglodytes, the natu­ral host for the hiv-1 strain and the choice subject for hiv studies, was reported by scientific periodicals as greatly endangered by West African culinary tastes.49 Such concerns led to an allied critique of primate consumption from naturalists, conservationists, and biomedical researchers, many of 152  Chapter 5

whom began to advocate for international wildlife stewardship across the continent of Africa. This rhe­toric was furthered by the misrepre­sen­ta­tion of the transmission of aids across the species barrier. While scientists generally agreed on the “cut-­hunter” hypothesis (which suggested that the virus was first transmitted when a hunter cut his hand while butchering an infected simian carcass), the press often attributed the disease to the consumption of simian flesh and blood.50 When the cut-­hunter hypothesis was correctly rendered, gratuitous stories with headlines such as “aids Started by Eating Chimps” and “Chimpanzee Meat Blamed for aids Epidemic” spoke in a strange and circuitous fashion of the inhumanity of ­those who chose to devour the almost ­human.51 Comparisons ­were made between cannibalistic be­hav­iors practiced by chimpanzees and the consumption of their flesh by ­humans.52 The language of cannibalism itself thus became a legitimized form of xenophobic racism, based on purportedly “universal” ­human values. Eating apes was considered to be both an “unnatural” phenomenon tabooed by moral sensibilities and mythologies, as well as a decidedly savage act that suggested a disinterest in the scientific “truths” that made the chimpanzee both a cruel and danger­ uman ous food source.53 Time and again, the public was reminded that the h population was not the “natu­ral reservoir” or “host species” for the disease; rather, it was an animal disease that had made its way across the animal/ human boundary ­under a variety of distasteful circumstances. The consumption of primate meat thus became a marker of the inhuman/e, both b ­ ecause cannibalism was not thought to be a common or modern ­human practice and ­because it evidenced a basic ignorance about “appropriate” ­human food sources. To be sure, the alignment of African ­people with so-­called inhuman be­hav­iors was not a new paradigm for Westerners to grasp. Discourses of racism and colonialism have long colluded to mythologize Africa and its p ­ eoples as primitive and animalistic. As one reporter put it, the theory that hiv jumped the species barrier from “primates in Africa” appeared to be “a pedestrian idea.”54 Even when not explic­itly referring to the continent of Africa, reports of hiv research tended to deploy “missing link” and other evolutionary rhe­torics of inevitability to describe the search for the virus that had traveled from African animals to African p ­ eoples.55 African scientists have provided a dif­fer­ent take on the m ­ atter. While many assert that hiv is a zoonosis, they do not agree on the methods of initial transmission to the ­human species. Alternative theories range from experimental errors in Western biomedical facilities, to contaminated vaccinations Of Sodomy and Cannibalism  153

disseminated throughout Western Africa at midcentury, and fi­nally to a call for a clarification of the timeline of hiv transference, which reveals a correlation between U.S. and British imperial intervention and the areas most affected by the disease.56 Although sometimes dismissed as conspiracy theories, ­these ideas bring attention to the curious irony of hiv as a zoonosis: if it was not transferred via “primitive” practices, it must have been transferred via modern practices—in the clinic itself. This suggestion works against the presumptions of ignorance, irrationality, and incompetence that Western science has long ascribed to African ­peoples and African clinicians. Instead, it suggests that the real barbarity lies within a broader system of dehumanization effected by modernity, colonialism, and biomedicine writ large.57 Yet this possibility has been eclipsed by mainstream Western accounts. While long-­standing racist ideologies have provided a climate of receptivity for hypotheses regarding the African origins of the disease, a new and more precise gaze turned ­toward the means of contagion in the late 1980s. In par­ tic­u­lar, the bushmeat markets that sold primate flesh as local delicacies became a source of spectacular media disgust, and gory images of slaughtered primates began to accompany popu­lar and scientific reports of the epidemic in Africa. ­These images ­were not easily come by, as apes only accounted for about 1 ­percent of the bushmeat trade.58 The sensationalism that surrounded the consumption of ape flesh was then compounded by the use of the word bushmeat itself. While the term simply implies any wild game found in the bush, ranging from rodents, to hogs, to primates, it began to take on the sole connotation of simian meat within the Western media.59 From 1988 onward, wildlife activist Karl Ammann managed to make an entire ­career out of traveling the continent of Africa and photographing the bushmeat markets for the Western gaze. Ammann was repulsed by the food economy that he witnessed, arguing that slaughtering and eating apes was inhumane. “A wounded chimp ­will beg for its life. . . . ​Where do we draw the line?” he asked. Ammann further reported that the choice to consume primates was not out of desperation but rather a ­matter of certain tastes: “­People ­don’t want beef or chicken anymore—­they call it a ‘white man’s meat.’ . . . ​You can order gorilla for Christmas the same way I’d order a turkey.”60 The idea that certain tastes are racially or culturally based works to re-­essentialize bodily practice in an era that has professed a move away from archaic understandings of biological essentialism. H ­ ere again lies the question: if aids containment has relied, and continues to rely, on an understanding of mutual interests and values—­“one body”—­what does this mean for ­those who engage in divergent practices? 154  Chapter 5

Excess and Absence

Since the identification of “improper” uses of nonhuman primates in Africa, newfound interest in cross-­species contagions that affect non-­Western nations has become manifest within scientific studies and the popu­lar media. Statistics demonstrate that this interest in fact does not correlate to waves of infection. Rather, the sheer number of ­these reports sensationalizes the breach of the species boundary. Rarefied incidents of Ebola, a zoonosis carried by primates and bats, began gaining attention in the mid-1990s, when the Associated Press published headlines such as “10 in Gabon Die of Ebola ­after Feast of Chimp Meat.”61 Similarly, interest in well-­known zoonotic diseases such as tuberculosis and small pox began to spike during the late 1980s, receiving levels of media attention that did not correspond to outbreak timelines. Between 1980 and 1984, ­these diseases ­were covered in only 160 articles in the major U.S. presses; between 1985 and 1989, the figure ­rose to 503; to 1,321 in 1990–94; to 2,566 in 1995–99; and to 4,260 in 2000–2004.62 The increasingly naturalized repre­sen­ta­tional association between Africa, zoonotic contagion, and aids was emblematized in 1993, when the first retrospective film on the aids epidemic appeared on hbo. Based on gay activist Randy Shilts’s 1987 publication, And the Band Played On, the film focused overtly on the decimation of the gay male community during the 1980s but strangely opened in the Ebola River in Central Africa in 1976, locating the etiology of the virus at a time in which it would not yet have been known.63 Certain scenes from the film locate hiv/aids as foreign in nature, emerging from the ashes of the incineration of contagious bodies (figures 5.1 and 5.2). The following year, popu­lar science writer Richard Preston’s harrowing account of the Ebola virus, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story, became a national best seller, bringing alarming “facts” about the easy dangers of transnational contagion emanating from Africa.64 Preston connected the spread of Ebola to the spread of aids, remarking that a more proper name for hiv might have been “Kinshasa Highway [Virus], in honor of the fact that it passed along the Kinshasa Highway during its emergence from the African forest.”65 Preston’s observation evidences the paradoxical practice of rhetorically provincializing “Third World” diseases, even in an era of increasing global connectivity. From the 1970s onward, Western researchers have geopo­liti­cally and racially essentialized zoonotic outbreaks appearing on the continent of Africa, by creating localized names for “new” diseases, including the Lassa, Ebola, West Nile, and Hanta viruses. Not only do ­these names evidence ­little understanding of the mechanisms of zoonotic transmission or the agents of disease that Of Sodomy and Cannibalism  155

cdc workers arrive in “Central Africa, 1976.” Still from And the Band Played On (1993).

F I G U R E  5 .1 .

F I G U R E  5 .2 .

Ebola as the “origin” of aids. Still from And the Band Played On (1993)

likely exist within U.S. borders, but they also demonstrate an anachronistic understanding of the saliency of national geography in the context of global capital. Seizing on national limits in the absence of species bound­aries, stories that circulate about zoonoses epitomize the fears associated with modernity and its displaced ­others, be they h ­ uman or animal. Similarly, reports of African bushmeat traffic in the United States began to appear in the Associated Press at the beginning of the twenty-­first ­century, accusing African immigrants of transporting “foreign” diseases with them into the country. In 2007 thirty-­nine-­year-­old Liberian immigrant Mamie Manneh was charged with trafficking the “skulls, limbs, and torsos of nonhuman primates” for consumption and sale.66 While her l­awyer argued that Manneh’s right to the meat was covered ­under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (due to her “hybrid Christian-­African” faith), she was nonetheless found guilty and sentenced to probation in 2009. B ­ ecause Manneh’s case resided at the intersection of international trade, public health, animal rights, immigration, and religious freedom, it represented a vast swath of competing cultural values. At her sentencing, the judge cautioned that any ­future importing or consumption of primate meat would result in immediate federal incarceration. During the trial, Jane Goodall spoke publicly about the severity of Manneh’s crime, and her belief that Manneh should be imprisoned.67 The emergence of stories such as Manneh’s, as well as the perpetual direction of U.S. sponsorship t­ oward the “global” aids epidemic, has further occluded understandings of the disease within the domestic context. While many individuals and corporations are comfortable engaging in a charitable, neo­co­lo­nial relationship with other countries and continents, t­ here is a profound silence around issues of health, in­equality, and the aids epidemic in the United States. Throughout the first de­cade of the twenty-­first ­century, domestic aids funding took a plunge. In the 2004 presidential contest, candidates from both sides of the po­liti­cal spectrum evidenced surprise when presented with local hiv statistics.68 In August  2008 the Black aids Institute (bai) published a call for action on behalf of African Americans struggling with the disease. Thinking about the U.S. African American population “as its own country,” bai researchers noted that an in­de­pen­dent “Black Amer­i­ca . . . ​would have an epidemic on par with t­ hose [nations] that have been targeted for emergency aid.” Since the 1990s, the disease has been on the rise in the black community and increasingly accounts for large percentages of fatalities. In many age categories, it is the leading cause of death among African Americans. Of Sodomy and Cannibalism  157

The prevalence of hiv within the black community during the early 2000s has continued to grow, representing rates greater than many nations in sub-­ Saharan Africa.69 In the U.S. capital, one in twenty African Americans is hiv positive. As Cathy J. Cohen and ­others have pointed out, complicated sexual politics, mistrust of the U.S. medical establishment, and a general lack of funding and governmental care have limited the success of minority-­ directed aids initiatives, such as the Black Leadership Commission on aids, ­People of Color in Crisis, and the National Minority aids Council.70 President Barack Obama’s engagement with the epidemic represented the paradoxes of the global obscuring the local. On the one hand, he and First Lady Michelle Obama publicly took hiv/aids tests while on the campaign trail in 2006 during a visit to K ­ enya, where he asserted that he wanted to set an example by helping “destigmatize” the practice of getting tested. Yet on the other hand, he chose to have the test administered in Africa rather than in the United States, in spite of the fact that he recognized that the spread of the disease in the United States was also likely connected to discomfort with testing procedures.71 They say that history repeats itself, and certainly, President Obama’s actions echo the remarks made by Alan Dershowitz over twenty years earlier. Yet the sad truth is that while Dershowitz’s pleas w ­ ere heeded, t­hose working on the prob­lem of aids within the black community ­today may never be heard. If the rationale ­behind destigmatizing the disease in the first place was the realization that homophobia was impeding its proper containment within the broader population, the clear neglect of African Americans indicates that no such threat is perceived, precisely ­because it is already contained: within the black population. To the extent that certain populations can be carved out of the image of “one body,” and to the extent that t­ here is no space for institutional interrogation, con­temporary biopolitics offer no plausible outside. While patterns of literal and symbolic dehumanization have persisted throughout the epidemic, perhaps it is even a more foreboding sign that a widespread narrative has yet to take shape in the case of the black aids crisis. Perhaps the ultimate form of dehumanization is complete silence, or the failure to recognize neither the h ­ uman, nor the dehumanized self.

158  Chapter 5

6. Every­thing except the Squeal PORCINE HYBRIDITY IN THE OBESITY EPIDEMIC A N D X E N O T R A N S P L A N TAT I O N R E S E A R C H

In a 2012 ted talk titled “On the World’s Killer Diet,” physician Dean Ornish posited obesity as an emerging epidemic on par with aids and Avian Flu. He did not elaborate further on his perceived connection between t­ hese epidemics, save for the use of statistical prevalence. Nonetheless, as he gave his pre­sen­ta­tion, it was clear that the audience agreed with his dim assessment of h ­ uman health and futurity. In a lecture riddled with hyperbole—­from narratives about fast food clogging the nation’s arteries, to the globalization of “Amer­i­ca’s prob­lem” with fat, to the suggestion of diet reform as a s­ imple antidote—­only one issue remained unexplained. Following the pre­sen­ta­tion of a series of maps detailing the increasing rates of obesity across U.S. states, Ornish briefly showed a cartoon of man’s descent into obesity, and then, into pigness (figure 6.1). “It gets even worse,” he said, “­we’re sort of devolving” (audience laughs). Ornish’s slide is one of many images that have begun to circulate since the beginning of the twenty-­first c­ entury, portraying the evolutionary downfall of man as caused by obesity as an infrahuman condition (see figure  6.2). One of the earlier incarnations of this image was exhibited on the cover of the New Yorker magazine in March 2000, where black silhouettes of man’s progression t­oward normative development are followed by the figure of a portly man in a baseball cap (figure 6.3). This figure’s posture and limb positioning appears similar to the earlier evolutionary figures in the image, and

F I G U R E  6 .1 .

Slide from Dean Ornish, “The World’s Killer Diet” (2005)

his arms mirror the shape of the other nonhuman creatures pictured. It is yet another vision of “posthumanity.” Variations on the schematic of obesity-­as-­devolution appear repeatedly online in meme form, in which man is portrayed as descending into a literal blob of fat, grotesque forms of embodiment, hypercorpulence as hyperwhiteness, and even states of porcine hybridity.1 In ­these memes, the obese body is represented as disabled and deformed; it is more often than not male, bald, and white. The raciality of t­hese images is especially impor­ tant to consider. In all the person-­to-­pig memes that represent race (­those that do not use silhouette forms, as in the New Yorker cover), the state of devolution prompted by enfattening is accompanied by a lightening of the skin tone, often u ­ ntil it becomes pink (figures 6.2 and 6.4). What is particularly in­ter­est­ing about many of ­these memes is that they often appear in truncated form, where two images may be identical, but one evolutionary diagram ends with an obese man, and the other with a pig. Why the pigs are removed from many of ­these memes is unclear; perhaps it is ­imagined as redundant, or 160  Chapter 6

F I G U R E  6 .2 .

Patrick Boivin, “Evolution” (2005). Ian Falconer, “Time Marches On.”

FIGU R E 6.3.

Chloe Cushman, “The Shape of the ­Future,” (2016). F I G U R E  6 .4 .

offensive, or both. As discussed in chapter  2, the history of evolutionary schemas is indeed long and complicated. Even in the current moment, the movement from a dark, nonhuman creature to a light-skinned h ­ uman being remains the dominant visual aid in portrayals of ­human evolutionary ascent. In ­these conceptualizations, racial difference provides the backdrop for understandings of biological pro­gress and species transformation. To be sure, cultural paranoia over the pos­si­ble devolution of mankind is not a novel concept. In the early twentieth ­century, confusion over the mechanisms of evolution and ge­ne­tic inheritance caused concern over the pos­si­ ble reversal of evolutionary development. This concern—­like that evidenced in figures shown in this chapter—­was largely tied to anx­i­eties about racial pro­gress and the pos­si­ble dwarfing of white masculinity. Further, the thematic of over-­evolution—­illustrated in chapter  1’s treatment of the child as a figure that must be returned to nature—­has plagued U.S. popu­lar and scientific cultures since the industrial revolution. In the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, this fear has rematerialized, both in the narrative of obesity-­as-­devolution and, in another common discourse, of man-­enfeebled-­ by-­machine. On the surface, t­hese schematics demonstrate a similar phenomenon: the decline of ­human health due to the con­ve­niences of modern 162  Chapter 6

life, with fast food for the obese, and personal computers for the inwardly inclined. Yet they also represent an oppositional topos, where the h ­ uman body is rendered ­either animal or machine, premodern or postmodern, both critically disabled. In this chapter, I think through how t­ hese concerns overlap and diverge, and what their cultural prevalence means. In part I of this book, evolutionary rhe­toric looked to the animal self as a model of h ­ uman perpetuity in an age of technological development and agricultural distancing. In part II, nuclear warfare and the space race made the human-­animal alien to itself, and the cyborg, or posthuman, became an ambiguously desirable endpoint. Part III offers an even more uncertain imaginary framework. In c­ hapter 5, the narratives of aids as zoonotic (cross-­species in origin), or iatrogenic (technologically created and disseminated), illustrated the ways in which both science and popu­lar culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries remain caught between figurations of the animal and the machine as equally vampiric forces, attacking the prospect of h ­ uman futurity from both ends of the spectrum. In this chapter, a similar thematic emerges, with regard to both the obesity epidemic and another site of what I am calling “porcine hybridity,” or ­xenotransplantation (cross-­species organ transplantation) research that seeks to use the pig as a model species for ­human organ “breeding.” Through ­these dual lenses—­that of obesity and that of xenotransplantation—­can be seen an emergent discourse of corporeal interchangeability, a biometrics of species, race, and class that comes together in the figuration of the chimeric pig. This approach to obesity is very dif­fer­ent from existing treatments, b ­ ecause it both seeks to consider a politics of animality and ultimately offers an argument about the way in which corporeal in/compatibility and nonuniformity is becoming less tolerable in an age where cross-­bodily incorporation has become more and more significant. The chapter takes its title from Upton Sinclair’s harrowing account of Chicago’s meatpacking industry, The Jungle (1906), calling attention to the discourses of butchery and animalism necessary to conceive of the ­human body as a spare parts machine. As Sinclair writes, “they use every­thing about the hog except the squeal.”2

Fat Terror

At once one of the most common yet maligned issues facing Americans ­today, obesity exists as a profound contradiction to the microtechnological cultures of health that have developed within the postmodern era. The obese Every­thing except the Squeal  163

body stands as a rejection of con­temporary medical knowledge and corporeal practice. It refutes widespread attitudes concerning the control and uses of the ­human body, and it rejects the cults of information technology and televisuality in which it is assumed that access to healthcare knowledge (if not health insurance) is an automatic given. In a moment where the changeability of the ­human body is made increasingly pos­si­ble by ge­ne­tic engineering, psychopharmacology, and surgical intervention, the purportedly chosen “imperfect” body challenges the ethos of modern medicine as well as long-­held individualistic cultural idioms. Within the last two de­cades, repre­sen­ta­tions of obesity and the “obesity epidemic” have come to occupy an ubiquitous place within U.S. popu­lar culture. As scholars such as Susan Bordo and Peter Stearns have argued, critical attitudes t­ oward weight and exercise have supplanted sexual freedom as “the” quasi-­religious, quasi-­social, quasi-­scientific moral cause célèbre across Western secular/Judeo-­Christian socie­ties.3 Similarly, Sander Gilman and Kathleen LeBesco have both identified the obesity epidemic as a “moral panic” that has been ­imagined as a sign of the declining national body.4 In ­these frameworks, fat is even envisaged as the “doom of Western civilization,” or, as Surgeon General Richard Carmona put it in 2006, “Obesity is the terror within,” a “dilemma that w ­ ill soon dwarf 9–11 or any other terrorist attempt. . . . ​Where w ­ ill our soldiers and sailors and airmen come from . . . ​ if the youngsters t­ oday are on a trajectory that says they w ­ ill be obese, laden with cardiovascular disease, increased cancers and a host of other diseases when they reach adulthood?”5 In 2007 USA ­Today reported similarly that obesity should be understood as a “much greater threat to our national security” than “terrorism.”6 During the week of Thanksgiving in 2014, multiple international news sources, including cbs, The Guardian, and the bbc, all reported that “obesity costs more than military spending worldwide,” a toll “greater than war, vio­lence, and terrorism” combined.7 Each report focused on the “loss of productive days” in a workforce occupied by obese persons; it is estimated that obesity costs the global economy approximately 1.93 trillion dollars per year. According to the National Institutes of Health, “overweight and obesity” cause an annual productivity loss of 3.9 billion dollars through “workdays lost,” “physician office visits,” “restricted-­activity days,” and “bed-­days.”8 Importantly, obesity is now understood to affect “­people of all incomes,” even those across the developing world, where l­abor is presumed to be ready and waiting.9 164  Chapter 6

And yet the obese body is a peculiar threat. It is not the traditional terrorist body, irreparably othered and inevitably bound for incarceration or elimination. (One could even say that the popularly conceived terrorist body is “good” for the economy, in the sense that it rationalizes huge military expenditures, creating a state of emergency in the climate of American spending even in times of deep austerity.) Rather, the obese body is perceived to be “fixable” and has become the object of intense public arbitration. The issue of economic burden—­augmented by the financial depression of the early twenty-­first c­entury—­has created a public discourse that often supports mechanisms of social control, including differential costs for health insurance recipients in “risky” categories and taxes on “unhealthy” foods. Economic rhe­toric surrounding obesity mirrors critiques of welfare use/abuse, suggesting that the financial costs associated with obesity are spread among anyone paying for health insurance out of pocket.10 “Personal responsibility” dogmas can be seen throughout government initiatives designed to penalize the obese. Since 2006, for instance, Arkansas and Missouri have offered state employees monthly discounts on health insurance premiums for t­hose willing to submit themselves to “health risk assessments and participate in wellness programs to reduce obesity, stress, and other prob­lems.” In 2008 Alabama, the state with the second highest prevalence of obesity in the nation, passed a resolution that charges state employees with an obese body mass index (bmi) twenty-­five dollars per month for insurance that was previously included in their compensation.11 Grade schools across the country have also begun including students’ bmi inside report cards, suggesting that c­ hildren are being graded on their physiques rather than simply their participation in physical education.12 Like academic achievement, bodily size is now understood as a predictor in the calculus of life success. According to psychologist Michael I. Loewy, ­children understand this fact from an early age: “By elementary school, ­children describe fat ­children as lazy, sloppy, dirty, stupid, and ugly. . . . ​When shown silhouettes of fat and thin males and females, nine-­year-­old ­children rated the fat figures as having significantly fewer friends, being less liked by their parents, ­doing less well at school, being less content with their appearance, and wanting to be thinner.”13 The studies described take historical root in the Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll experiments conducted during the 1940s, in which c­ hildren w ­ ere presented with white and black dolls, and w ­ ere shown to consistently attribute positive characteristics to the white doll and negative characteristics Every­thing except the Squeal  165

to the black doll. Sadly, the Clarks found no difference between white and black ­children’s response to the study. The Clark experiment results w ­ ere understood to be a frightening indicator of racial prejudice even among the very young and w ­ ere used in the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Conversely, the results of studies that indicate negative perceptions about weight are used to bolster, rather than deconstruct, the charge to eliminate fat persons. As one admissions officer at an Ivy League institution confessed, part of the rationale ­behind the trend in requiring photo­graphs as part of college application materials is that schools desire students with “fit minds and fit bodies.”14 Certainly, the connection between the health of the mind and the health of the body has a long history within Western medical and philosophical traditions. The concept of Cartesian dualism, in which the mind and body are understood to be separate yet interacting substances, has been maintained as a critical idiom in the construction of modern subjectivities. Consequently, the improper collapse of psyche into soma and vice versa forms the basis of our understanding of many pathologies, particularly ­mental illness, as well as the justification for forms of state regulation and institutionalization. The ability to control one’s body, to behave in a socially appropriate manner, and to participate in a communal sense of biosociality are all prerequisites to the terms of demo­cratic citizenship. As discussed in chapter 5, the notion of “modified isolation” raised in the early years of the aids crisis, for instance, suggests the ways in which the failure to comply to standards of “reasonable” personal comportment creates a state of exception within the constitutional rights of the individual. In the case of obesity, the state of exception often operates outside the direct scope of the law. It is not an infectious disease, per se, though it is often portrayed as such and is attached to the word epidemic, which directly translates as a condition of widespread infection. (Interestingly, recent research on the ge­ne­tics of obesity has led to the identification of “sick fat” cells that appear to damagingly “cross talk” with other cells in the body, a condition known as “adiposopathy.”15 ­Here, a symbolic language of contagion—or cross-­communication—is invoked to explain the biological basis of obesity.) The rhe­toric of epidemic is typically employed for the purpose of galvanizing public support for repressive public health mea­sures. Although obesity cannot technically be considered contagious, public health discourse and media portrayals of the disease have called for increasing governmental intervention in weight-­related health issues. As a disease that increases in numbers, its “spread” must be understood in ways that make use of the 166  Chapter 6

ideology of contagion, while acknowledging its individualized emergence.16 This anxiety was at the heart of a story reported by newspapers across in the country in 2005, about a medical clinic in California that was offering ­free vasectomies to obese men.17 Although the entire story turned out to be a hoax, it managed to gain attention precisely ­because it was so believable—­ fitting within popu­lar conceptions of obesity as a biological and cultural ill. The desire to “breed out” the fat is further bolstered by scientific claims that the ge­ne­tic propensity for obesity may be a sign of stilted evolution. While scientists have speculated about par­tic­u­lar ge­ne­tic proclivities for sedentariness, overeating, and poor regulation of self-­control, the primary ge­ne­tic logic associated with obesity is known as the “thrifty genotype hypothesis,” which posits a “mismatch between t­oday’s environment and ‘energy-­thrifty genes’ that multiplied in the past u ­ nder dif­fer­ent environmental conditions when food sources w ­ ere rather unpredictable. . . . ​The same genes that helped our ancestors survive occasional famines are now being challenged by environments in which food is plentiful year round.”18 The remnants of an earlier time, of a less evolved morphology, the thrifty genotype is outdated, outmoded, and undesirable. ­These beliefs appear to play out in the life experiences of ­people considered obese. Statistically, obese ­people are more likely to live in poverty and unemployment, identify as racial minorities, experience prejudice in the job market and healthcare system, face educational barriers, and fi­nally, have ­children who are more likely to reproduce ­these experiences. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20.7 ­percent of Caucasian persons are considered to be obese, while the figure rises to 39.9  ­percent for African Americans and 34.4 ­percent for “Hispanic or Latino” persons.19 ­Table 6.1 compiles percentiles and state rankings of obesity levels, per capita income, numbers of persons living below the poverty line, and numbers of African American and “Hispanic or Latino” persons in the states with the top ten obesity values, evidencing an overwhelming correlation between categories of weight, economics, and race. Rather than considering the direct percentages of African Americans, Hispanics, and Latina/os who would count as clinically obese in each of ­these states, this chart seeks to illustrate overlapping circles of oppression. Areas of the country targeted in the fight against the obesity epidemic are thus also haunted by histories of economic and racial disparity. As obesity rates climb in tandem with social prejudice, we have begun to see the rise of a new, medicalized underclass. ­These attitudes permeate culture on the deepest levels. Margaret K. Bass, an African American academic Every­thing except the Squeal  167

­TA BL E   6 . 1 .  ​Statistics for U.S. states with top obesity values, 2013–2015

State National values Mississippi Alabama Tennessee Louisiana W. V ­ irginia Arkansas S. Carolina Georgia Oklahoma Texas

Percentage of population that is African American

Percentage of population that is “Hispanic” or “Latina/o”

Rate of obesity

Per capita income

Rate of persons below poverty line

—­/ 26%

—­/ $36,276

—­/ 13.3%

—­/ 12.8%

—­/ 14.8%

1 / 32% 2 / 30.3% 3 / 30.1% 4 / 29.8% 5 / 29.5% 6 / 28.7% 7 / 28.4% 8 / 28.2% 9 / 28.1% 10 / 28%

50 / $28,845 42 / $32,404 35 / $32,304 41/ $30,952 49 / $27,897 48 / $27,935 47 / $31,013 38 / $31,891 37 / $32,210 25 / $34,257

1 / 21.3% 7 / 17.0% 11 / 15.5% 2 / 19.8% 4 / 18% 6 / 17.2% 10 / 15.6% 13 / 14.4% 9 / 16.5% 5 / 17.6%

1 / 36.9% 6 / 26.4% 11 / 16. 8% 2 / 33.1% 37 / 3.2% 13 / 15.7% 5 / 29.2% 3 / 29.8% 23 / 7.7% 18 / 11.7%

46 / 1.7% 41 / 2.3% 37 / 3% 38 / 2.8% 50 / .8% 29 / 4.7% 36 / 3.3% 20 / 7.1% 23 / 6.6% 3 / 35.1%

Figures are provided in the following format: national ranking / local percentage or value.

who identifies as “fat,” writes on existing parallels between the difficult economies of race-­and weight-­based prejudice. Quoting Susan Bordo, she notes: “The obese embody re­sis­tance to cultural norms. . . . ​We cannot allow them to get away with it; they must be put in their place, be humiliated and defeated.” I am defeated. I am humiliated and put in my place, and as I write I marvel at how closely related this language is to the language of racism. My racial self would never allow this, but my fat self concedes, gives up. . . . ​If I hated my racial self, I would be the subject of all kinds of studies—­pitied by blacks and whites alike. But this is dif­f er­ent; I should hate my fat.20 Beyond the literal connections between weight and other conditions of alterity, Bass points out that weight-­based discrimination both mirrors and diverges from other forms of discrimination. While multiculturalism has taught us that we cannot properly “hate” ourselves or o ­ thers for our racial or cultural differences, con­temporary biopolitics has taught us that we “should” hate nonnormative bodies. And yet ­because of the traffic between categories of weight, class, gender, and race, the culpability of the fat body cannot be 168  Chapter 6

understood in isolation. Addressing the quotidian nature of fat prejudice, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon write that the relationship between capital, race, and gender produces a unique nexus of alterity. The materialization of a fat w ­ oman in a clothing store—­lights up a pinball machine of economic, gender, and racial meanings. . . . ​To that ­woman the air of the shadow-­box theater of commerce thickens continually with a mostly unspoken sentence, with what becomes, ­under capitalism, the primal denial to anyone of a stake in the symbolic order: “­There’s nothing ­here for you to spend your money on.” Like the black ­family looking to buy a ­house in the suburbs, the gay ­couple looking to rent an apartment, the handicapped high school kid visiting a barrier-­ridden college in the Ivy League: Who and what you are means that ­there’s nothing ­here for you; your money is not negotiable in this place. . . . ​This is . . . ​the precipitation of one’s very body as a kind of cul-­de-­sac blockage or clot in the circulation of economic value.21 As Sedgwick and Moon argue, in a society based on cap­i­tal­ist exchange, the possession of nonnegotiable funds is more than a prob­lem of economic survival. Rather, it suggests a profound state of otherness in which one’s inclusion within the social body becomes impossible. This framework of economic trade as a form of disempowerment and invisibilization is impor­tant for considering the ways in which the obese body is excludable from other forms of exchange. Refusing to stay within the bounds of a standardized body size, the obese body is barred from participation in corporeal exchanges that are becoming normatively required in an age where increasing faith is placed on the means of prosthetic and organic organ replication as an antidote to vari­ous health prob­lems (an issue discussed at length l­ater in the chapter). In the evolutionary schemas offered at the beginning of the chapter, the perverse temporality of obesity provides yet another framework for understanding the obese body as disenfranchised. Occupying a dif­fer­ent time and place, ­either before or ­after mankind, the obese body in ­these images does not track as an available subject position to ­those existing in the current moment. Both fatness and pigness thus become the results of another worldly existence, set apart in time and space, ­future visions of a species undone.

Every­thing except the Squeal  169

The Sign of the Pig

In order to understand the connection between the question of obesity and the question of xenotransplantation, we must begin with the concept of the “spare part” body, or the body useable for donation and transplantation by way of physical fitness and normative biometrics. Recent medical lit­er­a­ture that addresses worldwide organ shortages speaks to a growing desire for a uniform and interchangeable h ­ uman body. The donatable and transplantable body is one whose parts are universally compatible in size, quality, and function. Imagining the body as a reservoir of spare parts provides a corollary to Sedgwick and Moon’s economic assessment of weight and currency, in which par­tic­u­lar bodies are written out of pro­cesses of monetary exchange. To be sure, the commodification of the body, as well as the unequal assignment of value to par­tic­u­lar bodies, is not a new phenomenon. What is new, however, is biomedicine’s increasing capacity to concretize corporeal value by itemizing and hierarchizing the worth of individual parts. In the case of organ donation and transplantation, the fracturing of the body does not suggest that individual pieces can be i­magined as completely isolatable. Instead, more often than not, the value of donatable organs is precisely tied to the overall health of the donor, who is ideally young, healthy, and able-­bodied. Much like the hierarchized images of skulls and bodies offered by craniometry and anthropometry in the early part of the twentieth ­century, new comparative portraits of “obese” versus “nonobese” organs have begun to circulate as repre­sen­ta­tions of corporeal difference. Cleanly excised from the body, ­these organs appear as butchered cuts of meat, imaginatively distanced from their original sources and neatly lined up to demonstrate their differences. What is particularly striking about ­these repre­sen­ta­tions is how dif­fer­ent they all are—­although each claims to be a photo­graph of a ­human liver. None of the colors, textures, or shapes appear to match. This curious lack of consistency—­vis­i­ble ad nauseam from a quick Internet search—­diverges from scientific fidelity to empirical uniformity and accuracy while nonetheless claiming both. It is a paradox that recalls Stephen J. Gould’s well-­known argument about nineteenth-­century physiologist Samuel  J. Morton’s cranial mea­sure­ments of “racial types,” in which Morton (deliberately? undeliberately?) fixed the results of his study through means of scale and accounting.22 One diagram that is frequently used on medical websites represents the transformation from healthy liver to sick liver, where the organ appears to literally jump outside the h ­ uman body, taking on a life of its own (figure 6.5). In this schematic, we are presented with a universal ­human form portrayed in a blue outline; it is an “any 170  Chapter 6

F I G U R E  6 .5 .

Mayo Clinic, stages of liver damage (c. 2010s).

body”—­and so, in a sense, are its organs. The notion that we all start out with equal health prospects (a healthy body with healthy parts, ours to lose) speaks to the silencing of health inequalities, while also training the viewers’ eyes to imagine the h ­ uman body as a s­imple and interchangeable puzzle, where proper pieces “fit” and ­others ruin bodily form. As social and medical practices, organ donation and transplantation are fairly recent in their evolution, becoming feasible and popu­lar within the last thirty years. In many cases, organ transplantation is ­either a best or last resort for patients who have tried other options, and yet realistically, most of ­these patients ­will die on waiting lists. Public health campaigns aimed at encouraging organ donation have done ­little to stop the gap between available organs and needy patients. While organ donation is always ­imagined within a rhe­toric of “shortage,” it is of course a prob­lem of its own making; prior to the capability to use organs outside their native body, they would have simply been excess, unusable parts. Beginning in the late twentieth ­century, three diverse strategies have emerged as pos­si­ble solutions to this “shortage,” including black market organ sales, the development of mechanical/robotic organs, and xenotransplantation, or the use of animal parts in ­human bodies. In this section, I briefly outline relevant issues in the first two cases but focus largely on the third, as an instantiation of infrahuman hybridity. As scholars such as Lawrence Cohen, Nancy Scheper-­Hughes, Melinda Cooper, and Catherine Waldby have noted, the recent emergence of quasi-­legal and illegal organ markets speaks to significant public interest in the procurement of h ­ uman organs to extend life by any means necessary.23 Cooper and Waldby raise Every­thing except the Squeal  171

the in­ter­est­ing point that ­because organ exchange has always been ­imagined and executed ­under the aegis of bioethics (i.e., ­human organs should be beyond the purview of sale, the ­human body is sacred, it would be unethical to ask someone to sell themselves or to purchase another’s body, and so on), its proper place within ­labor markets and economic cir­cuits has yet to be recognized. Cooper and Waldby call organ donation a form of “work” and production, a “clinical ­labor,” and they group it together with other self-­sacrificing medicalized practices that are generally ­imagined as acts of voluntary “goodwill,” while nonetheless emerging out of states of desperation and economic in­equality, including surrogacy and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal trial participation. For Cooper and Waldby, the recognition that such forms of exchange result in high profits for brokers and corporations suggests that the possibility of exploitation may be ameliorated by regulating the sale and transfer of body parts. Like other high-­risk black markets, including drugs and prostitution, many of the dangers associated with organ vending would likely be quelled by some form of official regulation. In par­tic­u­lar, the un­ regu­la­ted nature of organ sales contributes to a deepening chasm between the Global North and the Global South, where the former is positioned as purchasers and the latter as purveyors—an outsourcing of biological m ­ atter.24 Due to the difficulty and unseemliness of t­ hese transactions, many scientists have advocated for solutions that would not include the use of ­human organs. Beginning at midcentury, engineers have worked alongside biologists to create mechanical organs and organ parts. Th ­ ese ventures have been successful in some cases (e.g., the implantable artificial cardiac pacemaker, which achieved widespread success by the 1970s), but in most cases have remained in the (animal) research phase. In theory, the idea of a mechanical organ is appealing, in large part ­because of the opportunity to avoid the common ethical, psychological, and even physical issues presented by using living tissue transplants.25 Last but not least, and touted as a pos­si­ble solution to the global organ shortage, xenotransplantation is a new and highly experimental field of biomedical research.26 As Lesley A. Sharp argues in her recent assessment of the industry, xenotransplantation is controversial precisely ­because of the vari­ous moral and cultural taboos it violates. From the sanctity of the ­human body, to the bound­aries between ­human and nonhuman realms, to the hierarchy of life, the very idea of cross-­species transplantation balks at widely held Western truths about the constitution of h ­ uman subjectivity. Moreover, although it has become the front-­runner in studies comparing 172  Chapter 6

the use of mechanical versus animal organs, xenotransplantation remains highly controversial among physicians, and is often distasteful to patients. Researchers have been surprised by ­these rejections, assuming that ­people in desperate situations (and their physicians) would always resort to desperate mea­sures.27 For many ethicists, it is precisely the question of desperation that raises the morality of xenotransplantation; that is, patients may agree to undergo the procedure without fully acknowledging the risks. Problematic issues surrounding the practice of xenotransplantation include informed consent (­whether consent can ever be truly “informed” in the case of new medical procedures, and ­whether “consent” itself can ever be granted by patients in dire situations); the possibilities of unforeseen zoonotic infection, with par­tic­u­lar concern over porcine endogenous retrovirus (perv, an immunosuppressant virus with effects similar to hiv); and the unpredictable, transformative effects on both the ­human and porcine genomes (due to the necessary creation of human-­porcine chimeras that would produce compatible organs).28 How can we understand the justification for the use of a procedure with so many hazards? The first ­thing that must be understood about xeno research is that it takes for granted the utilization of nonhuman animal bodies, as both experimental models and as a compilation of surrogate parts for ­human bodies. At first glance, this does not appear unusual; ­after all, the biomedical sciences have always relied on nonhuman animals. In xeno research, nonhuman primates typically become the model recipients of cross-­ species implantation, standing in for the ­human subject. (Their proximity to the ­human genome now rules them out as potential donors, due to the ease with which infectious diseases can jump the species barrier.) Yet what distinguishes the case of xeno research from previous utilizations of animals as test subjects is that it has begun to ascend in a period marked by increasing public and professional scrutiny of the use of animals, particularly higher order primates, as test subjects. For instance, in the last de­cade, we have witnessed the rise of the Nonhuman Rights Proj­ect (2007–­pres­ent) and the Nonhuman Personhood Proj­ect (2000–­pres­ent), each of which seeks l­egal protections and rights for species of high intelligence and emotional capacity, namely, the ­great apes, Asian elephants, and cetaceans. In xeno research, nonhuman primates are s­ ilent participants, b ­ ecause the use of their organs is not in question. Perhaps for this reason, if not also for novelty, popu­lar reporting on xenotransplantation has focused on the proposed donor species—­the pig—in Every­thing except the Squeal  173

coverage dealing with recent developments and controversies in the field of xenoresearch. What would it mean to hybridize h ­ uman and porcine bodies? And what would this mean for other forms of human-­porcine corporeal amalgamation, namely, the American dietary passion for pork? In March 2014 Modern Farmer, a newly minted periodical that has taken up the ­causes of “mindful” and “sustainable” food (e.g., Michael Pollan et al.), noted that “in order to harvest h ­ uman organs from pigs, society would have to accept an image that many find unsettling: farms full of pigs that, at a cellular level, are part ­human. Many bioethicists rank their [own and the public’s potential] queasiness in direct proportion to the humanity of t­ hose pigs.”29 Christopher Thomas Scott, director of the Stanford University Program on Stem Cells in Society, has suggested that it is precisely the superficial absence of humanness from the porcine body (­whether chimeric or not) that could enable its ac­cep­tance: “They [chimeric pigs] are ­going to act like pigs, they are ­going to feel like pigs, what­ever ‘pig-­ness’ is. . . . ​We d ­ on’t know. We are 30 not pigs.” Scott’s statement begs a number of in­ter­est­ing questions. Is he, for instance, leaving open the possibility that one day we might know what “pig-­ness” is, b ­ ecause we might come to partially inhabit a porcine genomic code? Further, if “acting” and “feeling” like a pig are pos­si­ble barometers for establishing species difference (particularly for t­ hose of us without technical training in this area), why leave out the most obvious differential—­namely, “looking” like a pig? Unlike higher order primates, whose physical appearance and capacity for anthropomorphic gesture produces discomfort among t­hose who hold the terms of humanity in high esteem, pigs seem to remain at a clearer evolutionary distance from humanity. Indeed, ­there is no ambivalence in cultural portrayals of the pig—in spite of the fact that scientists have identified a certain capacity for intelligent thought (pigs are often equated to three-­ year-­old ­children in terms of their intellect), sociality, and both physical and psychological suffering. If nonhuman primates are the eerie doppelganger of humanity—or, quite literally the evolutionary path not taken—­pigs seem to represent one of the farther sides of species difference. Linguistically, the pig has long existed as the stand-in for vari­ous negative attributes, including dirtiness, slovenliness, laziness, excessive eating, and corpulence. Pigs are somehow roped into the discourses of misogyny (“male chauvinist pig”), debauchery (“swine”), physical ineptitude (“ham-­ fisted,” “ham-­handed,” “ham-­footed”), biological essentialism (“when pigs fly”), de­cadence (“porker”), and base humor (“a ham”). In the last case, it 174  Chapter 6

is relevant to note that the idea of the lowbrow comedian as “ham” originates in nineteenth-­century blackface minstrel per­for­mance culture, in the undated song “The Hamfatter.” In a New York Times article from 1883, the term hamfatter was noted as having “been in use among American actors for nearly twenty years as an expression of contempt for other actors whom they may happen to regard as possessing no good professional qualities, and who o ­ ught therefore to be relegated from the dramatic stage to the domain of negro [sic] minstrelsy. The word is undoubtedly derived from the old style negro song and dance, ‘The Ham-­fat Man.’ ”31 Originally composed by J. K. Campbell of the Frank Rivers’ Melodeon Com­pany, circa 1861–65, “Ham Fat” was a popu­lar song that reached audiences beyond the purview of minstrel shows.32 Its peculiar lyr­ics exalt “ham fat” as a food substance, a meta­phor for vio­lence, and an impor­tant component of the narrator’s sense of self. I. “White folks I’ve come to sing, And to try to please you all; I’m right from old ­Virginia, All sassey, fat and tall, You may talk about your comfort, But Massa is the man That give the Niggers Ham Fat A smoking in the pan. chorus. Ham Fat, Ham Fat, zig or zor zan, Ham Fat, Ham Fat, tickle and tan, Oh! Get into the Kitchen as quick as you can, And huche, cuche, cuche in the Ham fat pan. II. Whiskey it am plenty, And I’ve always got my fill, I’ve got a ­little collur’d gal, And I love her to kill; And if any darkey fools with her, I’ll tan him if I can, For the gravey’s mighty hot In the Ham fat pan. Every­thing except the Squeal  175

chorus. Ham Fat, Ham Fat, zig or zor zan, &c. III. Now farewell folks, I’m ­going far away, I’ll lay back, I’ll stay back in clover all the day, I tell you what it is folks, as long as I can stand, I’m ­going to stick to Union and the Ham fat pan. chorus. Ham Fat, Ham Fat, zig or zor zan, &c.33 Other con­temporary sources have noted the potential literal meaning of the Ham-­Fat Man: the use of lard by blackface performers to remove burnt cork “blackening” makeup. In this case, one might imagine the use of ham fat as a po­liti­cally complicated pro­cess of racial transformation, of blackening oneself first and claiming whiteness second. Scholars working on the history of blackface minstrelsy have demonstrated how donning blackface makeup operated to establish the whiteness of performers, whose own racial identities ­were uncertain in the complex hierarchy of Eu­ro­pean bloodlines established by modern evolutionary scientists.34 Yet in the case of the Ham-­Fat Man, we see not only the possibility of racial transgression but also the possibility of species transgression. What does it mean that in order to reveal one’s “white” face, a new mask was created, this one from pork fat? In drawing this connection, I am not interested in identifying the Ham-­Fat Man as a point of species crossover or per­for­mance. Rather, I am interested in the vexed relationship between whiteness, blackness, and “hamness”—­which might be alternately understood as a condition of animal edibility / edible animality. Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s recent work has called critical attention to the deep interstitiality between the politics of race and alimentary consumption. Tompkins demonstrates how discourses of cooking and eating often speak in code about ­matters of racial bodily in/ corporation. She elaborates on bell hooks’s notion of “ ‘eating the other,’ that is, the constitution of whiteness through the internalization of racial difference.”35 She imagines the “black body as food”—­food that is frequently indigestible, often “chok[ing]” its consumer, refusing total incorporation.36 For Tompkins, the symbolic “ingestion and figuration of blackness” are critically linked. Applying this to the narrative of the Ham-­Fat Man, another textual reading begins to emerge, in which the “man” himself is the “ham fat,” a shape-­shifting, edible substance. Historically, pork fat was indeed associated 176  Chapter 6

with the diet of American slaves, who sal­vaged unused scraps from their masters’ pantries to feed their families, and to impart flavor to spoiled grains and overripe produce.37 Since being brought over to the Amer­ic­ as from Spain by Hernando de Soto during the early seventeenth ­century, pigs became a popu­lar source of meat due to their flexible, omnivorous dietary requirements and hearty constitution. The po­liti­cal term pork barreling speaks to the ubiquity of pork in the early American diet, originating from the understanding that a f­ amily’s financial holdings w ­ ere likely evident in the girth of their salt pork barrels. As with all forms of butchery, certain parts of the pig ­were prized as yielding superior meat, while times of privation led to a more expansive notion of the edible porcine body. Although to this day, pigs remain the most consumed form of animal meat in the con­temporary world, they are nonetheless a fraught species. Pork is banned by multiple religious groups as “unclean,” including Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, and certain Christian sects.38 During the first half of the twentieth ­century, the rise of Islamic faith among African Americans in the United States transformed earlier understandings of pork as an essential component of blacks’ postslavery diet. In his 1967 culinary guide, How to Eat to Live, Nation of Islam prophet and leader Elijah Muhammad explained that both the Bible and the Qur’an prohibited the ingestion of pork, stating that the pig was a foul, diseased animal, pushed by the “white man’s government,” yet never meant for ­human consumption. Allah taught me that . . . ​the Arabic meaning of hog, or swine . . . ​is “I see the animal foul.” And very foul is the best explanation that I have heard to cover the very nature and characteristics of this animal. He is the foulest animal. He lives off nothing but filth. . . . ​He is so poisonous (99.9 per cent) that you can hardly poison him with other poison. You can even give him lye. Something you’d think would cut up the intestines when eaten. . . . ​His poison is that of a live nature, in the form of a parasitic worm that is called trichina (commonly known as pork worm), which is found in the stomach and intestinal walls—­until it fi­nally breeds and works itself into the muscles of the body of the eater. From t­ here, the trichinae work themselves into the spinal cord and travel the spinal cord ­toward the brain, at which time ­there is no pos­si­ble cure.39 For Elijah Muhammad, pork was a covert derivative of the slave mentality, a meat that both harkened back to dietary practices u ­ nder bondage and also demonstrated certain modern blacks’ ongoing fidelity to normative (white) Every­thing except the Squeal  177

American alimentary customs. In Muhammad’s paranoid/eerily prescient anxiety about diseased meat, he imagines the trichinae worms as white supremacist ciphers, tiny drones consuming the black body through cycles of reproduction and depletion. This is the context in which we must understand the repopularization of the term pig as a derogation of police during the Black Power movement and ­later, as seen in the lexicon of rap ­music during the 1980s to the pres­ent. In fact, one of the earliest appropriations of rap by a white musical group, “Jump Around” by House of Pain (1992), attempted to claim generic authenticity in the verse “I’d never eat a pig cuz a pig is a cop.”40 Yet unlike other species that have made their way into mainstream Western diets, as well as ­those that have been maligned by religious traditions, the pig occupies a peculiar popu­lar cultural position as a “cute” and even lovable figure. Pigs are scattered throughout Western cultural references, including centuries-­old folklore (The Three L ­ ittle Pigs, c. 1840), cartoon animation (Porky Pig, 1935) and ­children’s tele­vi­sion programming (Miss Piggy’s character on Sesame Street, 1974–­pres­ent; and Babe, 1998). Currently, two of the highest grossing ­children’s tele­vi­sion/book/toy franchises feature pig protagonists, Olivia (2000–­pres­ent) and Peppa Pig (2004–­pres­ent). In Olivia, all “­people” are pigs, while other species maintain their normal place on the food chain. In Peppa Pig, species functions as racial and ethnic difference, where the community is composed of families of dogs, sheep, cats, cows, foxes, rabbits, and so on, each with a species-­specific surname (hence, “Peppa Pig,” which is the protagonist’s full name).41 Even ­these seemingly benign repre­sen­ta­tions, however, have attracted their own controversies. In 2014 a young c­ ouple in South Yorkshire, E ­ ngland, was asked to leave a public bus a­ fter singing the Peppa theme song to their ­daughter, and was accused of anti-­Muslim racism by other passengers who found their guttural snorts (“oink oink”) to be threatening and insulting. The incident was widely reported by the British press, which pictured the ­couple holding their d ­ aughter and explaining their humiliation and bewilderment. Media coverage of the event focused around the fact that the child in question was autistic, and was often calmed by hearing familiar songs.42 What remained unresolved, however, was the very crux of the ­matter itself: ­whether the production of par­tic­u­lar animal noises could indeed be an act of racial aggression. (In an odd twist, as of January 2015, Oxford University Press has cautioned their c­ hildren’s book authors to avoid mentions of pigs and pig-­related products so as to dodge potential offense.)43 In May 2014 Spain made international news over a similar issue, when soccer fans threw bananas and made monkey noises at black players. ­After 178  Chapter 6

the home team was fined by the Spanish soccer federation, many questioned ­whether the punishment was significant enough, given the long legacy of antiblack racism in Spain, and within Spanish soccer culture.44 Dani Alves, a Brazilian player pummeled with bananas, responded by eating one in the ­middle of a game. Subsequently, the social media campaign “We Are All Monkeys” (riffing on the 2012 “We Are All Trayvon” campaign) went viral, featuring pictures of soccer players and other public personalities eating bananas.45 Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga and Hugh Raffles have both considered the politics of animal name-­calling and its relationality to group-­ specific vio­lence, largely as it pertains to the utilization of parasitic species to justify the genocide of minority populations. Mavhunga identifies the Rwandan Hutus’ application of the term cockroaches to the Tutsi population as an example of how groups of “vermin beings”—­“a pestiferous being in need of elimination”—­are constructed.46 ­These “pestiferous” incarnations of the h ­ uman self are bound rhetorically to tropes of destruction and removal. Similarly, Raffles demonstrates how the Nazi discourse surrounding delousing policies produced Jewish subjects both as lice-­ridden and as lice themselves.47 In both Mavhunga’s and Raffles’s arguments, the literal and symbolic subject position of t­hese species as pests provides a win­dow into the workings of dehumanization. Yet what might be said of the interaction between practices of racism and the discourses surrounding less clearly maligned species? In the case of Spain’s “monkey” incident—­and, for that ­matter, con­temporary U.S. utilizations of nonhuman primates as derogatory stand-­ins for African Americans (in par­tic­u­lar, the use of monkey imagery and figurines by the Right during critiques of Obama’s presidency)—­ evolutionary frameworks are used to imagine a biologically and culturally inferior, not-­quite-­human subject. (The nuances of race and primate speciation are discussed in chapter 2.) Yet, in the case of the Peppa Pig bus incident, the use of the pig is less transparent. The symbolic resonance of the pig is peculiarly multiple, complicated largely by the pig’s status as both a pos­si­ble edible object and an anthropomorphized familial subject. As demonstrated in chapter 5, it was precisely the “foreign” and “unnatural” practice of consuming primate flesh—­the body of an anthropoid—­that caused Western media and medical authorities to recoil with horror, and to create a racialized narrative of blame and justification for the ravages of hiv/aids. Yet, oddly, pigs continue to be consumed at a fairly constant rate (compared with rates of beef consumption, which have slowly declined since the 1990s, and rates of chicken consumption, Every­thing except the Squeal  179

which have skyrocketed during that same time period), even as their popularity has grown as a new breed of ­house­hold pets.48 Beginning in the early 1980s, during the rise of the “exotic” pet trade, Viet­nam­ese potbellied pigs imported from Canada became a trendy choice for well-­to-do pet o ­ wners, due to their intelligence, cleanliness, affectionate nature, litter box trainability, and purported adorableness.49 During the early twenty-­first c­ entury, the adoption of “micro mini” pigs by several high-­profile celebrities, including Miley Cyrus, Victoria and David Beckham, and Paris Hilton, boosted sales.50 Micro mini pigs, sometimes called “teacup” pigs (­after smaller dog breeds by the same name, e.g., “teacup Yorkshire terrier”), are defined as growing no larger than sixty pounds.51 Yet, as in the case of their canine counter­parts, t­ hese diminutive pigs are not ­really a separate breed. Rather, extreme miniaturization of both pigs and dogs is caused by unethical breeding practices, including deep inbreeding (leading to severe congenital health prob­lems), as well as the dishonest marketing of younger animals as older, or starving the animals prior to sale to superficially stunt their growth. In the case of dogs, false advertising might mean the difference between an expected five-­pound full-­grown dog and an ­actual twelve-­pound full-­grown dog. In the case of pigs, however, the difference is exponentially greater; micro mini pigs are typically listed as forty-­five to sixty pounds at adulthood, while in real­ity, many pigs sold ­under this label grow up to be three-­to five-­hundred-­pound animals. Most pig pet purchasers are not prepared to live with such large animals, resulting in the abandonment of large numbers of pet pigs in open fields, and startlingly, attempts to sell or donate them to slaughter­houses.52 While it seems a peculiar gesture to attempt to pawn one’s ­family member off on a butcher’s ­table, the plight of the mini pig illustrates the pig’s fraught cultural location, existing at the nexus of domestic affection and alimentary ingestion. (The 2014 YouTube sensation “Chris P. Bacon”—­pronounced “Crispy Bacon”—­the beloved wheelchair-­using pig, suggests a similar contradiction.)53 In his classic study on American pet-­keeping practices, Yi-­Fu Tuan suggests that the very idea of “owning” an animal for domestic companionship requires attendant feelings of dominance and affection, much like ­those felt ­toward ­children.54 The infrahuman animal/child subject, addressed in the first chapter of this book, can be the object of both tenderness and vio­lence without reprobation. This composite subject can be used to help unpack how, and in what ways, we treat par­tic­u­lar animals as lovable f­ amily members and as edible game. We might, following Mavhunga’s argumentation, imagine the production of a “domesticate being”—­one that offers an even darker vision of animal-­human relations, and animal-­human symbolisms. 180  Chapter 6

This vision is, however, no less connected to discourses of raciality, colonialism, and bodily domination than that proposed by Mavhunga. But instead of being the bold face of colonial vio­lence, the domesticate being can be linked to proj­ects of “cruel optimism,” as Lauren Berlant has conceived of them (i.e., a fantastic notion of care and inclusion), and what other scholars have begun to call the “cute” imaginary.55 Sianne Ngai has argued that “cuteness” is a deceptively ambiguous aesthetic category, one that is “or­ga­nized around a small, helpless . . . ​object that foregrounds . . . ​vio­lence in its production.”56 Through its very touchability, docility, powerlessness, and even potential deformity (vis-­à-­vis the distortions it invites through touch, manipulation, and dominance), the cute object elicits and produces a “fantasy of mastery,” a “vio­lence of domestication or ‘tenderization.’ ”57 To illustrate this dynamic, Ngai uses the example of a small frog-­shaped sponge designed for c­ hildren’s baths as an object of iconic cuteness: it both solicits touch and distortion while being unable to reciprocate (i.e., we desire to squeeze the sponge and see what becomes of the frog’s face ­after its compression, but the sponge cannot squeeze us back). For ­these reasons, Ngai notes that the “aesthetic of cuteness teaches us that powerlessness at its extreme is often figured as mouthlessness or deformity.” Ngai connects cuteness to the realm of the alimentary through the “pleasures of consumption,” using the turn of phrase “you are so cute I could just eat you up!” to illustrate the easy slippage between the cute aesthetic and the symbolic meanings of edibility.58 If taken literally, much like Chris P. Bacon’s name, this idiom might inspire fear, suggesting vio­lence, mutilation, and ultimately death. Yet symbolically, the concepts of cuteness, petness, and corporeal objectification/­ dismemberment/consumption are not at odds with one another, and must be understood as mutually constitutive. Th ­ ese peculiarities, when i­ magined specifically in relation to the symbolism surrounding the pig, accrue new meaning in an age of pos­si­ble porcine-­human hybridity. In the next section, I consider how and in what ways the consumption of the “other”—­when presented as a transplantable rather than edible part—­has come to shape debates around the prob­lems of xenotransplantation and obesity.

Spare Parts

In order to produce organs compatible with transplant recipients, xeno researchers splice genes across the species barrier to trick the body into recognizing “foreign” tissue as “native” tissue. Through this transformation, Every­thing except the Squeal  181

both donor and recipient become chimeric: the pig, by way of genet­ically engineered breeding; the ­human, by way of organ incorporation. Although proponents of xeno research typically assume ge­ne­tic modification to be a necessary inevitability, gene splicing remains an incredibly fraught practice in the early twenty-­first ­century. Neither the scientific community nor the lay public appear completely comfortable with the move ­toward ge­ne­tic modification, as seen in the case of genet­ically modified organisms (gmos) and the move to illegalize them. General concern over the production and distribution of gmos takes shape around the potential for unforeseen effects on individual species’ genomes. Even if scientists could control the production of a specific gmo, its interaction with other species could not be properly predicted with existing technologies and knowledge bases. Many large agricultural producers—­including ­those offering crops and livestock—supply faq pages on their websites explaining their stance on gmos, with the intent of “debunking myths” and assuring the safe consumption of gmo plants and creatures.59 This issue received par­tic­u­lar attention following the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996 at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. Although Dolly herself was considered a dubious success (her health prob­lems and short life span remain controversial), by the early twenty-­first ­century, cloning became a popu­lar agricultural practice.60 In her historical account of Dolly’s arrival, Sarah Franklin has demonstrated how cloned animals appear to be the “natu­ral” culmination of the production of live/stock, as “power­ful models of the ways in which capital in the older sense of stock derives out of a combination of genealogy, property, and instrumentality.”61 It is indeed striking that just as concern heightens over the integration ­ uman body—­namely in the form of gmo of nonhuman gmos into the h foods that have been linked to numerous health prob­lems62—­another cross-­ species venture is being touted as a practical solution. Relatedly, concern over zoonotic disease transmission, e­ ither through the transplants themselves or through ge­ne­tic mutations affecting disease re­sis­tance and receptivity occurring posttransplantation, looms large. In the who’s most recent meeting on regulatory requirements for xeno research in 2011, it was stated that u ­ ntil risks of infection w ­ ere lowered, and ­until the procedure had been refined to “reduce the current risk-­benefit ratio,” xenotransplantation should not be conducted.63 This recommendation came at the same time that the annual report of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (optn) in the United States revealed a 1:10 disparity in available organs versus patients in need of transplant; ­every day, eigh­teen Americans die on transplant lists. In nations with less developed healthcare systems and greater rates of poverty, 182  Chapter 6

t­hese numbers are higher.64 Perhaps for this reason, in spite of potential risks, xenotransplantation has been raised time and again as a pos­si­ble solution to world health crises, creating an affordable, and potentially endlessly duplicable, option for patients unable or ineligible to access allotransplants, both in the United States and on a global level.65 ­Under the changes to Medicaid effected by Obamacare, expensive procedures such as organ allotransplantation often still remain out of reach. Medicaid reimbursements are often insufficient, falling short of covering even the early stages of organ procurement. When institutions absorb the partial or full cost of the organ transplantation itself, the high cost of postoperative medi­cation, specifically t­ hose medicines designed to deter the body’s rejection of foreign ­matter, creates a clear preference for patients who can pay their own way. If patients do not continue their course of indicated medi­ cation, their body begins to cull the transplanted organ, and they cannot be placed back on organ transplantation lists. Failure to comply with medical instructions—­even for economic reasons—­thus continues to determine accessibility to full medical care in the case of organ transplantation.66 Statistically, poor ­people and ­people of color make up a disproportionate number of patients waiting on donor lists. Part of this has to do with the economic issues mentioned, as well as the socio­economics of race in the United States. Predominantly, however, this incongruence has to do with the disproportionate number of p ­ eople within ­these populations who experience health prob­lems that are remediable by organ transplantation, particularly renal failure. In medical lit­er­a­ture, t­hese racial disparities are explained in a curious manner, suggesting that the real prob­lem lies in a “cultural” aversion ­to organ donation within minority populations, particularly African Americans. This antipathy is said to ­matter b ­ ecause, “although suitable tissue matches are pos­si­ble between African Americans and Caucasians or other ethnic groups, ­there is a higher probability of a match between two African Americans. Thus the total probability of finding matches for African Americans among the general organ donor population is reduced, decreasing the number of suitable organs available.”67 Thus the discourse surrounding xenotransplantation has become yet another frontier for the rebiologization of racial difference, focusing as well on the significance of “cultural differences.” To date, ­there are as many, if not more, articles published on “racial disparities in organ donation” than on “racial disparities in organ transplantation.” (The phrase “if not more” h ­ ere acknowledges the fact that many studies claiming to address the latter issue raise the former as well.) In Every­thing except the Squeal  183

par­tic­u­lar, “barriers” to African American donation are said to include “unwillingness to donate, medical comorbid conditions, mistrust or fear of medical community, failure to follow-up, poor coping mechanisms, financial concerns, reluctance to ask f­amily members and friends, fear of surgery, and lack of awareness about living donor kidney transplantation.”68 Certainly, ­these characteristics could be used to describe any population’s or individual’s desire to resist becoming an organ donor. In fact, statistically, the two professional groups who are least represented in donor pools are physicians and ­lawyers—­both prominent players in bioethical decision-­making practices. In the case of the lit­er­a­ture treating African American donors, the legacy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments is frequently evoked to explain a population-­based unwillingness to submit to vari­ous types of medical knowledge or treatment, including organ procurement.69 Instead of being interpreted as a reasonable concern given past exploitations, African Americans’ perceived reticence is ­imagined as a form of ­antiquated, uneducated, and even magical thought. Yet when looking at a­ ctual statistics, it is clear that African Americans donate at or above their population proportion (African Americans comprise 12.9 ­percent of the U.S. population and 13.6  ­percent of the nation’s donor population). In this way, the narrative of race-­or culture-­based donation refusal becomes a projected fear, as well as a justification for the outcomes of unequal medical treatment. Nonetheless, African Americans are disproportionately represented on organ wait lists (34 ­percent of all waiting donors), and it is implied that they should consequently bear the burden of greater donation rates. This is a complicated picture, but it demonstrates that racial disparity in organ transplantation is due not to donation rates but to inequities in health/care that disproportionately require organ replacement. Assessing Latina/o attitudes t­oward organ donation, researchers advise that Latina ­women are more likely to comply with medical advice and volunteer to become organ donors, in spite of cultural differences that might inhibit their participation (e.g., “irrational” religious and cultural beliefs about the connectedness of body and soul). One study published in 2009 recommends using Latina ­women as a “bridge between healthcare providers and families,” whose ultimate task would be to convince their loved ones to comply with donation practices. For Latina/os, key obstacles to participation in organ donation are identified as “mistrust of the medical profession, concerns about religious ac­cep­tance of donation, perceptions of in­equality in the distribution of donated organs, and the context in which donation 184  Chapter 6

requests typically are made.”70 Recommendations are made for “cultural sensitivity,” with the end goal of compliance. In this context, it is hard not to recall Dershowitz’s call for a singular bodily politic in the wake of the hiv/aids epidemic. Yet, much like his point that queer persons might remain separate in the realms of sociality and culture, ­here too it appears that Latina/os can, and in a sense are, expected to remain culturally dif­fer­ent while attaining corporeal similitude. Research has yet to be done on how and in what ways perceived attitudes of medical compliance in Latina/o populations impact broader patterns of racialization. A brief survey of available medical lit­er­a­ture suggests that Latina/o health rates relative to other populations (irrespective of income levels) are unusually high, a phenomenon epidemiologists have problematically called the “Latino Paradox.” This concept has suspicious undertones when read alongside the critique of high birth rates within the same population. Nonetheless, public health researchers are interested in Latina/o corporeality precisely ­because it might offer a translatable model for other groups, and in this way, it is a proj­ect that might contribute to the parsing and relative “whitening” of certain Latina/o subjects. But even if t­here was a cultural refusal to donate organs among certain populations, why would this affect transplantation rates? According to the science of tissue matching, racial difference does play into the body’s ability to “accept” or “reject” an organ. This is impor­tant not only b ­ ecause it mirrors earlier ideas about race and blood transfusions (now proven false) but also ­because it is one of many con­temporary sites where race is being rescripted through biomedicine. While scholars such as Dorothy Roberts, Troy Duster, Keith Wailoo, and Stephen Pemberton have called attention to the ge­ne­ ticization of race, ­little has been written about con­temporary cross-­racial transplantation.71 In her history of organ transplantation and blood transfusion across and on ­either side of the color line, Susan E. Lederer has demon­ strated how anx­i­eties about hybridity at the levels of race, species, and sex have haunted cultural attitudes t­oward the incorporation of outside bodily ­matter. In the early years of transfusions and transplantations, for instance, recipients complained of psychic transformations that they believed ­were effected by undergoing surgical intervention. Patients recorded personality changes due to the incorporation of another person’s body; in this understanding, donated organs are not simply “spare parts” but possess a sort of cellular memory connected to the life and experiences of their original owner. Lederer notes that objections to transplantations have evolved over Every­thing except the Squeal  185

time, “def[ying] assumptions that the repellent is a historically stable category, that what repels us ­today is necessarily what repelled us in the past and ­will certainly repel us in the f­uture. . . . ​The per­for­mance of such surgeries must be understood within a cultural context.”72 This being said, notions of corporeal purity and sanctity are long held and widely shared among many cultures. ­Whether ­these ideas can be tied to religious viewpoints, the economics of bloodlines, or the building of nations and races, they nonetheless persist across many cultural, po­liti­cal, and scientific realms. While the age of ge­ne­tic science promised to provide relief from the stronghold of racial classification, it is now unfortunately clear that other forms of essentialist thinking have begun to take its place. We appear to have boomeranged back from the micro to the macro; while it was once thought that dna held the secrets to racial difference, scientists are once again speaking of tissues and organs, of w ­ hole bodies and w ­ hole cultural practices. It is nonetheless difficult to dispute reassertions of racial difference in light of clear disparities among par­tic­u­lar communities’ health profiles. For instance, scholars such as Alondra Nelson, Robert Bullard, and Evelynn Hammonds have demonstrated the connections between health status, mortality rates, and race.73 In the case of African Americans, lifespans are shorter and are more likely to be claimed by diseases attributed to environmental ­factors. ­These ­factors, such as poverty, poor access to healthcare, and the stress of living ­under the imprint of racism, are all known quite literally to be health hazards. Yet public health assessments of African American morbidity and mortality remain centered around a critique of behavioral issues. Specifically, the obesity epidemic is identified time and again as a source of African American ill health, and cultural difference is understood as the key culprit: “bad” dietary choices are deplored as a perverse loyalty to “soul food,” while overeating in general remains linked to older racial narratives of incivility and uncontrollable appetites. ­These thematics ­were painfully illustrated in Lee Daniels’s 2009 film Precious, which depicts the terrible life of an abused black teenager named Precious, herself a m ­ other to two c­ hildren by her own f­ ather, and whose obesity becomes a pivotal plot point, if not the backdrop on which all her other misfortunes rest (as one reviewer put it, Precious’s “massive body [is] at once a prison and a hiding place”74). Like so many films that sensationalize the lives of the “other half,” Precious received critical acclaim for its “realistic portrayal” of poor, black urban life. Yet as many critics have noted, to assume that the par­tic­u­lar problems characterizing Precious’s life are commonplace (sexual abuse at the hands of both parents, hiv-­positive status, 186  Chapter 6

early parenthood to two hiv-­positive c­ hildren, one of whom is intellectually disabled, and the list seems to go on) is to buy into a particularly sickening form of cultural essentialism. As Armond White, chief film critic for the New York Press and chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, wrote, “not since ‘The Birth of a Nation’ has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as ‘Precious.’ . . . ​Full of brazenly racist clichés . . . ​it is like a so­cio­log­i­cal horror show. . . . ​Black pathology sells. . . . ​It’s an over the top po­liti­cal fantasy that only works ­because it demeans blacks, w ­ omen, and 75 poor ­people.” Mirroring her parents’ violent sexual demands, Precious’s appetite is also out of control, and she is shown stealing buckets of fried chicken and cooking ­whole pigs’ feet for dinner. ­There is something barbaric, even animalistic, in the cycle of sexual and dietary abuse that circulates in Precious’s ­house. Hers is a life profoundly othered. Precious, and the narrative of black obesity in general, are indicative of a recapitulation of Bell Curve ideologies.76 As Ian Haney Lopez has pointed out, the paradigm shift from race-­as-­biology to race-­as-­culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries has reinvented discourses of difference and inferiority. Th ­ ese transformed discourses are cryptic, alluding to issues of personal responsibility, differential heritages, and unassimilable cultural practices.77 Along ­these lines, I am suggesting that eating must be understood as a critical site of neo-­essentialist rhe­toric, in which old ste­reo­types deriving from scientific racism (e.g., the body of color as “out of control,” rapacious, and beast-­like) are refigured along lines of health and illness. As ­legal scholar Paul Campos has pointed out, the proj­ect of obesity management in the United States has taken on a peculiar life of its own. Campos details how researchers have long known that obesity, as it is medically defined, is not, in fact, culpable for the wide variety of ill-­health effects it so often is branded with. Time and again, co-­morbidity f­actors have been deliberately misrepresented, claiming causality where t­here has only been correlation. Cries against the public health “expense” of the obese are also largely fabricated; instead, Campos notes, due to forms of discrimination on the part of health care workers and health insurance disincentives, obese individuals are less likely to see doctors regularly or, for that m ­ atter, at all. Obese patients frequently report that attempts to access medical care are often unproductive, due to the common assumption that their weight is always the under­lying f­ actor.78 In this way, weight mirrors other categories of stigmatized identities, namely race and sexuality. This comparison has begun to materialize in Every­thing except the Squeal  187

critical ways over the last several years. While feminist theory and queer studies scholars have called attention to the possibilities of weight as a “queer” category—­Eve Sedgwick has compared “coming out” as queer to “coming out” as fat; Kathleen LeBesco has demonstrated similarities in the search for the “gay gene” and the search for the “fat gene”; and Dylan Vade and Sondra Solovay have pointed to corollaries in the fight for antidiscrimination legislation for obese and transgender ­people—­the question of body size remains fairly silenced from within the fields of critical race studies.79 Aside from the few examinations of the “curviness” of Latina bodies, and the purported acceptability of dif­fer­ent body types within certain spheres of nonwhite culture, the issue of weight rarely enters the discourse of ethnic studies.80 And yet critically, weight is a major site of racial, cultural, and socioeconomic legibility. In the media, obesity is visually represented as a white prob­lem. This is not to say that images of obese persons of color are not available; rather, it is to say that when the explicit topic at hand is obesity, the subjects in question are usually white. In t­ hese cases, the prob­lem of obesity is illustrated prosthetically, in which an ample midsection moves across the screen without an accompanying head. Similarly, photographic illustrations that seek to depict the prob­lem of obesity frequently decapitate the body, framing the stomach in the center of the shot, with arms and hands pres­ent only to clutch bounties of quick and greasy foods. In ­these dehumanizing images, whiteness is the vis­i­ble invisible, while class identity speaks from “poor” food choices, a typically uncovered, protruding midriff, and the ample body itself. To the extent that the obesity epidemic is represented as a moral panic, it appears to echo Malthusian anx­i­eties pres­ent in the earlier part of the twentieth ­century. The obese body is at once a threat to the primacy, and coherence, of whiteness itself, recapitulating eugenic discourses concerned with issues of fitness, inheritance, and survivability. Returning to the person-­ to-­pig meme offered at the beginning of this chapter, we can see how the further whitening of the evolutionary subject, into a sort of pinkening or piggening, speaks precisely to ­these racial anx­ie­ ties. Medical marvel shows featuring weight loss, such as The Biggest Loser (NBC, 2004–­pres­ent), Heavy (a&e, 2011), and My 600-­Pound Life (tlc, 2013–­pres­ent), almost universally portray white subjects, particularly young men, as cause for concern. Frequently, ­these shows offer images of naked obese bodies, culminating in their live surgical dissection, scenes that recall the display and postmortem dissection of disabled and racialized subjects at ­human zoos in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.81 188  Chapter 6

As it pertains to persons of color, obesity is typically portrayed as both quotidian and pathological. It is presented as the logical outcome of “bad” foods, and criminalized as the logical outcome of bad choices. Eugenic ideologies, as well as the coalescence of issues of race, class, and obesity, are evident throughout public health campaigns to “end” the prob­lem of obesity, where “cultural” practices—­based on one’s class station or racial background—­ become the root of the prob­lem itself. Three examples—­two national, the other local—­stand as impor­tant instances of how obesity is framed as a biological and social ill that is particularly threatening to the nation’s youth: (1) Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, (2) the push from the Child Welfare League of Amer­ic­ a (cwla) to include obesity as a form of prosecutable child abuse, and (3) the Strong4Life public health campaign deployed by ­Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (choa). Launched in 2010, the “Let’s Move” campaign was inspired by Mrs. Obama’s own “wake-up call” at the ­family physician’s office, where she vowed to transform her ­house­hold’s exercise and consumption patterns. Mrs. Obama reported that “­little changes” in her own ­family’s routines made all the difference: “­You’ve got to keep your body active, even if that means just turning on some m ­ usic and dancing for an hour. . . . ​That’s how you’ll prepare your bodies and your minds for greatness.”82 Emboldened by the already inflammatory discourse of the war against fat, the first lady set off on a national campaign to effect corporeal change, one pudgy child at a time, or, officially, to secure “the elimination of obesity within a generation of ­children.” Public polls supported the first lady’s platform and suggested that the American public believed the government should play a “significant role in reducing childhood obesity.”83 That this movement occurred on the heels of media criticism of Mrs. Obama’s own body seems uncoincidental.84 The disproportionate effect of obesity on poor communities and communities of color can further be seen in the recent moves to criminalize the consumption of fatty foods, as well as the decision to criminalize obesity as a form of “child abuse.” H ­ ere, race and criminality cohere in familiarly punitive ways. Following a 2008 report from the Child Welfare League of Amer­i­ca (cwla) that urged a consideration of childhood obesity as abuse, the debate made its way into the mainstream media and then into medical lit­ er­a­ture.85 The cwla pointed out the emergence of a series of court cases beginning in the late 1990s where parents w ­ ere put on trial for their c­ hildren’s weight, reporting that in each trial, the courts “adjudicated the c­ hildren to be neglected and reached this conclusion by expanding their states’ statutory definition of medical neglect to encompass morbid obesity.” Although the Every­thing except the Squeal  189

Strong4Life, “My fat may be funny to you but it’s killing me” (2013).

FIGU RE   6 . 6 .

cwla acknowledges that income levels correlate with levels of obesity, the organ­ization recommends surveillance of “at risk” ­house­holds, in which a “visiting nurse” and “visiting homemaker” would check in on the questionable ­family to “teach” them how to properly care for their ­children.86 From 2008 onward, dozens of pieces have been published in ­legal journals as well as the popu­lar press urging the use of Child Protective Ser­vices (cps) in the monitoring of overweight ­children, as well as the prosecution of parents who allow their ­children to become obese.87 In one particularly extreme case from 2009, a black child, Alexander Draper, reached 555 pounds by fourteen years of age and was promptly removed from his m ­ other’s care, even though it appeared that Draper compulsively ate while his m ­ other was working long hours and unable to watch his be­hav­ior.88 A similar thematic of obesity-­and/as-­criminality surfaced in a series of advertisements produced by Strong4Life, a division of ­Children’s Healthcare 190  Chapter 6

Strong4Life, “It’s hard to be a ­little girl if ­you’re not” (2013). FIGU R E 6.7.

of Atlanta (choa) aimed at fighting childhood obesity.89 In print ads, images of overweight c­ hildren are presented in black and white, with a red warning sign that conjures the packaging of hazardous materials (figures 6.6 and 6.7). This text, coupled with the peculiar a­ ngle of the camera shot (which appears to be looking up at its subjects), renders the girls themselves as menacing; their forward-­facing posture and unsmiling ­faces recall the convention of the mug shot. In Strong4Life’s tele­vi­sion ads, a bare room with dim lighting, accompanied by the sounds of labored breathing, loud footsteps, and a peculiar clanging noise, all summon the tropes of a prison interrogation scene. Indeed, Strong4Life’s visual campaign recalls reviews of Precious that ­imagined the young protagonist’s body as a “prison and a hiding place.”90 If one’s very body is understood to be the crime, how dif­fer­ent is this r­ eally from discourses of racial embodiment that have marked bodies of color as biologically inferior? If obesity is disproportionately found among the poor Every­thing except the Squeal  191

and within communities of color, and if it is a condition that is illegalized, does it not mirror, if not exacerbate the machinations of, the prison industrial complex? Is it not a prison pipeline of a dif­fer­ent sort? ­These questions are particularly meaningful when the timeline of the obesity epidemic is understood as dating back to the 1990s, when another critical discourse on race-­as-­biology was taking shape. As Jenny Reardon has pointed out, beginning in 1995, a series of academic articles ­were published touting ­human genomics as a potential “liberator of racial difference” that could “ensure and extend ­human rights” on the basis of newly transparent theories of racial parity. Reardon identifies such optimistic views in both scientific technical lit­er­a­ture and cultural theoretical engagement with scientific pro­gress. In par­tic­u­lar, she uses Paul Gilroy’s Against Race: Po­liti­cal Culture beyond the Color Line (2000) to demonstrate how cultural theorists have often predicted the “end” of familiar racial politics, through the interlocking futurities of ­human ge­ne­tics and global migratory shifts.91 Yet given the government’s strong support of ge­ne­tics initiatives, including the massive funding ­behind the H ­ uman Genome Proj­ect (1990–2003), it should not be surprising that the discourse produced by official science would dovetail neatly with prevailing social and po­liti­cal ideologies. As former president Bill Clinton—­whose rec­ord on race is anything but obvious—­remarked in 2000, “I believe that one of the ­great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the h ­ uman genome is that in ge­ne­tic terms, all h ­ uman beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 ­percent the same.”92 What this realization has meant beyond acting as a rhetorical device is unclear. Since this knowledge has been made public, no less in the context of postracial ideology, policies of racial discrimination and illegalization have only seemed to increase. The first de­cade of the twenty-­first ­century has seen the endless expulsion of undocumented immigrants, the ongoing incarceration of ­people of color, and the racial profiling of Muslim Americans and all other persons appearing to be vaguely of ­Middle Eastern descent. In all ­these cases, forms of illegal personhood are accompanied by discourses and rituals of dehumanization. Similar to science’s midcentury interest in the posthuman, contrasted with minority groups’ insistence on attaining a very basic ­human status, mainstream narratives of the relationship between race, ge­ne­tics, and difference have emerged at an impor­tant point in time. Just three years ­after the popu­lar narrative of ge­ne­tic racial similarity (e.g., “we are all 99.9 ­percent the same”), biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks published the New York Times best seller What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee. (Strikingly, Marks 192  Chapter 6

is an adamant rejecter of theories of biological racial difference.) In What It Means, Marks argues that quantitative ge­ne­tic similarity suggests ­little about shared intelligence, be­hav­ior, or appearance. Marks is but one of many scholars who have begun to disprove the importance of ge­ne­tic traits or, at the very least, have begun to put greater emphasis on ge­ne­tic combinations rather than on single markers. For the most part, ­these combinations remain beyond the purview of con­temporary scientific understanding. Marks points out that even plants such as bananas share 25 ­percent of their ge­ne­tic makeup with h ­ umans, while lower order animals such as mice share a considerable 92 ­percent.93 To suggest that species with such g­ reat differences are indeed closely related on a ge­ne­tic level casts aspersions on the very meaning of ge­ne­tic knowledge and proximity. What it does not manage to do, however, is to transform the very categories themselves. That is, if ge­ne­tic singularity is not the defining marker of a species and, in par­tic­u­lar, of humanity, then what is? What remains of biological racism and biological essentialism in the early twenty-­first c­ entury is therefore complicated. Understanding the rise of the obesity epidemic in the context of scientific doubt about the meaning of ge­ne­tic racial difference provides an impor­tant counterpoint to discourses of postracialism. In closing this chapter, I return to the person-­to-­pig meme, and consider how this ­imagined devolution is articulated. In the case of obesity, the problematic from which ­these par­tic­u­lar evolutionary images have emerged, the mode of dehumanization at stake is the rearticulation and criminalization of biologized difference. In ­these images, the pig emblematizes a temporally inevitable declination of whiteness. This decline can be read in a number of ways, but ­here, I ­will turn to the site of xenotransplantation and porcine hybridity as an imaginative and speculative unfolding of t­ hese very polemics. If we follow the hopeful lit­er­a­ture on the development of transgenic pigs for the creation of ­human spare parts, we must acknowledge that we are, in a sense, headed for a porcine ­future; this hybridized genome ­will no longer speak in terms of the ­human but rather ­will be a literalization of the infrahuman. Reading between the lines of xenotransplantation lit­er­a­ture, three facts become evident about the near f­uture of this advancement. First, even if the technique of xenotransplantation is perfected—­that is, if issues of cross-­ species compatibility are resolved, ethical questions are answered, and psychological consequences are dealt with—­the procedure is not expected to trump allotransplantation as the preferred mode of corporeal repair. In other words, a match of singular species and race ­will be prioritized over a hybridized transplant. Second, due to the lack of ethical regulations surrounding the Every­thing except the Squeal  193

use of pigs, and their ongoing role as food animals, the production and procurement of chimeric porcine organs ­will remain vastly cheaper and more con­ve­nient than the utilization of ­human donor organs. Third, and most impor­tant, due to a wide variety of potential medical complications related to the possibility of cross-­species transplantation, chimeric donor recipients ­will be subject to several modes of surveillance for the remainder of their lives. Of par­tic­u­lar concern is the ongoing possibility of unforeseen zoonotic infections. As one immunologist stated, no ­matter the precautions taken, “we must remember that the large phyloge­ne­ tic distance ­will induce numerous perturbations a­ fter xenotransplantation.”94 ­Because of this fact, it is not only patients but also their “contacts” who would require monitoring, involving the development of blood and tissue testing and banking regimens that would rec­ord the health of transplant recipients, their healthcare workers, close friends and ­family, and their donor animal. This information would be expected to be “recorded in a central database or registry.”95 Such speculative rec­ord keeping would expand the par­ameters of normative kinship ties, across bloodlines and across the species barrier. Like sexual contact tracing during the aids epidemic, it would rely on patient cooperation; but, unlike the early years of the aids crisis, xenotransplant patients would have a built-in incentive to participate: the detection of illness yet to come that could spread through vari­ous means. Importantly, ­because the very prospect of cross-­species transplantation suggests the opening up of new and unforeseeable epidemiological prob­ lems, such rec­ord keeping would need to be ongoing and extensive. In 2014 the World Health Organ­ization ­adopted Resolution wha57.18, stating that xenotransplantation should only be allowed once “effective national regulatory control and surveillance mechanisms overseen by national health authorities are in place.” Surveillance would include “routine evaluation of social and sexual contacts . . . ​possibly including ­house­hold pets,” on an average of ­every three months to ­every five years.96 ­Because of the ambiguity inherent in unforeseeable conditions, the potential for the systematic abuse of this type of surveillance would be sadly exponential. In plain terms, the monitoring would anticipate the evolution of a new epizoonotic. But this time, it would be traceable to a population that was literally less than ­human—­the porcine hybrid. Although the pig occupies a vexed position in our cultural imaginary—­reviled, adored, eaten—it is certainly not a species of elegance, strength, or speed. At best it is a pet; at worst it is a symbol of stupidity, poor physicality, and corpulence. It exists as a symbolic form of the obese body ­under the obesity epidemic, and as 194  Chapter 6

the antidote to ­human organ shortages. Mapped on top of each other, ­these signs converge in a peculiar way that seems to ensure the decline of humanity and the perpetuity of a chimeric self. Unlike the evolutionary schemas offered in the early twentieth ­century and analyzed in chapter 2, where the chimpanzee became strategically whitened, the evolutionary descent in the person-­to-­pig meme offers a pinkening/pigging of the ­human form. In versions of the meme that end with an obese man, rather than a pig, the round, shapeless form of the body and the pink skin tone symbolize a form of porcine hybridity. This animalization of a dominant racial group is curious and troubling, speaking to the recalibration of whiteness in a postracial age. Millennial whiteness is indeed race at its most flexible, when, for instance, a black man can both rule the ­free world and be shot to death for wearing a hoodie and walking through the wrong neighborhood. This seeming paradox is much like the simultaneity of the pig as adorable pet and desirable food item, beloved and loved to and in death. The terms of the obesity epidemic, and the impending logic of transgenic surgical procedures and their attendant dangers, suggest that new ideologies of biological difference are on the horizon. Thus the title of this chapter is not only a colloquialism for the efficient usage of pigs in the meat pro­cessing industry of Sinclair’s era. Pork packers at the disassembly factory pride themselves on the careful dissection of the porcine body, saving glands for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal proj­ects, hair and heads for pet foods, and jugs of blood for soil fertilizer. This wasteless rendering of the porcine body—­far more sophisticated and complete than earlier formulations of industrialized slaughter, with ­every part usable, ­every part designed and harvested with uniformity in mind—is indicative of new attitudes t­ oward the body, w ­ hether porcine, h ­ uman, or chimeric. Now called “harvesting departments”—­the same language used to describe the procurement of transplantable organs—­t hese factories offer an impor­t ant corollary to discourses of corporeal efficiency.97 ­There is indeed a parallel biometrics of butchery at work, in the discourse of both obesity and organ transplantation—­a purpose for e­ very part, a part for e­ very purpose. This is the carving of a very dif­fer­ent sow with a very similar goal: every­thing except the squeal.98

Every­thing except the Squeal  195

Conclusion. The Plurality Is Near T E C H N I Q U E S O F S Y M B I O T I C R E - ­S P E C I AT I O N

Most life forms that have ever existed—­over 99 ­percent, according to some scientists—­are extinct. Extinction is, therefore, one of the most basic characteristics of the planet’s ecol­ogy. —­ U R S U L A   K .   H E I S E , “Extinction” Anthropocentrism may well have “infected” microbiology and misdirected research.  . . . ​If we accept the essential roles of microbes in our evolution and existence, should they be afforded some rights akin to UN charters? . . . ​Some thoughtful p­ eople have taken the question of bacteria rights seriously . . . ​although I think the suggestion is ridicu­lous. —­  J U L I A N D AV I E S , “Anthropomorphism in Science”

By way of conclusion, I examine two emerging types of re-­speciation that mirror each other in form and function: the ge­ne­tic transformation of “dangerous” mosquito populations into agents of their own corporeal evolution and the rise of microbiomics as a new field of ­human corporeal differentiation. In each case, a neoliberal system of economic exchange is evident in both the interpretation of data and the desire for species transformation. At the same time, each field of interest is marked by a broad population-­based approach to health and hygiene, where sheer numbers become the justification for drastic forms of intervention, w ­ hether in the ge­ne­tic manipulation of mosquito breeds or in the proportional management of one’s own internal microbes. Both fields also work to reimagine existing host-­parasite relationships into alternative forms of symbiosis. Though this comparison is intended to suggest ­future directions of biopo­liti­cal speciation proj­ects, it

is not a neat or tidy association; rather, it is the beginning of yet unknown infrahumanist ontologies. In the past de­cade, increasing debates about the “right” of the ­human population to eradicate species that cause disease have emerged across biomedical landscapes. Th ­ ese arguments have moved beyond macro considerations that would identify the structural realities of disease elimination (i.e., the marginalization of ­those already affected, the geopo­liti­cal and economic disparities in contagious disease prevalence, and so on) to the micro, or the a­ ctual bacterial vectors of infection. In between t­ hese spectral points lies the question of host species considered to be bridges between ­human and nonhuman bodies, such as civet cats in the 2007 sars scare and bats in the 2015 Ebola epidemic. As addressed in chapter 5, the narratives that accompany the movement of disease across the species barrier are typically framed in ways that support dominant modes of imperial thought. Host species for recently emerged zoonotic pandemics are rarely considered as having interests in their own rights, while their affiliation with par­tic­u­lar non-­Western cultural practices has been used to dehumanize p ­ eople unwilling to heed “normative” dietary and hygienic practices. Typically, host species during zoonotic pandemics are portrayed as forms of nonvaluable life. Visual repre­sen­ta­tions offered by the media focus on menacing portrayals of infectious bodies, while the curative logic of disease elimination through host species removal is generally used to quell public anx­i­eties. Since the early twenty-­first c­ entury, mosquitos have become a par­tic­u­lar ­object of scrutiny in international public health debates, and they provide an impor­tant case study in the current state of species-­specific extermination. Championed by medical authorities and supported by a $4 billion donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a new effort has been launched in support of the “total elimination” of the mosquito species Aedes aegypti, identified as a key f­ actor in the spread of the malaria, dengue, and Zika viruses throughout the Global South.1 Debates about the pos­si­ble long-­term ecological consequences of a “total” removal have been stifled by the presumption that mosquitos are inherently parasitic (or “just” pests), and by the peculiar notion that any positive role they play would likely be “naturally replicated” by another species. In so ­doing, ­these arguments belie what we might call a neoliberal ecological frame, in which potential ecological harm, typically mea­sured in a holistic fashion, has been replaced with a use-­value equation that imagines a sort of shape shifting among niche positions, or a reconstitution of species-­specific jobs. Yet the pos­si­ble transformation of a species’ niche position begs an impor­tant question of relational taxonomies, of who and what ­will become the new “mosquitos.” Conclusion 197

One answer is provided by the Gates Foundation’s website, which explains the threat of insect-­borne illness by comparing a list of the “world’s deadliest animals” by the “number of ­people killed . . . ​per year” by aggressing species. While familiar predators such as sharks, lions, crocodiles, and snakes are shown to merely dent the ­human population, causing 10, 100, 1,000, and 50,000 h ­ uman deaths per year, respectively, the two most harmful species identified are h ­ umans and mosquitos, producing 475,000 and 725,000 ­human deaths per year, respectively.2 Yet unlike other fatal species—­ including our own—­mosquitos are not the direct cause of any fatalities; rather, they endanger their prey as carriers of disease. Artistic renderings on the foundation’s website depict mosquitos as quite literally larger than ­human beings, intensifying the narrative of threat produced by the fatality statistics, while suggesting the necessity of action. Such configurations become more complicated when it is understood that the vio­lence wrought by mosquitos is geo­graph­ic­ ally disparate, producing pandemics that spread quickly through nations with few medical resources and public health infrastructures. The elimination of mosquitos in the name of ­human health, ­human rights, and nations plagued by histories and ongoing states of colonialism is thus a proj­ect that is hard to contest without appearing ignorant or callous. And yet it is also true that drastic ecological transformations forcibly produced within a short time frame ­will inevitably bring unforeseen prob­lems, prob­lems that ­will likely be intensified in t­ hese same regions. Looking at the language of biological confidence that backs the proposition of mosquito eradication, it is apparent that an ideology of fungibility is at stake. Scientific research backing t­hese programs suggests that b ­ ecause ecological niches can shift among and between species, the w ­ holescale elimination of certain mosquito breeds would not produce a significant absence. Yet the hubris required to imagine that the positive consequences of the removal of a species would far outweigh any unanticipated negative outcomes suggests an economic understanding of ecological life, where biological “workers” and niches become interchangeable. Man down, man up. H ­ ere, the value of species difference becomes reduced to brute function. Even more curious, as much as the field of ecol­ogy is based on premises of evolutionary change, the vision of eradicationism is incredibly presentist, with ­little consideration of ­future complications. In this instance, the proposed technique of species removal is a large-­scale ge­ne­tic modification program called a “gene drive” that si­mul­ta­neously reduces populations of certain breeds, while rapidly immunizing ­others against par­tic­u­lar diseases. This practice follows a negative/positive eugenic 198 Conclusion

logic, where the species as a w ­ hole is “strengthened” through the selective reduction of certain populations and the enhanced propagation of ­others. ­These aims are accomplished through ge­ne­tic modification, whereby some groups are targeted for sterilization, disability, or death, while other groups become fortified through bolstered immune systems and artificially increased reproduction. On the surface, the latter strategy of repopulation may seem ethically preferable and more environmentally sound; at the same time, however, it ­will inevitably pose its own set of questions related to the mass proliferation of genet­ically modified insects. By contrast, the desire and ability to depopulate would result in the death of the species as it is currently known.3 To be sure, attempts at culling the insect populations through ge­ne­tic alteration have not only occurred within a public health context. Instead, such efforts have been part of a broader interest in entomological weaponization—­a form of bioterrorism that the U.S. military has toyed with and feared since the Cold War years.4 In the case of public health–­related concerns, mosquitoes are effectively being weaponized against themselves to produce large-­scale population change. Not only is ge­ne­tic modification in this case deemed an inherently positive technology with equitable aims, but so too are the pro­cesses of species elimination and re-­speciation understood as ecologically desirable. As Ahuja has aptly written: “the world history of disease control is, for the most part, the history of the failed dream of species extermination.”5 In the case of Aedes aegypti, the weaponization of the few is seen to enable the perpetuity of the masses through an evolutionary shift that re-­speciates mosquitoes in the image of h ­ uman use value. As seen throughout the chapters in this book, proj­ects of speciation are never without consequence to the larger order of t­ hings, animals, and p ­ eople. Ongoing proj­ects to transform mosquitos to suit biomedical enterprises illustrate how techniques of re-­ speciation appear to be at the heart of current conceptions of ­human health and national security. At the same time, the rhe­torics of removal and endangerment utilized in conversations surrounding the alteration/elimination of mosquitos exist in clear parallel to another nascent field of biomedicine, microbiomics, which foregrounds a similar population-­based, pluralized approach.6 Launched in 2008 by the National Institutes of Health, the ­Human M ­ icrobiome Proj­ect (hmp) was established in the interest of identifying the relationships between certain microorganisms and vari­ous states of illness and health. From the beginning, the proj­ect has been modeled a­ fter the Conclusion 199

­ uman Genome Proj­ect (hgp), 1990–2003, and in many ways is a response H to some of its pre­de­ces­sor’s unresolved aims.7 While the discourse of “gene mapping” has predominated conversations about population differences in health, intellect, and be­hav­ior for much of the late twentieth and early twenty-­ first centuries, recent advances in the study of microbiomics have begun to challenge narratives of ge­ne­tic inheritance as the primary determinant in health and survival. The hmp departs from the hgp in several ways, beginning with frameworks of classification. While the science of ge­ne­tics employs a singular unit of the gene, and combinations thereof, to ascribe difference, narrativize inheritance, and speculate about changeability at both the individual and population levels, microbiomics is a pluralistic study that questions the logic of considering any organism, let alone any such small component as a gene, as comprehensible in isolation. This is not to overlook understandings of gene interaction but rather to acknowledge the ways in which ge­ne­tic traits are often ­imagined as singularly derived. Moreover, while genes are understood as inanimate entities, microbes are understood as live agents.8 The critical roles that microbes are now being ­imagined to play in the larger scheme of ­human health has provoked questions about the soundness of considering highly complex organisms as “singular” species. As Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber have argued, findings related to the microbiome have given rise to a rethinking of the long-­established biological princi­ple of “symbiosis,” which connotes the coexistence of mutually dependent organisms. Recent zoological studies providing new evidence of interspecies cooperation are beginning to force a broader reconsideration of “the classical conception of an insular individuality into one in which interactive relationships among species blurs the bound­aries of the organism and obscures the notion of essential identity.”9 As t­ hese phenomena unfold, we become faced with the reevaluation of ­human species itself. This reevaluation would not alter the species hierarchy at the macro level (i.e., the h ­ uman would remain at the apex of the species order) but rather has the potential to reprioritize microorganisms in light of new research surrounding their use value to the ­human body. Rhe­toric surrounding the microbiome that reimagines the h ­ uman body as a plural entity thus raises questions about the bound­aries between lower order organisms and the higher order organisms they comprise, from microbes to ­humans and every­thing in between. This development suggests an unfamiliar re­orientation of interspecies hierarchy and reliance, one that 200 Conclusion

does not align easily with the individualistic paradigms of ge­ne­tic mapping that have resonated with the U.S. public for the past two de­cades. And yet while the critical role ascribed to microbes in a wide variety of health issues is a fairly recent development, its framing is certainly not unfamiliar to the U.S. public, evidenced in the explosion of sales in yogurt products claiming to aid every­thing from digestive health to overall well-­being; the frequent news coverage of our immune systems’ relationship to “good” and “bad” germs; and the growing concern over ascending nonvaginal birth rates and declining breastfeeding rates, trends that are both thought to deprive infants of critical maternal bacteria.10 In medical lit­er­a­ture, terms such as re/population are typically employed in relation to the “climate” of the gut, which, due to what is now perceived to be the overuse of antibiotic chemicals, is presented as imperiled and in danger of extinction. In a language that mirrors environmental concerns, biologists now estimate that it can take up to two years for the gut to “recover” from a single course of oral antibiotic treatment. At the same time, concerns over unanticipated effects of antibiotic usage—­from forms of bacterial re­ sis­tance to the development of new bacterial forms—­are often articulated from within an ecological frame. This comparison between the environment and the body is one that researchers exploring the microbiome employ with intentionality; it is indeed a stated goal of the hmp to better understand the relationship between internal health and environmental changes.11 Imagining the body itself as an ecol­ogy that coexists among other ecologies is very dif­fer­ent from previous iterations of ­human corporeality that have sought solace in the construction of a singular corporeality bound by the skin. Thus, in the case of the microbiome, the possibility of ­human degeneration is created si­mul­ta­neously from within and without, in which the faulty, mispopulated gut has become the sign for an unprepared and vulnerable body. Although historians of medicine have long noticed the language of militarization in the rhe­torics of health and illness—we “fight” a disease, “­battle” cancer, “attack” a cold, and so on—­new understandings and articulations of the microbiome atomize and marshal the body along increasingly precise lines. The idea that we might c­ ounter disease from within our own bodies, that we might provide our own first defense against the spread of disease, is a concept that parallels the logic of mosquito re-­speciation. By recognizing the body as a pluralized entity composed of billions of microorganisms, microbiomics produces the possibility of self re-­speciation. As a result, symbiosis has begun to supplant parasitism as the primary logic Conclusion 201

used to describe the human-­bacteria relation, even as discourses of population removal and extermination persist with regard to creatures that become points of bacterial transfer. Following part III’s treatment of disease surveillance protocols, it stands to reason that such paradoxical frameworks may be cause for concern. In par­tic­u­lar, the vision of pluralized corporeality articulated through the study of the microbiome insinuates the necessity of new regulatory mechanisms, where the cohesion of the self becomes reliant on par­tic­u­lar narratives of population control. At the same time, b ­ ecause the rhe­toric surrounding the microbiome concerns the potential reevaluation of the h ­ uman itself, allowing for a layered conceptualization of life-­within-­life, we might look to the histories of past speciation proj­ects and ongoing discourses of corporeal plurality to begin to understand the significance of t­hese transformations. Take, for instance, the history of the mis/treatment of the pregnant body. For centuries, Western medical and l­egal conceptualizations of w ­ omen’s personhood have been marked by the notion that female corporeality is inherently problematic, a logic that is driven by a critique of ­women’s capacity for reproduction, or w ­ omen’s existence in a state of constant, potential duality. B ­ ecause Western juridical conceptions of personhood rely on notions of the “individual,” forms of pluralized subjectivity are deeply feminized and have been used time and again as justification for w ­ omen’s disempowerment and disenfranchisement. Indeed, to be h ­ uman in the Western sense is to be a singular, independent—­and therefore white and male—­entity. Such exclusionary formulations have been augmented by technological advances in the field of sonography, where the production of more precise, literal, and empirical imag(in)ings of the pluralized pregnant body has resulted in greater forms of disempowerment for pregnant ­women. The specter of pluralized corporeality as feminine can further be seen in the conversations surrounding transgenic experimentation addressed in chapter 6. ­Here, attention must be paid to long-­held social, scientific, and ­legal paradigms that pejoratively link states of femininity and animality (i.e., femininity as reducible to reproductive capability, femininity as monstrous, femininity as rupturing the bound­aries of Cartesian dualism, and so on), and that have used such associations for punitive, regulatory mea­sures. At the same time, ­these comparisons have already been seen in heightened discourses surrounding ­women’s bodies, female reproductive systems, and the importance of a favorable microbial balance for a healthy pregnancy and child birth. Further, to the extent that the production of healthy gut flora is understood to require the introduction of certain forms of “foreign” bacte202 Conclusion

“The Human”

Reproductive Self

FIGURE

Microbiotic Self

Singular Body/Subjectivity

Transgenic Self

Plural Body/Subjectivity

c . 1 . Pos­si­ble forms of re-­speciation through pluralization.

ria, we might also imagine it along the lines of transgenic hybridity. Through ­these and other points of comparison, it becomes hard to conceive of the plurality of the microbiome without the attendant forms of compulsory docility required to maintain population equilibrium. To put it another way, the reconceptualization of the singular h ­ uman as a pluralized bacterial entity suggests an alternate vision of speciation through the reframing of symbiotic biological relationality. This transformation also reveals continuities between microbiomic frameworks, as well as t­ hose used to define the female reproductive body and the hybridized non/human chimera (figure c.1). As Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber note, interest in the microbiome has also occasioned the utilization of unusual species in new forms of ­human biological modeling. For instance, although the individuation of species is typically defined through anatomic structure, nascent theorizations have emerged suggesting that we might instead begin to speak of anatomic structures, or anatomies. This transformation requires a recentering of speciation models, in which symbiotic creatures like the sponge—­nearly 40  ­percent bacteria—­become re­imagined alongside all multicellular organisms, and vice versa.12 Further, if traditional use of the term symbiotic has largely been applied to more simplistic life forms—in which percentages of “self ” and “other” are easily parsed—­the utilization of such species as ideological models for reconceptualizing broader speciation paradigms has impor­tant consequences. For example, while small, lower order creatures are often used as experimental subjects in research proj­ects, this fact is typically enabled by an understanding of their profound distance from the ­human (i.e., animal research is “not” ­human research, which comes with a complicated set of ethiConclusion 203

cal limitations and protocols). ­Here, the primary units for mea­sur­ing such distance have been ge­ne­tic code and cognitive ability, units that have been deployed po­liti­cally ­either to justify or decry the subjugation of nonhuman beings. Indeed, if one of the major shortcomings of the ­Human Genome Proj­ect was the inability to liberate race from the prism of biological essentialism, so too have understandings of ge­ne­tic proximity been incapable of dismantling taxonomic hierarchies that rationalize nonhuman abuses. In the case of the microbiome, where formerly singular organisms become re­imagined as pluralized ecosystems, the differences among and between species become im­mensely greater and exponentially more complicated. Moreover, much like chapter  4’s assessment of the trajectory of posthumanist thought as traceable to a moment when minorized groups became increasingly vocal about their need for “­human” rights (and where the interest in moving beyond the ­human, literally and figuratively, becomes the occasion to eschew t­hese claims), the rise of symbiotic species models through the lens of the microbiome devalues the singularity and presumed sanctity of the ­human species. On the one hand, such configurations are in line with broader scholarly trends treating posthumanism and the Anthropocene, where frameworks of relationality, interdependence, and coevolution have been used to rethink species bound­aries, po­liti­cal economies of scale, and what Jane Bennett has called a “vital materialism.”13 On the other hand, t­ here is a strange way in which the pluralization of ­human corporeality draws focus from the structural to the individual, first by suggesting an ever-­evolving reordering of matterable life forms, and second by refocusing a microscopic, critical gaze on the inside of the body. In so d ­ oing, theorizations of the microbiome offer a new forum for “proving” mea­sur­able biological differences that may contest accepted arguments regarding ge­ne­tic similarity (i.e., that ­there is no ge­ne­tic basis of race, that chimpanzees genetic proximity to ­humans is meaningful, and so on). More significantly, while ge­ne­tic change is understood as a slow, multigenerational pro­cess, research on gut flora suggests that endless transformations are pos­si­ble in the course of a single lifetime, and that further, t­hese transformations ­will inevitably be connected to varying states of health. Indeed, we might speculate that the mounting primacy of the microbiome in ­human health research w ­ ill only serve to widen health gaps between the rich and the poor, given that the ability to correct microbial imbalance is understood to depend primarily on ­factors such as diet, exposure to toxins, and use of “antibacterial” substances. ­These gaps may become manifest literally—in terms of the types of foods one can afford or the types of chemicals 204 Conclusion

one may be able to avoid—or figuratively, where ideologies of personal responsibility w ­ ill castigate t­ hose who fail to produce their own good health. Such individualized prescriptions for what we might call bio-­morality, or the systemic valuation of liveliness and health as morally imperative, mirror existing approaches to obesity that blame patients for societal ills. At the same time, ongoing research has already begun to connect gut pathologies with the obesity epidemic, in studies addressing every­thing from the effect of the microbiome on psychological impulse control to the somatics of satiety. The interlocution between microbiomic research and obesity research is thus not accidental but inevitable, when following the logic of each field and their material outcomes on patient lives. And yet we have seen this reasoning before. Indeed, the distinction between, and serialized production of, the H ­ uman Genome Proj­ect and the ­Human Microbiome Proj­ect recall midcentury transformations in ge­ne­ tic research. As chapter 4 explains, Lederberg’s proposal of “euphenics” as an antidote/counterpoint to eugenics urged a dif­fer­ent pace of corporeal change. While eugenics sought to regulate reproduction by limiting and promoting births according to notions of “fitness,” euphenics sought to alter the ge­ne­tic code of lives that already existed. In the years since, we have witnessed the rise of numerous reproductive technologies that incorporate both practices, from prenatal screenings to selective abortions. From our current vantage point, it is unclear what the hmp ­will mean for ideological constructions of health, healthcare practices, and biomedical ethics. Similarly, the relationship between the hgp and the hmp appears nebulous, but their potential connections follow the eugenics/euphenics distinction along the lines of scale, time, and individual agency. The congruence between all o ­ f these fields become clearest in relation to the development of microbial transplantation procedures, which graft bacteria from one person’s intestinal tract into another’s.14 Such protocols are understood to be especially promising in the case of degenerative diseases, where the fast pace of microbial adaptation may halt corporeal deterioration. At the same time, it is precisely the speed at which bacteria can reproduce and evolve that makes ­these procedures incredibly risky, where the potential for unanticipated effects are ­great, and where the urgency of individual life is thought to outweigh consequences for the broader population. Like the self-­weaponization of mosquitos, the transformation of the gut as a site of evolutionary pro­gress produces a façade of control, while cracking open the door to massive population-­and environmentally based shifts. Placing ­these phenomena alongside chapter  6’s treatment of xenotransplantation, it is Conclusion 205

also impor­tant to note that in many cases, such procedures rely on forms of porcine-­human hybridity. Since the early twenty-­first ­century, “­human flora-­associated piglet models” (hfas)—or piglets delivered by caesarian section and immediately inoculated with ­human gut bacteria—­have been used in laboratories to simulate the ­human microbiome.15 Like the pro­ cess of cross-­species organ transplantation, bacterial transplants in porcine models rely on anatomical and immunological similarities between ­humans and pigs. Yet unlike xenotransplantation research that seeks to produce useable parts for deteriorating ­human bodies, the hfa studies employ the pig as ­human model, where the ­human microbiome becomes i­magined as detachable from the rest of the body (i.e., made legible through its removal to another body), even as the princi­ples of microbiomics dictate an ecological frame of relationality that operates against the premise of isolating, transferring, or re-­speciating cells. Moreover, while the transfer of organ tissue between bodies and species may appear more significant than the transfer of bacteria—­after all, we are constantly exchanging bacteria with countless beings in the world around us—it is in fact the other way around. If the microbiome is just beginning to be understood, and what ­little is known seems to speak of complicated ecosystems and billions of tiny interdependent units, it seems incredibly risky to proceed with proj­ects that cross the bound­aries of dif­fer­ent bodies with ­little understanding of long-­term consequences. Perhaps such arrogance can be traced to the history and current state of antibiotics, which, when administered properly, are thought to control and eliminate bacterial agents of infection. And yet bacteria are known to defy expectations; they cannot even be claimed, for all intents and purposes, as part of a species, ­because their very changeability contradicts the stasis implied by taxonomic nomenclature. Like the weaponization of mosquitos, ­there is a very real issue of scale in the manipulation of gut bacteria, where their sheer amount coupled with their seeming simplicity of form is ­imagined to solicit drastic forms of intervention. Thus in the transformation of nonhuman entities to fit ­human ends—­from bacteria to mosquitos to pigs—we are witnessing a quickening pace of corporeal change and a reconceptualization of bodily difference. At the same time, b ­ ecause the very concept of a “species” relies on a relational framework of difference, the alteration of ge­ne­tic codes, internal microbiota, and organ composure threatens a biological reordering of unknown proportions. From this ambiguity, we might expect to see a rise in novel health threats—­whether real or i­ magined—­and, in turn, an extension of new forms of health-­related surveillance. Such forms of scrutiny w ­ ill be 206 Conclusion

by necessity both deep and wide, requiring dual optics at both the individual and population levels. In the case of microbiomics, which reimagines the individual as population, mea­sures of surveillance, manipulation, and control can be ­imagined as self-­reproducing. Rhe­torics of “good” and “bad” gut flora, much like rhe­torics of “good” and “bad” mosquitos, have the capacity to produce new forms of inter-­speciation. The proposed manipulation of populations that exist in parasitic and symbiotic relation to the ­human species, often inside the body itself, suggests a deep unsettling of the animal/human binary and a restaging of ­human difference. In their early stages, ­these fields of scientific advancement similarly position the ­human body as at once host and parasite, pluralized in nature, and unabashedly infrahuman.

Conclusion 207

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION. T­ OWARD A THEORY OF INFRAHUMANITY

1. “If Science Should Develop Apes into Useful Workers,” Washington Post, May 14, 1916, 15. 2. “If Science Should Develop Apes into Useful Workers,” 15. 3. Robert M. Yerkes, “Provision for the Study of Monkeys and Apes,” Science 43, no. 1103 (1916); Robert M. Yerkes, “The Study of Nonhuman Primates,” Science 467 (January 15, 1916): 564. 4. In Yerkes’s era, bonobos ­were known as “pygmy chimpanzees,” and they ­were not clearly designated as a taxonomic subfamily. On the etymology of “infrahuman,” see Oxford En­glish Dictionary, s.v. “Infra-­, prefix,” http://­dictionary​.­oed​.­com. 5. See, for example, Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and ­Children in Gilded Age Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 6. See Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 7. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Po­liti­cal Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 26, 32, 44, 45, 88, 203, 348. 8. Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), xiv. 9. See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Miriam Ticktin, “The Gendered ­Human of Humanitarianism: Medicalizing and ­Politicizing Sexual Vio­lence,” Gender and History 23, no. 2 (2011); Darius Rejali, “Torture as a Civic Marker: Solving a Global Anxiety with a New Po­liti­cal Technology,” Journal of ­Human Rights 2, no. 2 (2003); Darius Rejali, “Electric Torture: A Global History of a Torture Technique,” Connect (June 2001).

10. See the Nonhuman Rights Proj­ect website for a detailed explanation of how ­these attributes are used to advocate for certain species of animals: www​ .­nonhumanrightsproject​.­org. 11. See Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 175–217; Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 12. Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 13. In this book, I use the term animal studies to incorporate a wide variety of interdisciplinary work that treats questions regarding nonhuman animal life. At turns, this lit­er­a­ture has come to be known as animality studies, human-­animal studies, animal-­ human studies, and critical species studies. While it is not fully within the scope of this book to deconstruct the arguments at stake in each, they w ­ ill be addressed when directly relevant. 14. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004). 15. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1998); Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Agamben’s intervention has also risen to significance alongside rejuvenated interest in the concept of biopower proposed by Michel Foucault in the first volume of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), which he defined as “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (58). 16. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 1. 17. Cacho, Social Death; Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How ­Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011), 32. See also Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. 18. Alexander Weheylie, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the ­Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 2. 19. Chekhov quoted in Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 114. 20. See Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern Amer­i­ca (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 2003); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon, 1997); and Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-­create Race in the Twenty-­First ­Century (New York: New Press, 2012). On the history and afterlife of eugenics, see also Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the ­Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 210  Notes to Introduction

21. Adele E. Clarke, Janet K. Shim, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, and Jennifer R. Fishman, “Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine,” American So­cio­log­i­cal Review 68, no. 2 (2003): 161. 22. Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical ­Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, “Ge­ne­tic Risk and the Birth of the Somatic Individual,” Economy and Society 29, no. 4 (2000): 485–513. 23. Neel Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World,” pmla 124, no. 2 (2009); Ahuja, Bioinsecurities, 6. Ahuja’s concept of “dread life” is further addressed in chapter 5. 24. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 20. 25. Greta Gaard, “Speaking of Animal Bodies,” Hypatia 27, no. 3 (2012): 522; Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 14. 26. Gaard, “Speaking of Animal Bodies,” 522. Wolfe did not coin the term posthumanism, but from the context of this article, I read Gaard’s point to refer to Wolfe’s role in popularizing it as a descriptor of the transformation of animal-­human relations. 27. Vasile Stanescu, “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough: A Response to Kathy Rudy, Locavorism, and the Marketing of ‘Humane’ Meat,” Journal of American Culture 36, no. 2 (2013): 105. See also Carol Adams’s originary work on the consumption of meat and feminist ethics, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-­Vegetarian Critical Theory, 20th Anniversary Edition (Boston: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010). 28. Robert C. Jones, “Eating Animals: A ‘Funny’ Kind of Love” (paper presented at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, University of California, Berkeley, May 10, 2013). In using the word aspiration in relation to his categorization of vegan 2, Jones references the work of Lori Gruen. 29. Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 20. 30. Kevin Powell, “Trayvon Martin and the Fatal History of American Racism,” The Guardian, March 20, 2012, https://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­commentisfree​/­cifamerica​ /­2012​/­mar​/­20​/­trayvon​-­martin​-­fatal​-h ­ istory​-a­ merican​-r­ acism; Julie Leroy, “Pit Bulls Give Amazing Reason Not to Call Them ‘Monsters,’ ” The Dodo, August 13, 2015, https://­www​.­thedodo​.­com​/­pit​-­bulls​-­give​-­amazing​-­reason​-­not​-­to​-­call​-­them​-­monsters​ -­1294337469​.­html; David Bailey, “Minnesota Dentist Who Killed Zimbabwe’s Cecil the Lion Draws Threats, Protests,” ­Reuters, July 29, 2015. 31. Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for ­Women?,” in Feminism/ Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 163–64. See also Christine di Stefano, “Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity, and Postmodernism,” in Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism, 63–82. A big thank you to Alexandre Barille for reminding me of ­these impor­tant texts in relation to my own arguments. Notes to Part I  211

PART I. BIOEXPANSIONISM, 1900S–1930S

1. ­Because this book is largely an intellectual history, ­these dates are by necessity hazy. ­There was no “one” event that precipitated the invention of infrahuman subjectivities or ideologies; rather, as this section explores, ­there ­were myriad circumstances and ideas that contributed to the production of the infrahuman. 2. On subalterity and the condition of animality, see, for example, Jennifer Wolch, “Zoopolis,” in Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity at the Nature-­Culture Borderlands, ed. Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (London: Verso, 1998), 119–38; on the subject position of the child, see, for example, Cassandra Philips, “Re-­Imagining the (Dis)Abled Body,” Journal of Medical Humanities 22, no. 3 (2001). 3. On definitions of the subaltern, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 4. Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique,” 557. 5. Please see chapter 1 for an explanation of my use of the generic terms child, ­children, and childhood.

1. BRIEF HISTORIES OF TIME

1. Sebastian Hinton, “Patented Oct. 23, 1923, Patent 1,471,465, United States Patent ­Office, Sebastian Hinton of Winnetka, Illinois, Assignor to Junglegym, Inc., of Chicago, Illinois, a Corporation of Illinois, Climbing Structure, Application Filed July 22, 1920,” uspto Patent Full-­Text and Image Database, United States Patent and Trademark Office. 2. Hinton, patent 1,471,465. 3. John E. B. Myers, Child Protection in Amer­i­ca: Past, Pres­ent, and ­Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); LeRoy Ashby, Endangered ­Children: De­pen­dency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne, 1997). 4. Frank T. Carlton, “Humanitarianism, Past and Pres­ent,” International Journal of Ethics 17, no. 1 (1906); Maurice Parmelee, “The Rise of Modern Humanitarianism,” American Journal of Sociology 21, no. 3 (1915). 5. Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-­ American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995) 303–34. 6. Brooklyn Ea­gle, quoted in Lela B. Costin, “Unraveling the Mary Ellen Legend: Origins of the ‘Cruelty’ Movement,” Social Ser­vice Review 65, no. 2 (1991): 206. On the intersection between animal rights and ­children’s rights, see Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and ­Children in Gilded Age Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 7. Bergh, quoted in Sidney H. Coleman, Humane Society Leaders (Albany, NY: American Humane Association, 1924), 74. 8. Abram Daily, “The Conflict between Parental Authority and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to ­Children,” Medico-­Legal Journal 10 (1892): 376–85. See also Eric A. Shelman, The Mary Ellen Wilson Child Abuse Case and the Beginning of ­Children’s Rights in 19th ­Century Amer­i­ca (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005); Costin, “Unraveling the Mary Ellen Legend,” 203. 212  Notes to Part I

9. Charles Loring Brace, The Best Method of Disposing of Our Pauper and Vagrant ­Children (New York: Wynkoop, Hallenbeck, and Thomas Printers, 1895); C ­ hildren’s Aid Society, The ­Children’s Aid Society of New York: Its History, Plan, and Results (New York: ­Children’s Aid Society, 1893): Stephen O’Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the ­Children He Saved and Failed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). 10. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless, 3–4. 11. Theodore Roo­se­velt, “Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1904,” “Transcript of Theodore Roo­se­velt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” Our Documents, http://­www​.­ourdocuments​.­gov​/­doc​.­php​?­flash​=­true&doc​=­56&page​=t­ ranscript. 12. Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress.” 13. The Outlook, quoted in Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 123. 14. William McKinley, quoted in Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation,” ii. 15. Roo­se­velt, quoted in Hon. Edgar Weeks, “The Filipino Race—­Its Capacity for Self-­Government” (House of Representatives speech, Washington, DC, January 23, 1902), F. 1902 W4185, American Tracks, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, New Haven, CT. 16. Roo­se­velt, quoted in Weeks, “The Filipino Race.” 17. Roo­se­velt, quoted in Weeks, “The Filipino Race.” 18. Ernest Thompson Seton, Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca: A Handbook of Woodcraft, Scouting, and Life-­Craft (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1910), 34. 19. On the history of ­children’s culture, see, for example, Caroline Levander, Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Caroline Levander and Carol J. Singley, eds., The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). 20. Karen Sanchéz-­Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-­Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 21. Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-­Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2005): 818. 22. Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Or­ga­nized Playgrounds and Moral Reform, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 78–89. 23. In ­these years, the juvenile justice system was on the ascent. By referring to juvenile delinquency ­here, I mean to suggest a variety of be­hav­iors displayed by ­children in public spaces that w ­ ere troubling to law enforcement, ranging from petty crime, to loitering, to simply trying to survive if homeless. On the history of the juvenile justice system, see Miroslava Chavez-­Garcia, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of ­California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 24. Joe L. Frost, A History of ­Children’s Play and Play Environments: ­Toward a Con­temporary Child-­Saving Movement (New York: Routledge, 2010), 84–86. 25. Amalie Hofer Jerome, “The Playground as a Social Center,” Annals of the American Acad­emy of Po­liti­cal and Social Science 35, no. 2 (1910): 134. Importantly, the first president of the American Playground Association was Luther Halsey Gulick, physician, Notes to Chapter 1  213

physical education instructor, and founder of the Camp Fire Girls in 1913 (which was a parallel scouting organ­ization for young girls). 26. Otto T. Mallery, “The Social Significance of Play,” Annals of the American Acad­emy of Po­liti­cal and Social Science 35, no. 2 (1910): 368, 370, 372. 27. Mallery, “The Social Significance of Play,” 368. 28. Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 6. 29. Luther H. Gulick, “Presidential Address: ­Children of the ­Century,” Playground Congress of New York City (1908), 244, 243. 30. “The ­Children Need No Watching on the Junglegym,” Playground and Recreation 21, no. 3 (1927): 45. 31. Addams, The Spirit of Youth, 53. 32. Hermann Hagedorn, The Scout Movement: Guiding the Youth of ­Today (New York: Girls Scouts, Inc., 1915), 3. 33. For example, see Kenneth Kidd, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 109–11; Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 34. Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 117–44; “W. D. Boyce Dead; Chicago Publisher Was a Hunter of Big Game and a Picturesque Figure in Life of Community,” New York Times, June 12, 1929, 24; William D. Boyce, Alaska and the Panama Canal (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1914), 10–11. Boyce writes, “The effect of climate . . . ​is one of the questions that must be seriously considered in connection with the development of Alaska, and the furnishing of a government for a country on the Arctic Ocean, so far from Washington and—­Heaven. . . . ​The spreading of the Indians from the Arctic to the Antarctic ­waters no doubt occupied many thousands of years, indeed so long a period of time that no one even dares to guess its length. The white race, however, with superior mind and skill, in a few centuries took practically every­thing away from the Indians, an example of the law of ‘the survival of the fittest.’ ” 35. This issue is taken up in greater detail in chapter 2. 36. Girl Scouts, Scouting for Girls: Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts (New York: Girl Scouts of Amer­i­ca, 1915). 37. Seton, Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca, 32–34; Girl Scouts, Scouting for Girls, 4–5. While it is beyond the purview of this book, it is impor­tant to note that gender differences articulated by the bsa and gsa became augmented over time. 38. On the culture of primitivism, see, for example, John Cooley, Savages and Natu­ rals: Black Portraits by White Writers in Modern American Lit­er­a­ture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1980); Athena Devlin, Between Profits and Primitivism: Shaping White Middle-­Class Masculinity in the United States, 1880–1917 (New York: Routledge, 2005); Ronald E. Martin, Languages of Difference: American Writers and Anthropologists Reconfigure the Primitive, 1878–1940 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 39. Seton, Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca, xi, xii. 214  Notes to Chapter 1

40. See John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in Amer­i­ca (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 49. 41. Seton, Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca, i. 42. On the history of the Woodcraft Indians, see Deloria, Playing Indian, 111–24. 43. Seton, Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca, 2–4. 44. The earliest work that I have found that employs animals in teaching the alphabet (or the alphabet in teaching about animals) is the anonymously written Animal A.B.C.: A Child’s Visit to the Zoo (Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1907). The genre may have existed in earlier forms, b ­ ut there is currently no scholarship on this topic. Although Kipling is a British author, his works achieved ­great success in the United States and must therefore be considered as a part of U.S. literary culture, at least from the side of consumption practices. 45. Peter Hunt, “Ernest [Evan] Thompson Seton,” in ­Children’s Lit­er­a­ture: An ­Anthology, 1801–1902, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 447. 46. Ernest Thompson Seton, Wild Animals I Have Known and 200 Drawings (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 12. 47. Ernest Thompson Seton, The Wild Animal Play (Philadelphia: Curtis, 1900), 11. 48. Seton, The Wild Animal Play, 19. 49. Seton, Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca, 33; Girl Scouts, Scouting for Girls, 8. 50. Seton, Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca, 27. 51. Ernest Thompson Seton, Sign Talk: A Universal Sign Code, without Apparatus, for Use in the Army, the Navy, Camping, Hunting, and Daily Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1918), xvi, xvii. 52. Seton, Sign Talk, xix–­xx. 53. On the history of the picture book genre and the rise of ­children’s literary culture, see Hunt, ­Children’s Lit­er­a­ture. 54. Seton, Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca, 122. 55. Seton, Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca, 516–18. 56. Jeffrey P. Brosco, “Weight Charts and Well Child Care: When Pediatricians Became the Expert in Child Health,” in Formative Years: ­Children’s Health in the United States, 1880–2000, ed. Alexandra Minna Stern and Howard Markel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 96–97. 57. Lilian D. Wald, “The Federal ­Children’s Bureau: A Symposium,” Annals of the American Acad­emy of Po­liti­cal and Social Science 33, no. 2 (1909): 24. 58. Herbert Parsons, “Establishment of a National ­Children’s Bureau,” Annals of the American Acad­emy of Po­liti­cal Science 34, no. 1 (July 1, 1909): 48. 59. Richard Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Russell Viner, “Abraham Jacobi and German Medical Radicalism in Antebellum New York,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72, no. 3 (1998). 60. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of Amer­i­ca’s Hospital System (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 61. Ronald Numbers, “The Maturation of American Medical Science,” in Scientific Colonialism: 1800–1930: A Cross-­Cultural Comparison, ed. Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987). Notes to Chapter 1  215

62. Jesse R. Gerstley, “The New Era in Pediatrics,” Journal of the American Medical Association 76, no. 24 (1921): 1634. 63. “A Conference on Pediatrics,” Lancet 194, no. 5006 (1919): 259. See also Sydney Halpern, American Pediatrics: The Social Dynamics of Professionalism, 1880–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 92–93. 64. Jacobi, quoted in Henry L. K. Shaw, “The American Pediatric Society and Preventive Pediatrics,” American Journal of Diseases of ­Children 38, no. 1 (1929): 1. 65. Borden S. Veeder, “Pediatrics and the Child,” Journal of the American Medical Association 81, no. 7 (1923): 517. 66. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 67. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: ­Toward a Corporeal Feminism (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994); Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997). 68. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psy­chol­ogy and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton and Com­pany, 1904), vii–­viii. 69. Hall, Adolescence, vii. 70. Hall, Adolescence, vii. 71. Hall, Adolescence, 126. 72. Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: or the Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natu­ral ­Causes, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton and Com­ pany, 1880), 34. 73. Hall, Adolescence, viii. 74. Hall, Adolescence, 60. 75. Lewis M. Terman, The Hygiene of the School Child (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 47–48. 76. Terman, The Hygiene of the School Child, 48. 77. Alex Kozulin, “Apes, Primitives, ­Children and . . . ​Translators,” ­Human Development 36, no. 6 (1993); L. S. Vygotsky and A. R. Luria, Studies on the History of Be­hav­ior: Ape, Primitive, and Child, trans. and ed. Victor I. Golod and Jane E. Knox (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Earlbaum, 1993); A. R. Luria and L. S. Vygotsky, Ape, Primitive Man and Child: Essays in the History of Be­hav­ior, trans. Evelyn Rossiter (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). As Kozulin points out, Luria and Vygotsky’s study remained out of print following its first edition ­until the early 1990s. ­There is evidence that Luria and Vygotsky ­were familiar with Hall’s work and, more importantly, that Robert Mearns Yerkes, addressed in chapter 2, read the work of Luria and Vygotsky. 78. Vygotsky and Luria, Studies on the History of Be­hav­ior, 23–24. 79. Vygotsky and Luria, Studies on the History of Be­hav­ior, 145. 80. G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin, “The Psy­chol­ogy of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic,” American Journal of Psy­chol­ogy 9, no. 1 (1897): 16. The narrative of the “feral child,” as mentioned in the quotation, is another impor­tant “link” in the story of the child’s cultural morphology as well as the development of scientific perceptions of childhood. During the late 1890s, immediately prior to the rise of the child study school of thought, a rash of reports from British India appeared that claimed the 216  Notes to Chapter 1

discovery of several feral ­children. It is difficult to assess the impact of ­these accounts on American scientific and popu­lar thought. To be sure, they ­were covered more vigorously in the En­glish newspapers, and, to the extent that they formed the basis of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories, they remained part of the national imaginary of ­England for years to come. Like the international quality of scientific discovery and publication, narratives of the feral child did receive attention in the United States. Nonetheless, I am reluctant to foreground the figure of the feral child within the United States, which could not claim the (symbolic) presence of feral c­ hildren in its colonial possessions. As chapter 2 ­will note, repre­sen­ta­tions of ferality in U.S. popu­ lar culture centered around Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, which was ultimately a story of primates rather than wolves (as was offered by Kipling and the real-­life Indian accounts), and of a white, British child rather than an Indian child. See Kipling, The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894 and 1895) and Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1912; reprint, New York: Signet Classics, 2008). 81. Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in Amer­i­ca (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 55. 82. C. Becket Mahnke, “The Growth and Development of a Specialty: The History of Pediatrics,” Clinical Pediatrics 39, no. 12 (2000); A. R. Colón, Nurturing ­Children: A History of Pediatrics (New York: Greenwood, 1999); Buford L. Nichols, Angel Ballabriga, and Norman Kretchmer, eds., The History of Pediatrics, 1850–1950 (Boston: Raven, 1991).

2. OCULAR ANTHROPOMORPHISMS

1. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the Modern World of Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1. 2. Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Kline, Building a Better Race; Stern, Eugenic Nation. 3. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Se­lection in Relation to Sex, vol. 2, ed. John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May (1871; reprint, Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1981). 4. Richard G. Delisle, Debating Humankind’s Place in Nature, 1860–2000: The Nature of Paleoanthropology (Upper ­Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2007), 84. 5. Delisle, Debating Humankind’s Place in Nature, 89, 100–101. 6. As Frank Spencer has noted, “Darwinists’ dreams of the missing link had to be sustained by speculative prophecies that ­were conceived as a collage of structural intermediaries between modern ­humans and extant anthropoid apes.” Frank Spencer, “Prologue to a Scientific Forgery: The British Eolithic Movement from Abbeville to Piltdown,” in Bones, Bodies, and Be­hav­ior: Essays in Biological Anthropology, ed. George Stocking Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 89. 7. Craig B. Stanford, Biological Anthropology: The Natu­ral History of Humankind (Upper ­Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006); Jonathan Marks, ­Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995). Notes to Chapter 2  217

8. On the history of Piltdown Man, see Frank Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (London: Oxford University Press, 1990); J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery (London: Oxford University Press, 1955). 9. George MacAdam, “Prominent Scientist Holds That Man’s Ascent from Apes Means an Incessant Evolutionary Pro­cess for Humanity,” New York Times, December 13, 1913. 10. I do not read any significance into the use of chimpanzee and orangutan bones in the creation of the Piltdown hoax; rather, I assume ­these parts w ­ ere used ­because of the compatibility of their size with ­human remains. 11. Miles Russell, Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson and the World’s Greatest Archaeological Hoax (London: Tempus, 2003), 178–80; K. P. Oakley and C. P. Groves, “Piltdown Man: The Realization of Fraudulence,” Science 169, no. 3947 (1970). 12. Sherwood L. Washburn, ­Human Evolution ­after Raymond Dart (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1985); Esteban E. Sarmiento, The Last H ­ uman: A Guide to Twenty-­Two Species of Extinct ­Humans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 13. Louis S. B. Leakey, Adam’s Ancestors: An Up-­to-­Date Outline of the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and What Is Known about Man’s Origin and Evolution (London: Methuen, 1934), 173. 14. William K. Gregory, “Did Man Originate in Central Asia? (Mongolia the New World, Part V),” Scientific Monthly 24, no. 5 (1927). 15. Leslie A. White, “The Mentality of Primates,” Scientific Monthly 34, no. 1 (1932); Leakey, Adam’s Ancestors, 182. 16. “­Mental Tests,” New York Times, April 30, 1922. On the assumed impartiality of Yerkes’s tests, see Stephen J. Gould, “A Nation of Morons,” New Scientist 6 (May 1982); Carl Murchison, “Autobiography of Robert Mearns Yerkes,” in History of Psy­chol­ogy in Autobiography, vol. 2, ed. Carl Murchison (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1930), 300. 17. Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Ge­ne­tics and the Uses of ­Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 110–15. 18. Walter Lipp­mann, “The ­Mental Age of Americans,” New Republic 32, no. 412 (1922): 213; Michael M. Sokal, Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890–1930 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984). 19. Yerkes, memorandum, “Provision for the Study of Monkeys and Apes,” 1920, file “Robert Mearns Yerkes,” box 23, Simon Flexner Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; Robert M. Yerkes and Margaret Sykes Child, “Anthropoid Be­hav­ior,” Quarterly Review of Biology 2, no. 1 (1927). 20. Robert M. Yerkes, “The Study of ­Human Be­hav­ior,” Science 39, no. 1009 (1914). 21. Robert M. Yerkes and Ada W. Yerkes, The ­Great Apes: A Study of Anthropoid Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1929), 586; Yerkes, “Autobiography,” 385. 22. Yerkes, “Autobiography,” 399. 23. Yerkes, “Provision for the Study of Monkeys and Apes.” 24. Gregory A. Kimble and Michael Wertheimer, eds., Portraits of Pioneers in ­Psy­chol­ogy, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998), 232. 25. Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 145–47; Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist (1983; reprint, New York: Mari­ner Books, 2000), 99–102. 218  Notes to Chapter 2

26. Robert M. Yerkes, Almost ­Human (New York: ­Century, 1925), 134. 27. Yerkes and Yerkes, The ­Great Apes, 389. 28. Yerkes and Yerkes, The ­Great Apes, 199–201, 265, 389, 530. 29. Yerkes and Yerkes, The ­Great Apes, 39. 30. Yerkes and Yerkes, The ­Great Apes, 375. 31. Yerkes and Yerkes, The ­Great Apes, 381, 397, 421–23, 442. 32. Thomas C. Leonard, “Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (2005). 33. Yerkes and Yerkes, The ­Great Apes, 492. 34. Akeley, quoted in Yerkes and Yerkes, The ­Great Apes, 506. 35. “ ‘Hall of Man’ Attacked: New York Museum All Wrong about the Descent of ­Human Beings, Another Scientist Declares,” New York Times, August 8, 1924. 36. Yerkes, Almost ­Human, 100. 37. Yerkes and Yerkes, The ­Great Apes, 456, 381. 38. Certainly, this is not to suggest that the decline of good eyesight u ­ nder civilization was not a cause for concern among eugenicists. Rather, it is impor­tant to note that poor eyesight was read as a prob­lem of civilized, technologically advanced ­people (and animals). See Charles Wray, “Civilization and Eyesight,” British Medical Journal 2 (November 1, 1902); H. de Hutorowicz and B. F. Adler, “Maps of Primitive ­People,” Bulletin of the American Geo­graph­i­cal Society 43, no. 9 (1911): 669–79; Woodworth, “Racial Differences in ­Mental Traits.” 39. Yerkes and Yerkes, The ­Great Apes, 264. Original copy in folder 2251, box 133, ms 569, Series V, Robert Mearns Yerkes Papers, Yale University. 40. Marianne Hirsch, ­Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4. 41. On photography and “native re­sis­tance,” see R. E. Dennett, “Bavili Notes,” Folklore 16, no. 4 (1905): 371–406; Charles Dundas, “History of Kitui,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of G ­ reat Britain and Ireland 43 (July–­December 1913): 480–549. 42. Yerkes and Yerkes, The ­Great Apes, 443. I chose not to include this image in the chapter. As Anne Fausto-­Sterling and other scholars have pointed out, the continuing spectacularization of exploited persons can breach ethical standards of repre­sen­ta­tion. See Anne Fausto-­Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ ­Women in Eu­rope, 1815–1817,” in Feminism and the Body, ed. Londa Schiebinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). I explore this point further in chapter 3’s discussion of Holocaust imagery. 43. It is unclear from the historical rec­ord exactly who took each of the photo­ graphs, though their presence in Yerkes’s own scrapbooks and, in certain cases, their selective publication in his written work suggest that, at the very least, he directed the shots. 44. On the transformation of racial categorizations, Matthew Frye Jacobson writes that 1924 “mark[ed] the beginning of the ascent of monolithic whiteness.” Jacobson, Whiteness of a Dif­fer­ent Color: Eu­ro­pean Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 93. 45. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 404. Notes to Chapter 2  219

46. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1912; reprint, New York: Signet Classics, 2008), 32–33, 50–51. 47. “Biggest Laugh of the Year,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1922; “The Newest Star,” Atlanta Constitution, October 12, 1919. 48. Yerkes, Almost ­Human, 45. 49. Hugh Lofting, The Story of Doctor Doolittle (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1920). 50. John Collier, His Monkey Wife; Or, Married to a Chimp (New York: D. Appleton, 1931), 4, and front ­matter. 51. W. S. Van Dyke, dir., Tarzan the Ape Man (1932; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2004), dvd. 52. P. Martin, “New Marilyn Monroe,” Saturday Eve­ning Post, May 5, 1956. 53. Lois W. Banner, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and Whiteness,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 4 (2008): 9. 54. See, for example, Richard Dyer’s brilliant study White (New York: Routledge, 1997). 55. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, dirs., King Kong (1933; Atlanta, GA: Turner Home Entertainment, 2005), dvd. 56. J. B. T. Scripps, “Gargantua: World’s Most Successful Animal Lives for One Purpose: Murder,” Life magazine, February 26, 1940, 64. 57. Scripps, “Gargantua,” 80, 82; “Gorilla v. Man,” Time magazine, June 20, 1938, 90. 58. Bert James Loewenberg, “Darwinism Comes to Amer­i­ca, 1859–1900,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28, no. 3 (1941): 359. 59. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of ­Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 145.

PART II. EXTRATERRESTRIALITY, 1940S–1970S

1. Hannah Arendt, The ­Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 2. 2. ­There are several excellent treatments of ge­ne­tic science at midcentury that nonetheless do not take up the issue of extraterrestrial life. See, for example, Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2004); Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-­First ­Century (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006); Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics.

3. ON ALIEN GROUND

1. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture, Criticism, and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1981), 17–34; Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Ray220  Notes to Chapter 2

mond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes!,” trans. Joan Tate (New York: New Press, 1996). 2. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Seyla Benhabib (New York: Routledge, 1995), 35–58. 3. George H. Roeder Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 4. Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; reprint, New York: Picador, 2001), 19–20. 5. On the imagery of the Holocaust, see Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Lawrence Douglas, “The Shrunken Head of Buchenwald: Icons of Atrocity at Nuremberg,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 275–99; Dora Apel, “The Tattooed Jew,” in Zelizer, Visual Culture and the Holocaust, 300–322. 6. Fausto-­Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation,” 19. 7. See Lindqvist, “Exterminate all the Brutes!”; Zelizer, Remembering to Forget. 8. James McAndrew, The Ros­well Report: Case Closed (Washington, DC: U.S. Air Force Publications, 1997). 9. Marc Peyser, “Ros­well—­The Sequel: Now the Military Has a New Explanation,” Newsweek 130, no. 1 (1997): 65; Robert E. Bartholomew, “Before Ros­well: The Meaning ­behind the Crashed ufo Myth,” Skeptical Inquirer 22, no. 3 (1998): 29–31; William J. Broad, “Air Force Details a New Theory in U.F.O. Case,” New York Times, June 25, 1997, a1, b7; Leon Jaroff, “Did Aliens ­Really Land?,” Time, June 23, 1997, 68–71; Dawn Stover, “50 Years a­ fter Ros­well,” Popu­lar Science 250, no. 6 (1997): 82–89; Kendrick Frazier, “World Survives Ros­well Hysteria, Aliens Remain Elusive,” Skeptical Inquirer 21, no. 5 (1997): 5–6; Bernard D. Gildenberg and David E. Thomas, “Case Closed: Reflections on the 1997 Air Force Ros­well Report,” Skeptical Inquirer 22, no. 3 (1998): 31–35. A word about the Skeptical Inquirer, as it is cited frequently in the first section of this chapter: in spite of the similarity of its name to sensationalist popu­lar periodicals, the Skeptical Inquirer is in fact published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which was founded for the purposes of investigating “paranormal and fringe science-­claims from a responsible, scientific point of view and disseminates factual information about the results of such inquiries to the scientific community and the public.” Founding members of the committee include “scientists, academics, and science writers such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Philip Klass, Paul Kurtz, Ray Hyman, James Randi, Martin Gardner, Sidney Hook, and ­others.” Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, “About csi,” accessed January 20, 2012, http://­www​.­csicop​.­org​/­about​/­. 10. See, for example, Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, “Cold War Popu­lar Culture and the Image of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Perspective of the Original Star Trek Series,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 4 (2005): 74–103; Elaine Graham, Repre­sen­ta­tions of the Post/ Human: Monsters, Aliens, and ­Others in Popu­lar Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 11. Joe Nickell, “Extraterrestrial Iconography,” Skeptical Inquirer 21, no. 5 (1997): 18–19. Notes to Chapter 3  221

12. Barney Hill, quoted in John Moffitt, Picturing Extraterrestrials: Alien Images in Modern Culture (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 149–50. See also Margalit Fox, “Betty Hill, 85, Figure in Alien Abduction Case,” New York Times, October 23, 2004, a18. 13. Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2002), 78. 14. See, for example, Susan A. Clancy, Abducted: How ­People Come to Believe They ­Were Kidnapped by Aliens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); David Gallo, Associative Illusions of Memory: Research on False Memories for Related Events (New York: Psy­chol­ogy Press, 2006); C. J. Brainerd and V. F. Reyna, The Science of False Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 15. Martha A. Churchill, “A Skeptic Living in Ros­well,” Skeptical Inquirer 22, no. 3 (May–­June 1998): 40–43, 60; Kaja Perina, “Alien Abductions: The Real Deal? What Leads ­People to Believe ­They’ve been Abducted by Aliens?,” Psy­chol­ogy ­Today (March–­ April 2003), http://­www​.­psychologytoday​.­com​/­articles​/­PTO​-­20030527​-­000002​.­html; Jonathan Amos, “Alien ‘Abductees’ Show Real Symptoms,” bbc News, February 18, 2003, http://­news​.b ­ bc​.­co​.­uk​/­1​/­hi​/­in​_­depth​/­sci​_­tech​/­2003​/­denver​_­2003​/­2769875​.­stm. 16. “Science: Closing the Blue Book,” Time, December 26, 1969, 28. ufo reporting peaked in 1952, with 1,501 sightings. By 1969, reports had tapered off to 146. 17. Charles Albert Maney and Richard Hall, The Challenge of Unidentified Flying Objects (Washington, DC: American Meteor Society Press, 1961). 18. Lt. Col­o­nel Garrett, quoted in Michael D. Swords, “Proj­ect Sign and the Estimate of the Situation,” Journal of ufo Studies 7 (2000): 32. 19. Michael D. Swords, “ufos, the Military, and the Early Cold War,” in ufos and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of Knowledge, ed. David M. Jacobs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 97–99. 20. On the histories of Operation Paperclip and Overcast, see John Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Linda Hunt, “U.S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 41, no. 4 (1985): 16–24; Clarence G. Lasby, Proj­ect Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War (New York: Atheneum, 1971). 21. Edward U. Condon, The Complete Report Commissioned by the U.S. Air Force: Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Bantam Books, 1969). See also David Michael Jacobs, The ufo Controversy in Amer­ic­ a (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975). 22. Condon, The Complete Report, 86. 23. “Science: Closing the Blue Book,” 28. 24. Jung, quoted in “Martians over France,” Time, October 25, 1954, 71. 25. “Martians over France,” 71, brackets and internal text in original. Jung elaborates on ­these points in his little-­known 1959 book, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of ­Things Seen in the Skies, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959). 26. “Life on a Billion Planets?,” Time, March 3, 1958, 42–43. 27. Julia A. Thomas, “Photography, National Identity, and the ‘Cataract of Times’: War­ time Images and the Case of Japan,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1476. 222  Notes to Chapter 3

28. On the first point, see, for example, Robert James Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision (St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 1995); Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); on the second point, see, for example, James J. Weingartner, “Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japa­nese War Dead, 1941–1945,” Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 1 (1992): 53–67; John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Routledge, 1986); Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why Amer­i­ca Dropped the Atom Bomb (New York: ­Little, Brown, 1995). 29. John W. Dower, “Race, Language, and War in Two Cultures: World War II in Asia,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 202–16. 30. Frank Capra, dir., Know Your ­Enemy: Japan (1945), P. D. Films, dvd released 2016. 31. “Weenie Royale: Food and the Japa­nese Internment,” npr, December 20, 2007, http://­www​.­npr​.­org​/­templates​/­story​/­story​.­php​?­storyId​=­17335538. 32. “Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of the Japa­nese (1942),” Our Documents, January 2, 2008, http://­www​.­ourdocuments​.­gov​/­doc​.­php​?­flash​=­true&doc​=7­ 4. 33. M. Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11. 34. Lindee, Suffering Made Real, 98. 35. A. M. Rosenthal, “The Taste of Life in Hiroshima Now,” New York Times, August 1, 1965, sm4. 36. See, for example, Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González, What Have They Built You to Do? “The Manchurian Candidate” and Cold War Amer­i­ca (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006), 30–51. 37. “How to Avoid Radiation without ­Really Knowing It,” Time, June 1, 1962, 42. 38. Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 337. 39. Popu­lar press that covered the situation tended to gloss over the ­human damages of the test and noted with optimism that many plants and animals at the Bikini Atoll appeared to have survived the bomb. See, for example, “Can Life Survive the Bomb?,” Time, October 30, 1964, 67. Earlier tests in the Bikini Atoll revealed, according to researcher Dr. David Bradley, “1. ­There is no real defense against atomic weapons. 2. ­There are no satisfactory counter-­measures and methods of decontamination. 3. ­There are no satisfactory medical or sanitary safeguards for the ­people of atomized areas. 4. The devastating influence of the Bomb and its unborn relatives may affect the land and its wealth—­and therefore its ­people—­for centuries through the per­sis­tence of radioactivity.” Bradley, quoted in “Atomic Radiation Hazards,” Science News-­Letter 54, no. 23 (1948): 359. 40. Norman Cousins, “Voyage with the Maidens,” Saturday Review 39 (November 24, 1956): 29. 41. Naoko Shibusawa, Amer­i­ca’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japa­nese E ­ nemy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 45–47. Notes to Chapter 3  223

42. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 151. On the cultural valences of Japa­nese war brides, see Caroline Chung Simpson, “Out of an Obscure Place: Japa­nese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s,” Differences 10, no. 3 (1998): 47–81. Simpson writes, “As white Americans tried to negotiate the threat of black integration, and government programs tried in vain to resettle interned Japa­nese Americans, Japa­nese war brides provided at least one ‘unofficial or obscure place’ out of which the redemption of cultural pluralism, as an ideal that stabilized relations rather than disrupted them, would reemerge as a distinct possibility. In significant ways, the postwar popu­lar media’s changing view of Japa­nese war brides proj­ects them as an early form of the Asian American model minority” (49). 43. Arthur J. Olsen, “73 Polish ­Women, Nazi Victims, to Get Indemnities from Bonn,” New York Times, November 13, 1961, 1, 12; “An End to Mass Guilt,” Washington Post and Times Herald, May 31, 1959, e4. 44. On the use of “Lapin,” see, for example, “33 ­Women Victims of Nazi Torture Re­united: Ravensbrück Lapins (Guinea Pigs) W ­ ere Used in Poland Camp to Test Out Drugs,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1959, b6; Gerhard Baader, Susan E. Lederer, Morris Low, Florian Schmaltz, and Alexander V. Schwerin, “Pathways to H ­ uman Experimentation, 1933–1945: Germany, Japan, and the United States,” Osiris 20 (2005): 230. 45. Nuremberg Military Tribunals, quoted in Daniel Callahan, Arthur Caplan, Harold Edgar, Laurence McCullough, Tabitha M. Powledge, Margaret Steinfels, Peter Steinfels, Robert M. Veatch, Joseph Walsh, Joel Colton, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Milton Mimmelfarb, and Telford Taylor, “Special Supplement: Biomedical Ethics and the Shadow of Nazism,” Hastings Center Report 6, no. 4 (1976): 5. 46. Norman Cousins, “Dialogue in Warsaw,” Saturday Review 41 (June 28, 1958): 11. Cousins writes, “In examining the medical rec­ords, it became apparent that the ordeal of the test surgery had left the w ­ omen with a wide legacy of physical infirmities and diseases. Most of them now suffered from vari­ous forms of cardiac illnesses, of which chronic myocarditis was the most frequent. Osteomyelitis, pernicious anemia, hepatitis, tuberculosis, hypertension, cystitis, rheumatism, asthma, and a wide variety of reactive neuroses . . . ​all this, of course, in addition to the handicap of legs from which muscles or sections of bone had been removed, making locomotion difficult and painful.” 47. Cousins, “Dialogue in Warsaw,” 11, 32. 48. Norman Cousins, “Report on the Ladies,” Saturday Review 44 (July 22, 1961): 28, 40. 49. Norman Cousins, Pres­ent Tense: An American Editor’s Odyssey (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1967), 272; Norman Cousins, “Life Begins at Twenty-­Five,” Saturday Review 23 (April 24, 1965): 28. 50. Steven M. Spencer, “Banishing the Horror of Leprosy,” Saturday Eve­ning Post 233 (August 27, 1960): 26. 51. Norman Cousins, “Paul Brand and His Mission,” Saturday Review 47 (October 3, 1964): 21–23, 50–52. In the case of the fin­gers and toes, Brand ultimately discovered that the nerve damage associated with leprosy was so severe that many patients w ­ ere unable to feel their extremities, such that rats would gnaw away at them in their sleep 224  Notes to Chapter 3

without their noticing. In the case of the sunken noses, Brand discovered that nerve damage caused the interior fibers of the nose to contract. 52. David Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 21–56. On the meta­phoric uses of the prosthetic, see Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory, and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998). 53. Declaration of Geneva, “Policy: World Medical Association International Code of Medical Ethics,” World Medical Association, https://­www​.­wma​.­net​/­what​-­we​-­do​ /­medical​-­ethics​/­declaration​-­of​-­geneva​/­. 54. See the text of the Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights, United Nations, http://­www​.­un​.­org​/­en​/­universal​-­declaration​-­human​-­rights​/­; “The Right to Health,” World Medical Association, https://­www​.­wma​.­net​/­what​-­we​-­do​/­human​-­rights​/­right​ -­to​-­health​/­; and the Geneva Convention, International Committee of the Red Cross, https://­www​.­icrc​.­org​/­eng​/­assets​/­files​/­publications​/­icrc​-­002​-­0173​.­pdf. 55. “The ‘Fair Deal,’ ” New York Times, January 9, 1949, e1. 56. Virgil W. Dean, “Charles F. Brannan and the Rise and Fall of Truman’s ‘Fair Deal’ for Farmers,” Agricultural History 69, no. 1 (1995): 28–53. 57. “The ‘Fair Deal,’ ” e1. 58. Truman, quoted in United Press, “It’s ‘Fair Deal’ Now, States the President,” New York Times, January 6, 1949, 1. 59. George Eckel, “ ‘Me-­Tooism’ Scored at a gop Meeting,” New York Times, July 29, 1949, 18. 60. Virkus, quoted in Eckel, “ ‘Me-­Tooism.’ ” 61. Alan Derickson, “Health Security for All? Social Unionism and Universal Health Insurance, 1935–1958,” Journal of American History 80, no. 4 (1994). 62. “Truman Sees A-­Survivors,” Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1964, 1. 63. Oxford En­glish Dictionary, s.v. “alien.” 64. On the golden age of science fiction, see Isaac Asimov, “Introduction,” in ­Great Tales of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, ed. Charles Waugh and Martin Greenberg (New York: Galahad Books, 1991), i–­xxii. 65. On ­these alien themes, see Neil Badmington, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (New York: Routledge, 2004). 66. As nasa scientist Dr. George E. Mueller predicted, “Man ­will live and work in space for long periods of time. Men ­will be ferried between ­these stations and the ground in re-­usable land-­landing spacecraft. The station ­will be used by multiple agencies of the government or industry to satisfy a broad spectrum of uses.” Mueller, quoted in John Noble Wilford, “When Man Has Stations in Space,” New York Times, October 19, 1969, e9. 67. Dwight Eisenhower, “Text of Eisenhower’s Address to the 15th Session of U.N. General Assembly,” New York Times, September 23, 1960, 14. 68. Gene Fowler Jr., dir., I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), Paramount Studios, dvd released 2004. 69. William Cameron Menzies, dir., Invaders from Mars (1953), Shout! Factory Studio, dvd released 2015. Notes to Chapter 3  225

70. Stanley Kramer, dir., On the Beach (1959), Kino Lorber Films, dvd released 2014. 71. On Strangelove’s “mechanical hand,” see Bosley Crowther, “Is Nothing Sacred? Two New Films Make Mockeries of Some Very Serious ­Things,” New York Times, February 2, 1964, x1; Bosley Crowther, “Kubrick Film Pres­ents Sellers in Three Roles,” New York Times, January 30, 1964, 24. 72. See, for example, G. Banks, P. Short, A. J. Martinez, R. Latchaw, G. Ratcliff, and F. Boller, “The Alien Hand Syndrome: Clinical and Postmortem Findings,” Archives of Neurology 46, no. 4 (1989): 456–59. 73. Boyd R. Keenan, quoted in “Taming of the Scientist?,” New York Times, July 26, 1964, e7. 74. “Eugenics and War,” Scientific Monthly 52, no. 4 (1941): 388. 75. “Eugenics and War,” 388.

4. INNER AND OUTER SPACES

Epigraph: Joshua Lederberg, “Life in Space,” unpublished document, 1960, B. Articles, Joshua Lederberg Papers, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, 1. 1. See “Flu from Venus?,” Time, February 21, 1944, 90; “Space and Bugs,” Time, January 25, 1960, 50; “Exobiology: Quarantine for Space Travelers?,” Time, June 4, 1965, 70; Carl Sagan, Elliott C. Levinthal, and Joshua Lederberg, “Contamination of Mars,” Science 159, no. 3820 (1968); Joshua Lederberg, “Lunar Quarantine,” New York Times, July 13, 1969, e13. 2. Joshua Lederberg, “Fragments from a Scientific Autobiography,” unpublished document, 1969, B. Autobiographies, Joshua Lederberg Papers, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, 1–12; Joshua Lederberg and E. L. Tatum, “Sex in Bacteria: Ge­ne­tic Studies, 1945–1952,” Science 118, no. 3059 (1953); Joshua Lederberg, “Ge­ne­tic Recombination in Bacteria,” Science 122, no. 3176 (1955); Joshua Lederberg, “Ge­ne­tic Transduction,” American Scientist 44, no. 3 (1956). 3. Kevin Warwick, “Joshua Lederberg,” Biography 24, no. 4 (2001): 978–82. 4. Joshua Lederberg, “Exobiology: Approaches to Life beyond the Earth,” Science 132, no. 3432 (1960). See also Harold M. Schmeck, “Rockets’ Effect on Moon Feared; Non-­Sterile Space Ship May Distort Life on Other Planets, Experts Say,” New York Times, July 6, 1958, 17. 5. Robin Marantz Henig, “ ‘Where Is Every­body?’ Exobiologists Continue to Search for Life on Other Planets,” BioScience 30, no. 1 (1980): 9. 6. George Gaylord Simpson, “The Nonprevalence of Humanoids,” Science 143, no. 3608 (1964). 7. Simpson, “The Nonprevalence of Humanoids,” 770. 8. As Steven Dick and James E. Strick write, “­because the ufo craze had been sweeping the country since 1947, from its inception exobiology walked a fine line between being perceived as at the cutting edge of futuristic science and seeming to be, in the public eye, a ‘search for ­little green men.’ ” Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick, The Living Universe: nasa and the Development of Astrobiology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 30. 226  Notes to Chapter 3

9. Audra J. Wolfe, “Germs in Space: Joshua Lederberg, Exobiology, and the Public Imagination, 1958–1964,” Isis 93, no. 2 (2002): 183–205. 10. Lederberg, “Exobiology,” 398. 11. Carl Sagan, “Biological Contamination of the Moon,” Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences in the United States of Amer­i­ca 46, no. 3 (1960): 396. 12. “Exobiology: Quarantine for Space Travelers?,” Time, June 4, 1965, 70. 13. Lederberg, “Exobiology,” 399. 14. Stanley L. Miller, “A Production of Amino Acids ­under Pos­si­ble Primitive Earth Conditions,” Science 117, no. 3046 (1953): 528–29. 15. “Earth Life Not from Space,” Science News Letter 81, no. 1 (1962): 4. 16. Wallace O. Fenn, “The Challenge of Space Biology,” American Institute of Biological Sciences Bulletin 8, no. 2 (1958): 15; Joshua Lederberg and Dean B. Cowie, “Moondust,” Science 127, no. 3313 (1958): 1473–75; Sagan, “Biological Contamination of the Moon,” 398. 17. George Claus and Bartholomew Nagy, “A Microbiological Examination of Some Carbonaceous Chondrites,” Nature 192 (November 18, 1961): 594–96; George Claus and Bartholomew Nagy, “Considerations of Extraterrestrial Taxa,” Taxon 11, no. 5 (1962): 160–61. 18. Ryoichi Hayatsu, “Orgueil Meteorite: Organic Nitrogen Contents,” American Association for the Advancement of Science 146, no. 3649 (1964): 1291. See also Frank L. Staplin, “Microfossils from the Orgueil Meteroite,” Micropaleontology 8, no. 3 (1962): 343–47; Frank W. Fitch and Edward Anders, “Or­ga­nized Ele­ment: Pos­si­ble Identification in Orgueil Meteorite,” Science 140, no. 3571 (1963). 19. Edward Anders, Eugene R. DuFresne, Ryoichi Hayatsu, Albert Cavaille, Ann DuFresne, and Frank W. Fitch, “Contaminated Meteorite,” Science 146, no. 3648 (1964): 1157–61. 20. “Amino Acids in a Meteorite,” Science News 98, no. 23 (1970): 429. 21. For this definition of molecular biology, see William Astbury, “Molecular Biology or Ultrastructural Biology?” Nature 190 (1961): 1124. 22. Joshua Lederberg, “Dangers of Reprogramming Cells,” Science 158, no. 3799 (1967): 313. 23. Joshua Lederberg, “The Biological ­Future of Man,” in Man and His ­Future, ed. Gordon W. Wolstenholme, 2nd ed. (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1967), 270. 24. Joshua Lederberg, “Molecular Biology, Eugenics, and Euphenics,” Nature 198, no. 4879 (1963): 428. 25. Joshua Lederberg, “A Crisis in Evolution,” New Scientist 21, no. 375 (1963): 212. 26. Lederberg, “A Crisis in Evolution,” 212–13. 27. Lederberg, “Molecular Biology, Eugenics, and Euphenics,” 429. Elsewhere, Lederberg defines “the distinction between eugenics, that is, programmed evolution, and euphenics, that is, the reprogramming of somatic cells and the modification of development.” Lederberg, “Dangers of Reprogramming Cells,” 313. Lederberg also writes, “What we have overlooked is euphenics, the engineering of ­human development. Development is the translation of the ge­ne­tic instructions of the egg, embodied in its dna, which direct the unfolding of its substance to form the living, breathing organism.” Lederberg, “The Biological ­Future of Man,” 265. Notes to Chapter 4  227

28. Lederberg, “Molecular Biology, Eugenics, and Euphenics,” 429. 29. Lederberg, “Molecular Biology, Eugenics, and Euphenics,” 428–29. 30. Stephen L. Endicott, “Germ Warfare and ‘Plausible Denial’: The Korean War, 1952–1953,” Modern China 5, no. 1 (1979): 79–104; Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and ­Korea (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998); Phil B. Fontanarosa and Martin Furmanski, “Biological Warfare in the 1940s and 1950s,” Journal of the American Medical Association 284, no. 5 (2000): 1877–78. 31. Joshua Lederberg, “Biological Warfare and the Extinction of Man: Statement by Professor Joshua Lederberg of Stanford University before the Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments, of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs; Rep. Clement J. Zablocki, Chm,” unpublished document, December 2, 1969, B. Speeches, Joshua Lederberg Papers, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, 1–2. 32. Lederberg, “Biological Warfare and the Extinction of Man,” 4. 33. Lederberg, “Biological Warfare and the Extinction of Man.” See also Joshua Lederberg, “A Treaty Proposal on Germ Warfare,” unpublished document, September 24, 1966, Joshua Lederberg Papers, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD. 34. “Texts of Nixon-­Brezhnev Declaration and of Joint Communiqué at End of Visit,” New York Times, May 30, 1972, 18. The princi­ples of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention have been continually ­violated due to the prob­lem of surveillance. See, for example, Malcolm W. Browne, “Soviet Believed Equipped to Wage Chemical and Perhaps Biological War,” New York Times, December 8, 1980, a10; Bernard Gwertzman, “Reagan Is Said to Find Breaches by Soviet of Agreements on Arms,” New York Times, January 14, 1984; “About the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention,” Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, accessed January 12, 2017, http://­shodhganga​.­inflibnet​.­ac​.­in​/­bitstream​/­10603​/2­ 9372​/1­ 1​/1­ 1​_a­ nnexures​.­pdf. 35. “Iraq Renounces Germ War, But . . . ,” New York Times, February 26, 1998, a10. 36. The concept of the “Third World” originated in 1950s French economics and quickly passed to En­glish usage. For a discussion of the use of “Third World” during the Cold War, see B. R. Tomlinson, “What Was the Third World?,” Journal of Con­ temporary History 38, no. 2 (2003): 307–21. On the etymology of the term, see Oxford En­glish Dictionary, s.v. “Third World.” 37. Lederberg, “The Biological ­Future of Man,” 265. 38. Lederberg, “Molecular Biology, Eugenics, and Euphenics,” 429. 39. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 56–103; Kline, Building a Better Race. Lederberg famously went on rec­ord in f­ avor of the birth control pill, in spite of disagreements within the medical community as to its efficacy and safety. See Joshua Lederberg, “What about the Pill?,” Washington Post, September 18, 1966, a14; “Pill Heralds Biological Change,” Washington Post, September 25, 1966. 40. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 150–201. 41. Joshua Lederberg, “Long-­Range Study ­Mustn’t Sidetrack Birth Control,” Washington Post, March 21, 1970, a15. 228  Notes to Chapter 4

42. Lederberg, quoted in Walter ­Sullivan, “For Science, an Awesome Choice,” New York Times, December 30, 1969, 22. 43. Joshua Lederberg, “­Mental Retardation: Challenge to ­Mental Advance, Pre­sen­ ta­tion by Joshua Lederberg, Ph.D., Dedication Ceremony—­Mental Retardation Center, ucla,” October 15, 1969, B. Speeches, Joshua Lederberg Papers, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, 3. 44. H. L. Nadler and A. B. Gerbie, “Role of Amniocentesis in the Intrauterine Detection of Ge­ne­tic Disorders,” New E ­ ngland Journal of Medicine 282, no. 11 (March 12, 1970): 596–99; M. F. Niermeijer et al., “Prenatal Diagnosis of Ge­ne­tic Disorders,” Journal of Medical Ge­ne­tics 13, no. 3 (1976): 182–94; Jane M. Friedman, “­Legal Implications of Amniocentesis,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 123, no. 1 (1974): 95–100. 45. A. Milunksy et al., “Prenatal Ge­ne­tic Diagnosis,” New E ­ ngland Journal of Medicine 283, no. 25 (December 17, 1970): 1498–503. 46. Rayna Rapp, Testing ­Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in Amer­i­ca (New York: Routledge, 2000), 128. 47. Friedman, “­Legal Implications of Amniocentesis,” 93. 48. Friedman, “­Legal Implications of Amniocentesis,” 133. 49. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Reproduction, Ethics, and Public Policy: The Federal Sterilization Regulations,” Hastings Center Report 9, no. 5 (1979): 30. 50. Petchesky, “Reproduction, Ethics, and Public Policy,” 29–30. 51. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). See also John Hart Ely, “The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade,” Yale Law Journal 82, no. 5 (1973): 920–49. 52. Richard Wasserman points out the difficulty of “translating medical terms such as ‘trimester’ and ‘viability’ into ­legal criteria,” an imprecision that “has resulted in many recent enactments that overtly conflict with the Supreme Court decisions.” See Richard Wasserman, “Implications of the Abortion Decisions: Post ‘Roe’ and ‘Doe’ Litigation and Legislation,” Columbia Law Review 74, no. 2 (1974): 241. 53. Friedman, “­Legal Implications of Amniocentesis,” 133. 54. Ad Hoc Committee on Ge­ne­tic Counseling, “Ge­ne­tic Counseling,” American Journal of ­Human Ge­ne­tics 27, no. 2 (1975): 240–41. 55. On the concept of “wrongful life,” see Alexander Morgan Capron, “Tort Liability in Ge­ne­tic Counseling,” Columbia Law Review 79, no. 4 (1979): 618–84; Horace B. Robertson Jr., “­Toward Rational Bound­aries of Tort Liability for Injury to the Unborn: Prenatal Injuries, Preconception Injuries, and Wrongful Life,” Duke Law Journal 1978, no. 6 (1979): 1401–57. 56. On “wrongful life” and “bastardy,” see, for example, “Compensation for the Harmful Effects of Illegitimacy,” Columbia Law Review 66, no. 1 (1966): 127–49; Maxine H. Linde, “Liability to Bastard for Negligence Resulting in His Conception,” Stanford Law Review 18, no. 3 (1966): 530–38. 57. Sonia Fader, Sperm Banking: A Reproductive Resource (Los Angeles: California Cryobank, 1993), 2–3. See also R. H. Foote, “The History of Artificial Insemination: Selected Notes and Notables” (pre­sen­ta­tion, American Society of Animal Science Symposia, January 2002). Notes to Chapter 4  229

58. Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End, 1997), 4–17. 59. See, for example, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Foetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” in Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood, and Medicine, ed. Michelle Stanworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Emily Martin, The W ­ oman in the Body: A Cultural Analy­sis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon, 1987); Barbara Duden, Disembodying ­Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Alice Adams, Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Lit­er­a­ture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Sandra Matthews and Laura Wexler, Pregnant Pictures (New York: Routledge, 2000). 60. A. Adams, Reproducing the Womb, 101. In “The Reproductive Revolution: How Far Have We Come?” (lecture, London School of Economics, London, November 24, 2005), Sarah Franklin argued that the absence of the maternal body is even more evident in recent reproductive photo­graphs that feature the “tools of the trade,” such as a “close up of cells [with] a needle,” suggesting that “life itself ” is literally being “remade.” 61. In Pregnant Pictures, Matthews and Wexler describe Nilsson’s images as “cultural icons” (195). 62. Edward C. Hughes, “Life in Inner Space,” American Journal of Nursing 63, no. 1 (1963): 92. 63. Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics, September 1960, 26–75. 64. Lederberg, “Animals for Research,” Washington Post, August 21, 1966, 45. 65. Lederberg, “The Biological ­Future of Man,” 269, 268. 66. Lederberg, “The Biological ­Future of Man,” 270; Lederberg, “Our Pal, the Computer,” Washington Post, January 29, 1967, e21. 67. William H. Whyte, The Organ­ization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). 68. Whyte, The Organ­ization Man, 121. 69. Lederberg, “Our Pal, the Computer,” e21. 70. Lederberg, “Molecular Biology, Eugenics, and Euphenics,” 430. 71. Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman ­Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). On the etymology of “posthuman,” see Oxford En­glish Dictionary, s.v. “posthuman.” 72. Maurice Parmelee, Poverty and Social Pro­gress (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 318–19, emphasis mine. 73. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (1975; reprint, New York: Ecco, 2002). 74. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Letter Writer,” New Yorker, January 13, 1968, 26. 75. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011). 76. See, for example, Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to ­Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Strug­gle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Marjorie Agosin, ­Women, Gender, and ­Human Rights: A Global Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Lorena Oropeza, 230  Notes to Chapter 4

¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 77. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex [1949], trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-­Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011). 78. Audre Lorde, ­Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1984), 110. 79. bell hooks’s ­Ain’t I a W ­ oman? Black ­Women and Feminism (Boston: South End, 1981) is one of the texts that most clearly lays out black ­women’s corporeal dehumanization (con­temporary to the black feminist movement). Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body provides a history of the abuse of black ­women’s bodies as reproductive chattel. 80. A. Breeze Harper, “Phenomenology of Race and Whiteness: Knowing, Feeling, and Experiencing the Vegan ‘Exotic,’ ” in Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman, ed. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2011): 221–38. 81. Raymond Dominick, “The Roots of the Green Movement in the United States and West Germany,” Environmental Review 12, no. 3 (1988): 1–30. Dominick suggests that the green movement in the United States was born out of student organ­izing, anticapitalist sentiment, and civil rights agendas. 82. Rachel Carson, ­Silent Spring, 104th ed. (New York: Mari­ner Books, 2002). 83. Jody Emel and Jennifer Wolch, “Witnessing the Animal Moment,” in Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature/Culture Borderlands, ed. Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (London: Verso, 1998), 12. 84. iucn Red List of Threatened Species, International Union for Conservation of Nature, https://­www​.­iucn​.­org​/­resources​/­conservation​-­tools​/­iucn​-­red​-­list​-­threatened​ -­species, accessed May 9, 2008. 85. Maria Buchinger, “International Cooperation in Natu­ral Area Preservation,” BioScience 18, no. 5 (1968): 388–92. On the actions of the ssc and the iucn, see James Fisher, Noel Simon, and Jack Vincent, Wildlife in Danger (New York: Viking, 1969). 86. “Species Survival Plan Programs,” Association of Zoos and Aquar­iums, accessed December 12, 2014, https://­www​.­aza​.­org​/­species​-­survival​-­plan​-­programs. 87. Robert G. Weisbord, “Birth Control and the Black American: A ­Matter of Genocide?,” Demography 10, no. 4 (1973): 587. 88. George Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 145–76; Clayborne Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: ­Grand Central, 2001), 200–204. 89. On the history of the environmental justice movement, see Martin Melosi, “Equity, Eco-­Racism, and Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 19, no. 3 (1995): 1–16. 90. Weisbord, “Birth Control and the Black American,” 580. 91. Brenda K. Hyson, “Birth Control,” Black Panther, July 30, 1970, 12–13. 92. Dick Gregory, “My Answer to Genocide,” Ebony, October 1971, 66. On black attitudes ­toward birth control and reproductive control, see Loretta J. Ross, “African-­ American ­Women and Abortion,” in Abortion Wars: A Half ­Century of Strug­gle, 1950–2000, ed. Rickie Solinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Doris Notes to Chapter 4  231

Witt, Black Hunger: Soul Food and Amer­i­ca (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 138; Roberts, Killing the Black Body. 93. Keith Wailoo, ­Dying in the City of Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 184–90. 94. Weisbord, “Birth Control and the Black American,” 502. 95. Wailoo, ­Dying in the City of Blues, 185. 96. Linus Pauling, “Reflections on a New Biology: Foreword,” ucla Law Review 15, no. 2 (February 1968): 269. Keith Wailoo and Stephen Pemberton address Pauling’s remarks further in The Troubled Dream of Ge­ne­tic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-­Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 123–36. See also Wailoo, ­Dying in the City of Blues, 186–87.

PART III. INTERIORITY, 1980S–2000S

1. William F. Buckley Jr., “Crucial Steps in Combating the aids Epidemic: Identify All the Carriers,” New York Times, March 18, 1986.

5. OF SODOMY AND CANNIBALISM

1. Alan M. Dershowitz, “Emphasize Scientific Information,” New York Times, March 18, 1986, a27. 2. Haitians ­were also identified as having a similar disease during the early 1980s. See Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880, expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 122. 3. Larry Gostin and William J. Curran, “The Limits of Compulsion in Controlling aids,” Hastings Center Report 16, no. 6 (1986): 25. 4. See, for example, Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon, 1993). 5. Catharine MacKinnon, Are ­Women ­Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 6. Ticktin, “The Gendered ­Human of Humanitarianism.” 7. Judith Butler, Gender Trou­ble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006); José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Per­for­mance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Anne Fausto-­Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Schiebinger, Nature’s Body. 8. Butler, Gender Trou­ble, 104. 9. Cindy Patton, Sex and Germs: The Politics of aids (Boston: South End, 1985); Brandt, No Magic Bullet; Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, aids, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox, eds., aids: The Burdens of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 10. For a historical trajectory of events relevant to this chapter, see t­ able 5.1. 232  Notes to Chapter 4

11. Renee Sabatier, Blaming ­Others: Prejudice, Race, and Worldwide aids (Philadelphia: New Society, 1988); Cindy Patton, Inventing aids (New York: Routledge, 1990); Steven Epstein, Impure Science: aids, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of aids (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 12. Sabatier, Blaming O ­ thers, 105. 13. “Pat Buchanan in His Own Words,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (fair), February 26, 1996, https://­fair​.­org​/­press​-­release​/­pat​-­buchanan​-­in​-­his​-­own​-­words​/­. 14. Mark E. Pietzryk, “Queer Science,” New Republic, October 3, 1994, 11. 15. Walt Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 104. 16. Pietzryk, “Queer Science,” 12. 17. John Parry, “aids as a Handicapping Condition,” ­Mental and Physical Disability Law Reporter 9, no. 6 (1985): 402–3. For more on the relationship between the law and the h ­ uman, see Samera Esmeir, “At Once ­Human and Not H ­ uman: Law, Gender, and Historical Becoming in Colonial Egypt,” Gender and History 23, no. 2 (2011): 235–49. 18. See the case of White v. Western School Corp., No. 86-144, Clinton County Ind. Cir. Ct. (April 10, 1986). 19. Parry, “aids as a Handicapping Condition,” 404. 20. Benjamin Keppel, “Insurers Try to Screen Out aids Cases,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1985, 1. 21. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 84–100. 22. William F. Buckley, “Identify All the Carriers,” New York Times, March 18, 1986, a27. 23. Ben Robbins, “Buckley Retracts Tattoo Proposal,” Gay Community News, December 14–20, 1986, 2. 24. Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an aids Activist (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989). 25. Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust, 263, 264–65. See also Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1966; reprint, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). 26. On the Holocaust as a meta­phor, see, for example, Alan Bowne, Beirut (New York: Broadway, 1988); on Holocaust revivalism in the 1990s, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). 27. Hugh Raffles, “Jews,” in Insectopedia (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 141–61; Uli Linke, Blood and Nation: The Eu­ro­pean Aesthetics of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine ­under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 28. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 144. 29. Daniel E. Beauchamp, “Morality and the Health of the Body Politic,” Hastings Center Report 16, no. 6 (1986): 31, emphasis mine. 30. Interview 2 with Dr. Robert Gallo, by Victoria A. Harden and Dennis Rodrigues, November 4, 1994, In Their Own Words: nih Researchers Recall the Early Years of aids, Notes to Chapter 5  233

National Institutes of Health, https://­history​.­nih​.­gov​/­nihinownwords​/­assets​/­media​ /­pdf​/­Gallo94​-­11​.­pdf. 31. Deborah B. Gould, “The Shame of Gay Pride in the Early Years of aids Activism,” in Gay Shame, ed. David Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 222–45. 32. Lee Edelman, No ­Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 2004). Judith Butler has also noted that the rejection of normative gender roles is tantamount to the rejection of one’s ­human rights. See Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 66. 33. Douglas A. Feldman, aids, Culture, and Gay Men (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010). 34. Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Pres­ent (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 331–33. Washington also points out that the concept of the “innocent victim” is lost once aids becomes understood as a predominantly Third World and First World minority “prob­lem.” 35. François Clavel et al., “Isolation of a New ­Human Retrovirus from West African Patients with aids,” Science 233, no. 4761 (1986): 343–46. 36. Lisa Ely, “Virus Has Questionable and Controversial Origins,” Hyde Park Citizen, April 16, 1992, 6. See also Kenneth M. Boyd, Roger Hines, and Anthony J. Pinching, “An aids Lexicon,” Journal of Medical Ethics 26, no. 1 (2000): 76. 37. aids Action Newsletter 6 (1989): 1; see also Patton, Inventing aids, 94. 38. “S. Africa’s Mbeki Withdraws from hiv/aids Debate: Report,” Agence France-­ Presse, October 15, 2000, https://­khn​.o ­ rg​/­morning​-b ­ reakout​/d ­ r00000601​/­; Rachel L. Swarns, “South Africa in a Furor over Advice about aids,” New York Times, March 19, 2000, b2. 39. Mhlongo is one among many physicians who form part of what has been called the “counter-­epistemic community” in the aids debate. See Jeremy R. Youde, aids, South Africa, and the Politics of Knowledge (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 107; Panos Institute, aids and the Third World (Philadelphia: New Society, 1989), 71. 40. On the “­human” and the animal world, see William Ian Miller, “Darwin’s Disgust,” in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (New York: Berg, 2005), 335–56. 41. Examples include Edward A. Gargan, “The Ivory Trade Endangers a Species,” New York Times, December 8, 1985, a9; “The Sahara: Desert Slaughter,” The Economist, March 2, 1991, 42; Joseph Conreras, “The Killing Fields,” Newsweek, November 18, 1991, 86; Jane Perlez, “Rhino Near Last Stand in African Wild, Animal Experts Warn,” New York Times, July 7, 1997, c4. 42. “In Compromise, U.S. Unit Declares African Chimps to Be Endangered,” Washington Post, March 1, 1989, a24; Michael D. Shear, “U.S. Puts African Chimpanzees on Endangered List,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1989, 17. 234  Notes to Chapter 5

43. This popularization of primates was very dif­fer­ent from what occurred in the early twentieth ­century, when the characters of the chimpanzee and the gorilla attained cultural significance. During the 1980s, several individual primates, particularly gorillas, became cultural icons, due to their perceived unique capacity for sign language and ­human companionship. 44. Linda Marie Fedigan, “Science and the Successful Female: Why ­There Are So Many ­Women Primatologists,” American Anthropologist 96, no. 3 (1994): 529–40. 45. ­Virginia Morell, “Called ‘Trimates,’ Three Bold W ­ omen ­Shaped Their Field,” Science 260, no. 5106 (1993): 420–25. 46. See, for example, Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist. 47. Françoise d’Eaubonne, Le feminisme ou la mort (Paris: Pierre Horay, 1974); Marti Kheel, “An/Aesthetics: The Re-­Presentation of ­Women and Animals,” Between the Species 1, no. 2 (1985): 37–45. 48. Susanne Kappeler, “Speciesism, Racism, Nationalism . . . ​or the Power of Scientific Subjectivity,” in Animals and ­Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 320–52. 49. Donald G. McNeil Jr., “The ­Great Ape Massacre,” New York Times Magazine, May 9, 1999, 54. 50. P. A. Marx, C. Apetrei, and E. Drucker, “aids as a Zoonosis? Confusion over the Origin of the Virus and the Origin of the Epidemics,” Journal of Medical Primatology 33, nos. 5–6 (2004): 220–26. 51. Philip M. Boffey, “U.S. and French Teams Report aids Virus Finds,” New York Times, March 27, 1986, a1, d25. 52. “Chimps Should Not Be Food,” New York Times, September 11, 2001, f3. 53. Dale Peterson, Eating Apes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 65–94. 54. Gina Kolata, “The Genesis of an Epidemic: ­Humans, Chimps, and a Virus,” New York Times, September 4, 2001, f1. 55. Katherine Roberts, “Ideas and Trends: Breakthroughs in aids Research,” New York Times, March 30, 1986, a8; “Scientists Admit aids Identification Error,” New York Times, February 23, 1988, c3. 56. John Iliffe, The African aids Epidemic: A History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 58. 57. African perspectives on the epidemic are of course varied and multitudinous. ­Because this work is largely concerned with U.S. conceptualizations of the disease, I do not have the space to delve into ­these complicated views. 58. David Quammen, “Almost Cannibalism: The Chances of Keeping Africans from Eating All Their Apes ­Don’t Look Good,” New York Times Book Review, June 15, 2003, 16. 59. Ellen Barry, “A Taste of Baboon and Monkey Meat, and Maybe of Prison, Too,” New York Times, November 17, 2007, b1. 60. McNeil, “The ­Great Ape Massacre,” 57. See also “Chimps u ­ nder the Gun,” pbs: Scientific American Frontiers, April 3, 2001, http://­www​.­chedd​-­angier​.­com​/­frontiers​ /­season11​.­html. Notes to Chapter 5  235

61. “World News Briefs: 10 in Gabon Die of Ebola ­after Feast of Chimp Meat,” New York Times, February 17, 1996, a5. 62. Newspapers surveyed include Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. 63. Randy Shilts, Politics, ­People, and the aids Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); Roger Spottiswoode, dir., And the Band Played On (1993), released as dvd by hbo Studios 2006. 64. Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story (New York: Doubleday, 1994). 65. Preston, The Hot Zone, 292–93. 66. Barry, “A Taste of Baboon,” b1. 67. John Marzulli, “Staten Island Octomom Mamie Manneh Gets Probation in Monkey Meat Case,” New York Daily News, December 12, 2009, http://­www​ .­nydailynews​.­com​/­news​/­ny​_­crime​/­2009​/1­ 2​/1­ 2​/2­ 009​-1­ 2​-­12​_­monkeymeat​_­ma​_­will​_­not​ _­be​_­caged​.­html. 68. Kai Wright and Andre Banks, “We Demand Accountability: The 2008 Presidential Elections and the Black aids Epidemic,” Black aids Institute, December 2007, http://­img​.­thebody​.­com​/­bai​/­2007​/­election2008​.­pdf. 69. Kai Wright and Myisha Patterson-­Gatson, “Making Change Real: The State of aids in Black Amer­i­ca,” Black aids Institute, February 2009, http://­www​.­thebody​ .­com​/­content​/­art50747​.­html. 70. Cathy J. Cohen, The Bound­aries of Blackness: aids and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 110. 71. Kerry Eleveld, “Obama Lifts hiv Travel Ban,” Advocate, October 30, 2009, https://­www​.­advocate​.­com​/­news​/­daily​-­news​/­2009​/­10​/­30​/­obama​-­lifts​-­hiv​-­travel​-­ban.

6. EVERY­T HING EXCEPT THE SQUEAL

1. See, for example, Mervyn Deitel, “It’s a Fat, Fat, Fat, Fat World,” International Bariatric Club, December 16, 2014, http://­www​.­ibcclub​.­org​/­its​-­a​-­fat​-­fat​-­fat​-­fat​-­world​ /­; Eirik Garnas, “The ­Human Microbiome in Overweight and Obesity: The Dawn of a New Era?,” Darwinian Medicine, December 18, 2013, http://­darwinian​-­medicine​.­com​ /­the​-­human​-­microbiome​-­in​-­overweight​-­and​-o ­ besity​-t­ he​-d ­ awn​-o ­ f​-­a-​ ­new​-­era​/­; “Is the Internet Dehumanising Us?,” Charles Said That: Digital Marketing, March 18, 2011, http://­charliesaidthat​.­com​/­digital​/­social​-­media​/­is​-t­ he​-i­ nternet​-d ­ ehumanising​-u ­ s​/­. 2. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Dover, 2001), 28. 3. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Peter Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 4. Sander Gilman, Fat Boys: A Slim Book (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Kathleen LeBesco, “Quest for a Cause: The Fat Gene, the Gay Gene, and the New Eugenics,” in Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum, ed., The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 65–74. 236  Notes to Chapter 5

5. Gilman, Fat Boys, 47; “Obesity Bigger Threat Than Terrorism?,” cbs News, March 1, 2006, http://­www​.­cbsnews​.­com​/­stories​/­2006​/­03​/­01​/­health​/­main1361849​ .­shtml​?­loc​=i­nterstitialskip. 6. DeWayne Wickham, “Obesity Is the ­Enemy: 2 ‘Soldiers’ Take Up the Fight,” usa ­Today, April 17, 2007. 7. “Obesity Costs More Than Military Spending Worldwide,” cbs News, November 20, 2014, http://­www​.­cbsnews​.­com​/­news​/­obesity​-­costs​-­more​-­than​-­war​-­and​ -­terrorism​-­combined; “Obesity Bigger Cost for Britain Than War and Terror,” The Guardian, November 20, 2014, http://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­society​/­2014​/­nov​/­20​ /­obesity​-­bigger​-­cost​-­than​-­war​-­and​-­terror; Hugh Pym, “Cost of Obesity ‘Greater Than War and Terrorism,’ ” bbc News, November 20, 2014, http://­www​.­bbc​.­com​/­news​ /­health​-­30125440. 8. “Statistics Related to Overweight and Obesity,” Weight-­Control Information Network, National Institute of Health, March 20, 2013. 9. Pym, “Cost of Obesity.” 10. See, for instance, Radley Balko, “Government Gets Fat Fighting Obesity,” Fox News, February 26, 2004, http://­www​.­foxnews​.­com​/­story​/­0,2933,112546,00​.­html. 11. Phillip Rawls, “Extra Pounds Mean Insurance Fees for Ala. Workers,” Business Week, August 21, 2008, https://­www​.­semissourian​.­com​/­story​/­1454952​.­html. An obese bmi is determined by the following computation: (pounds/height squared) times 703; results over 35 are considered obese. 12. Jodi Kantor, “As Obesity Fight Hits Cafeteria, Many Fear a Note from School,” New York Times, January 8, 2007. 13. Michael I. Loewy, “Working with Fat ­Children in Schools,” Radiance (fall 1998), http://­www​.­radiancemagazine​.­com​/­kids​_­project​/­working​.­htm. 14. Confidential correspondence, February 1, 2005. 15. H. E. Bays, J. M. Gonzalez-­Campoy, and A. B. Schorr, “What Men Should Know about Metabolic Syndrome, Adiposopathy and ‘Sick Fat,’ ” International Journal of Clinical Practice 64, no. 13 (2010): 1735–39. 16. Disability has been one framework used to consider the personal and public costs of obesity. Many activists from the fat ac­cep­tance movement, or the fat pride movement, have welcomed the corollary between disability and obesity, particularly when it comes to the question of civil rights and discrimination in the workplace. ­Others within the movement have refused the label, concerned that it may stigmatize, or further pathologize, obese persons. For an overview of the fat ac­cep­tance movement, see Marilyn Wann, fat! so? ­Because You ­Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size! (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1998); and Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, eds., The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 17. Joseph Williams, “Curing Obesity through Sterility: California’s Controversial Program ­under the Microscope,” Pacific Northwest Medical Journal (April 1, 2005). 18. “Obesity and Ge­ne­tics,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed August 9, 2014, http://­www​.­cdc​.­gov​/­obesity​/­index​.­html. 19. The use of “Hispanic or Latino” is in keeping with governmental language, and is intended to include persons of “Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central Notes to Chapter 6  237

American or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” See “U.S. Census Bureau News,” January 16, 2013, https://­www​.­census​.­gov​/­topics​/­population​/­hispanic​ -­origin​/­about​.­html. 20. Margaret K. Bass, “On Being a Fat Black Girl in a Fat-­Hating Culture,” in Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-­Representations by African American ­Women, ed. Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 229. Bass quotes Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 21. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (with Michael Moon), “Divinity,” in Tendencies, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 217. 22. See chapter 2, Stephen J. Gould, The Mismea­sure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). 23. Lawrence Cohen, “The Other Kidney: Biopolitics beyond Recognition,” in Commodifying Bodies, ed. Nancy Scheper-­Hughes and Loïc Wacquant (London: sage, 2002), 9–30; Nancy Scheper-­Hughes, “Commodity Fetishism and Organs Trafficking,” in Scheper-­Hughes and Wacquant, Commodifying Bodies, 31–62; Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical ­Labor: Tissue Donors, and Research Subjects in a Global Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 24. Cooper and Waldby, Clinical ­Labor. 25. See Lesley A. Sharp, The Transplant Imaginary: Mechanical Hearts, Animal Parts, and Moral Thinking in Highly Experimental Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 26. The use of the term new ­here is complicated. Xenotransplantation as a field, both in concept and in practice, ­really has only risen within the last twenty or so years. However, examples can be found dating back to the late nineteenth c­ entury in which scientists attempted to manipulate animal parts for use in animal bodies, including skin grafts and gland transplantation. Perhaps what most distinguishes xenotransplantation research in the current moment is the creation of chimeric donors, or hybrid species genet­ically engineered for compatibility with the h ­ uman body. On the history of xenotransplantation, see Susan E. Lederer, Flesh and Blood: A Cultural History of Transplantation and Transfusion in Twentieth-­Century Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 211. On recent developments in the field of xenotransplantation, see Sharp, The Transplant Imaginary, chapter 4. 27. Sharp, The Transplant Imaginary, 60–68. 28. Ololade Olakanmi and Laura Purdy, “Xenotransplantation: For and Against,” Philosophy Now, no. 55 (May–­June 2006). See also Megan Sykes, Anthony J. F. d’Apice, and Mauro Sergio Sandrin, “Position Paper of the Ethics Committee of the International Xenotransplantation Association,” Transplantation 78, no. 8 (2004): 1101–7. On perv, see Iris Bittmann, Debora Mihica, Roland Plesker, and Joachim Denner, “Expression of Porcine Endogenous Retroviruses (perv) in Dif­fer­ent Organs of a Pig,” Virology 433, no. 2 (2012): 329–36. 29. Sam Brasch, “The Quest to Grow ­Human Organs inside Pigs Comes to the U.S.,” Modern Farmer, March 13, 2014, http://­modernfarmer​.­com​/­2014​/­03​/­ethics​-­using​-­pigs​ -­farms​-­human​-­organs​/­. 238  Notes to Chapter 6

30. Scott, quoted in Brasch, “The Quest to Grow ­Human Organs.” 31. “ ‘Hamfatters’ and a ‘Ham-­Fat Man,’ ” New York Times, March 5, 1883, 5. 32. Constant Reader, “A Plea for Specialists,” New York Times, July 15, 1893, 5. 33. J. K. Campbell, Original Comic Song: Ham Fat, American Broadsides and Ephemera, series 1, no. 708, rec­ord no. 10f453b06a909758 (n.p.: Frank Rivers’ ­Melodeon Com­pany, [1861–65]). All misspellings and irregularities are printed in the original. Other, similar versions of this song came out at the same time u ­ nder dif­fer­ent names. See, for instance, “Ham Fat, as Sung by Ben Cotton” (Horace Partridge, Boston, ca. 1863), American Song Sheets, Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections, series 1, vol. 4, http://­lcweb2​.1­ 0c​.­gov​/d ­ iglib​/i­ has​/l­ oc​.r­ bc​.­amss​.­as105090​/­mets​.­xml. 34. See, for example, Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 35. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th ­Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 91. 36. Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 92. 37. Herbert C. Covey and Dwight Eisnach, What the Slaves Ate: Recollections of African American Foods and Foodways from the Slave Narratives (Santa Barbara: abc-­c lio, 2009), 211–12. 38. As stated in the Old Testament (Leviticus 11:7–8): “And the pig, ­because it has a cloven hoof that is completely split, but ­will not regurgitate its cud; it is unclean for you. You s­ hall not eat of their flesh, and you s­ hall not touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.” As stated in the Qu’ran (Al-­Baqara 2:173): “He has made unlawful for you that which dies of itself and blood and the flesh of swine and that on which the name of any other than Allah has been invoked. But he who is driven by necessity, being neither disobedient nor exceeding the limit, then surely, Allah is Most Forgiving, Merciful.” Other religious taboos (including ­those held by Hindus and Sikhs) cover pigs ­under general rules of vegetarianism as a form of compassion ­toward animals. Old Testament and Qur’an passages as quoted in Palash Ghosh, “Pigs Heads Left at French Mosque: Why Muslims, Jews, and Hindus D ­ on’t Eat Pork,” International Business Times, August 2, 2012. 39. Elijah Muhammad, How to Eat to Live: Book 1 (Phoenix: Secretarius memps Ministries, 1967), ebook, chapter 4, “Why They Urge You to Eat the Swine.” 40. See, for instance, Cypress Hill, “Pigs,” 1991 (“This pig harassed the ­whole neighborhood / Well this pig worked at this station / This pig he killed my Homeboy / So the fuckin’ pig went on a vacation”); Body Count, “Cop Killer,” 1992 (“Die, die, die, pig, die! Fuck the police!”); Aesop Rock, “Pigs,” 2007 (“It all boils down to them shit-­soaked pigs / The pigs, the pigs, the dregs of what y’all aim for / The gluttonous muddy stomachs ­under the pudgy cakehole . . . ​And place a cloven hoof on the lucrative when con­ve­nient”); Lil’ Wayne, “Rich as Fuck,” 2013 (“Never talk to the cops, I ­don’t speak Pig Latin”). The use of pig for policeman was originally used in ­England in the early nineteenth ­century, and is understood as a derogatory term (Oxford En­glish Dictionary, s.v. “pig”). 41. It should be noted ­here that species-­as-­race in Peppa only pertains to mammals; birds, insects, amphibians, and reptiles occupy their “proper” place. That both Notes to Chapter 6  239

Peppa and Olivia are female characters is worth noting. Although it could be said that the pig’s condition as a domesticated, breeding/breedable animal, coupled with its portrayal of pink, adipose flesh, works to feminize the species, I am hesitant to think about gender simplistically in ­these texts, as each series features prominent male characters, and Peppa actually challenges many gender ste­reo­types. Ultimately, ­these issues require further time and exploration that are beyond the purview of this book. 42. Jennifer Smith, “­Couple Singing Peppa Pig Tune to Toddler ‘Forced Off Bus ­after Complaints They ­Were Being Racist’ B ­ ecause It Goes against Muslim Pork Ban,” Daily Mail, September 26, 2014, http://­www​.­dailymail​.­co​.­uk​/­news​/­article​-­2770621​/­ Couple​-s­ inging​-P ­ eppa​-P ­ ig​-t­ heme​-t­ une​-­toddler​-­daughter​-­thrown​-­bus​-­passenger​ -­accused​-­racist​.­html. 43. Katie Strick, “Oxford University Press Bans Sausages and Pigs from ­Children’s Books in Effort to ‘Avoid Offense’; Bizarre Clampdown Branded ‘Nonsensical Po­ liti­cal Correctness,’  ” Daily Mail, January 13, 2015, http://­www​.­dailymail​.­co​.­uk​/­news​ /­article​-­2908910​/­Oxford​-­University​-­Press​-­bans​-s­ ausages​-p ­ igs​-c­ hildren​-s­ ​-­books​-­avoid​ -­offending​-­Jews​-­Muslims​.­html. 44. Lauren Frayer, “Spain Fines Team of Racist, Banana-­Throwing Fan, But Is It Enough?,” Code Switch (blog), npr, May 9, 2014, http://­www​.­npr​.­org​/­blogs​/­codeswitch​ /­2014​/­05​/­09​/­310990212​/­spain​-­fines​-t­ eam​-o ­ f​-r­ acist​-b ­ anana​-­throwing​-­fan​-­but​-­is​-­it​ -­enough; Tom McGowan, “Bananas and Monkey Chants: Is Racism Endemic in Spanish Football?,” cnn, May 5, 2014, http://­edition​.­cnn​.­com​/­2014​/­05​/­05​/s­ port​/f­ ootball​/d ­ iop​ -­monkey​-­chants​-­racism​-­football​-­atletico​-­madrid​/­. 45. Robert Hay, “Why We Should Care about ‘We Are All Monkeys,’ Even if It Was a pr Campaign,” World Soccer Talk, May 4, 2014, http://­worldsoccertalk​.­com​/­2014​/­05​ /­04​/­the​-­we​-­are​-­all​-­monkeys​-m ­ edia​-c­ ampaign​/­. 46. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and ­Human Game,” Social Text 29, no. 1 (106) (2011): 152. 47. Hugh Raffles, “Jews, Lice, and History,” Public Culture 19, no. 3 (2007): 521–66. 48. Eliza Barclay, “A Nation of Meat Eaters: See How It All Adds Up,” The Salt: What’s On Your Plate (blog), npr, June 27, 2012, https://­www​.­npr​.­org​/­sections​/­thesalt​ /­2012​/­06​/­27​/­155527365​/­visualizing​-­a​-n ­ ation​-o ­ f​-m ­ eat​-e­ aters. 49. “The Joy of Pigs: Pigs as Pets,” pbs Nature, November 10, 1996, http://­www​.­pbs​ .­org​/­wnet​/­nature​/­the​-­joy​-­of​-p ­ igs​-p ­ igs​-a­ s​-p ­ ets​/­2124​/­. In par­tic­u­lar, potbellied pigs ­were touted as “the condo pet of the eighties—­clean, smart, small and affectionate. Imported into the United States from Canada, the first potbellies sold for up to $25,000!” Priscilla Valentine, “Potbellied Pig Be­hav­ior and Training,” excerpted on the Pig Placement Network website, http://­www​.­pigplacementnetwork​.­org​/­adopt​/­is​-­a​-­pig​ -­right​-­for​-­you​/­. 50. Jack Crone, “Cull of the Micro-­Pigs,” Daily Mail, September 12, 2014, http://­ www​.­dailymail​.­co​.­uk​/­news​/­article​-­2754673​/­Cull​-­micro​-­pigs​-­Hundreds​-­tiny​-­piglets​ -­popular​-­Miley​-­Cyrus​-­Tom​-­Daley​-­shot​-­marksmen​-­running​-­wild​-­Welsh​-w ­ ood​.­html. 51. Gloria Riviera, “­They’re Clean, Th ­ ey’re Cute and They Cuddle,” abc News, January 11, 2010), http://­abcnews​.­go​.­com​/­Nightline​/­micro​-­pigs​-­latest​-­tiny​-­trendy​-­pets​ /­story​?­id​=­9502599. 240  Notes to Chapter 6

52. Abandoned mini pigs, often unneutered, ­will sometimes become rewilded, interbreeding with other domesticated and nondomesticated pigs in their pursuit of food and community. See Crone, “Cull of the Micro-­Pigs”; Marissa Curnutte, “The Big Prob­lem with Mini-­Pigs,” National Geographic News, September 30, 2014, http://­news​ .­nationalgeographic​.­com​/­news​/­2014​/­09​/­140930​-a­ nimals​-c­ ulture​-s­ cience​-m ­ iniature​ -­pigs​-­breeders​-­sanctuaries​/­, responses considered logged from September 30, 2014, to December 15, 2014, but have since been removed. 53. Michelle Schenker, “Interview with Chris P. Bacon, Pig on Wheels,” Canine Journal, July 18, 2014, http://­www​.­caninejournal​.­com​/­chris​-­p​-­bacon​/­. 54. Yi​-­Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). 55. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). On the recent emergence of cute studies, see, for instance, work by Sianne Ngai, described ­later in this chapter, or the following 2014 call for papers: Cute Studies, http://­cutestudies​ .­tumblr​.­com​/­post​/­67343398551​/­cute​-­studies​-­call​-­for​-­papers (accessed September 10, 2014). See also “Introduction to Asian American Studies: ‘Too Cute!’ and the New Asiamania,” a course taught by Anne Cheng in the Departments of En­glish and African American Studies at Prince­ton University, http://­registrar​.­princeton​.­edu​/­course​-­offerings​ /­course​_­details​.­xml​?­courseid​=­012620&term​=­1144 ­(accessed September 10, 2014). 56. Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-­Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2005): 819. 57. Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-­Garde,” 830, 842. 58. Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-­Garde,” 844. 59. See, for instance, Andrew Martin, “fda Says Cloned Animals Safe to Eat,” New York Times, January 15, 2008. 60. Retro Report, “Dolly the Sheep: A Controversial Clone,” New York Times, October 14, 2013. 61. Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 101. 62. On the dangers of gmo foods, see, for example, Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Boston: South End, 2000). 63. World Health Organ­ization, “Second who Global Consultation on Regulatory Requirements for Xenotransplantion Clinical ­Trials: October 17–19 2011, who, Geneva Switzerland,” 5, http://­www​.­who​.­int​/­transplantation​/­xeno​/­report2nd​_­global​ _­consultation​_­xtx​.­pdf​?­ua​=­1. 64. J. Zeyland, D. Lipin­ski, and R. Slomski, “The Current State of Xenotransplantation,” Journal of Applied Ge­ne­tics 56, no. 2 (2014): 211–18. 65. World Health Organ­ization, Dept. of Emerging and Other Communicable Diseases, Surveillance, and Control, “Report of who Consultation on Xenotransplantation, Geneva, Switzerland, 28–30 October 1997,” http://­libdoc​.­who​.­int​/­hq​/­1998​/­WHO​ _­EMC​_­ZOO​_­98​.­2.​ ­pdf. 66. D​.­ A. Axelrod, D. Millman, and M. M. Abecassis, “US Health Care Reform and Transplantation, Part II: Impact on the Public Sector and Novel Healthcare Delivery Systems,” American Journal of Transplantation 10, no. 10 (2010): 2203–7. Notes to Chapter 6  241

67. Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Xenograft Transplantation: Ethical Issues and Public Policy, Xenotransplantation: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1996), 66. 68. C. Bratton, K. Chavin, and P. Baliga, “Racial Disparities in Organ Donation and Why,” Current Opinion in Organ Transplantation 16, no. 2 (2011): 243–49. 69. Tuskegee looms large in the minds of many Americans as an eerie misstep in the march of the nation’s medical pro­gress. Lasting forty years, 1932–72, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment used over six hundred black sharecroppers to examine the “untreated” effects of syphilis on the ­human body. The men who served as experimental subjects did not know they ­were being used for research purposes but instead thought they ­were receiving treatment for “bad blood.” Though the lack of consent in the Tuskegee experiments is troubling enough, perhaps most egregious was the fact that penicillin became available in the 1940s and became established as the official medical treatment for the disease by 1947. See James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, expanded ed. (New York: ­Free Press, 1992); Washington, Medical Apartheid. 70. C. R. Breitkopf, “Attitudes, Beliefs, and Be­hav­iors Surrounding Organ Donation among Hispanic ­Women,” Current Opinion in Organ Transplantation 14, no. 2 (2009): 191–95. 71. Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-­ Create Race in the Twenty-­First C ­ entury (New York: New Press, 2011); Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 2003); Keith Wailoo and Stephen Pemberton, The Troubled Dream of Ge­ne­tic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-­Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 72. Lederer, Flesh and Blood, 211. 73. Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Robert Bullard, Dumping in D ­ ixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (New York: Routledge, 2000); Evelynn Hammonds, Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diptheria in New York City, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 74. A. O. Scott, “Howls of a Life, Buried Deep Within,” New York Times, November 5, 2009. 75. Armond White, quoted in Felicia R. Lee, “To Blacks, Precious Is ‘Demeaned’ or ‘Angelic,’ ” New York Times, November 20, 2009. 76. Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: ­Free Press, 1996). 77. Ian Haney Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the M ­ iddle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 78. Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth: Why Amer­i­ca’s Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health (New York: Gotham, 2004) 104–7. 79. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Tendencies, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); LeBesco, “Quest for a Cause”; Dylan Vade and Sondra Solovay, “No Apology: Shared Strug­gles in Fat and Transgender Law,” in Solovay and Rothblum, The Fat Studies Reader, 167–75. 242  Notes to Chapter 6

80. See, for instance, Isabel Molina Guzman, Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Myra Mendible, From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popu­lar Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007). 81. See, for example, Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 82. “Remarks by First Lady to Kids at Let’s Move! Active Schools Launch,” Office of the First Lady, White House, February 28, 2013, http://­www​.­whitehouse​.­gov​/­the​-­press​ -­office​/­2013​/­02​/­28​/­remarks​-­first​-l­ ady​-k­ ids​-l­ ets​-m ­ ove​-­active​-­schools​-­launch. 83. Pew Foundation poll, quoted in Paul Campos, “Michelle Obama’s Childhood Obesity Let’s Move Campaign Is Helping Bullies,” Daily Beast, March 15, 2011, http://­ www​.­thedailybeast​.­com​/­articles​/­2011​/­03​/­16​/­michelle​-­obamas​-­childhood​-­obesity​-­lets​ -­move​-­campaign​-­helps​-­bullies​.­html. 84. Since the early days of her husband’s campaign, Michelle Obama’s appearance was a polarizing force in U.S. politics and culture. Some sources have ­imagined her as strikingly attractive, daringly fash­ion­able, and impressively fit (dozens of news sources covered the musculature of her upper arms following her first public sighting in a tank top in 2009), while ­others have critiqued her look as both too severe and too informal, as not being “beautiful enough” for her handsome partner. 85. Abigail Darwin, “Childhood Obesity: Is it Abuse?,” ­Children’s Voice 17, no. 4 (2008): 25. On the ­legal rationale for including childhood obesity as a form of child abuse, see also Kellie R. Lang, “Parents of Obese ­Children and Charges of Abuse,” Pediatric Nursing 38, no. 6 (2012): 337–40. 86. Darwin, “Childhood Obesity,” 27. 87. See, for example, Shauneen M. Garrahan and Andrew W. Eichner, “Tipping the Scale: A Place for Childhood Obesity in the Evolving ­Legal Framework of Child Abuse and Neglect,” Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics 12, no. 2 (April 26, 2013): 336–70. Still other publications have pointed to strong correlations between childhood m ­ ental, sexual, and physical abuse and victims’ likelihood of becoming obese l­ater in life, with one article in the medical journal Pediatrics even correlating waist mea­sure­ments to previous maltreatment. See Jesse Helton and Janet Liechty, “Obesity Prevalence among Youth Investigated for Maltreatment in the United States,” Child Abuse and Neglect 38, no. 4 (2014): 768–75; Renée Boynton-­Jarrett, Lynn Rosenberg, Julie R. Palmer, Deborah A. Boggs, and Lauren A. Wise, “Child and Adolescent Abuse in Relation to Obesity in Adulthood: The Black ­Women’s Health Study,” Pediatrics 130, no. 2 (2012): 245–53. 88. Tracy Miller, “Is Child Obesity Abuse? Court to Decide if S.C. Mom Jerri Gray Neglected 555-­Pound 14-­Year-­Old Son,” New York Daily News, July 22, 2009, 1, 35. 89. choa is one of the largest networks of pediatric care in the United States. See http://­www​.­choa​.­org. 90. Scott, “Howls of a Life.” 91. Jenny Reardon, “The Anti-­Racist Demo­cratic Genome?” (lecture, Clarke Forum, Dickinson College, October 8, 2013), http://­clarke​.­dickinson​.­edu​/­jenny​-­reardon​/­. 92. Clinton, quoted by Reardon, “The Anti-­Racist Demo­cratic Genome?” For an excellent assessment of Clinton’s racial politics and policies, see Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics, chapter 5. Notes to Chapter 6  243

93. Jonathan Marks, What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, ­People and Their Genes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Although scientists dispute the meaning of quantifying ge­ne­tic similarity (while ­others quantify according to dif­fer­ ent calculations, yielding dif­fer­ent results), the point ­here is to consider the cultural and scientific meaning of a popu­lar book written by a technician, whose percentages are meaningful within their own framework. 94. Zeyland, Lipin­ski, and Slomski, “The Current State of Xenotransplantation,” 211. 95. Institute of Medicine (U.S.) Committee on Xenograft Transplantation, Xenotransplantation, 54–59. 96. Jay A. Fishman, Linda Scobie, and Yasuhio Takeuchi, “Xenotransplantation-­ Associated Infectious Risk: A who Consultation,” Xenotransplantation 19, no. 2 (2012): 72–81. 97. On the use of “harvest” in the meat pro­cessing industry, see Timothy Pachirat, ­Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 39. 98. Sinclair wrote: “they use every­thing about the hog except the squeal” (The Jungle, 28).

CONCLUSION. THE PLURALITY IS NEAR

Epigraphs: Ursula K. Heise, “Extinction,” in Keywords for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 118; Julian Davies, “Anthropomorphism in Science,” Eu­ro­pean Molecular Biology Organ­ization Reports 11, no. 10 (2010): 721. 1. Helen Coster, “Why You ­Can’t Just Wipe Out Mosquitos to Get Rid of the Zika Virus,” ­Reuters, February 1, 2016, http://­blogs​.­reuters​.­com​/­great​-­debate​/­2016​/0 ­ 2​/0 ­ 1​/t­ o​ -­eliminate​-­zika​-­why​-­not​-­wipe​-­out​-m ­ osquitoes​/­; Antonio Regalado, “The Extinction Invention,” mit Technology Review, April 13, 2016, https://­www​.­technologyreview​.­com​ /­s/​ ­601213​/­the​-­extinction​-­invention​/­; “Extinctions to Order: Gene-­ocide,” The Economist, September 17, 2016. 2. Chart originally posted on Bill Gates’s Twitter account, quoted ­here from Sarah Ruiz-­Grossman, “Bill Gates Has a Plan to Eliminate Malaria Once and for All,” Huffington Post, April 25, 2016, http://­www​.­huffingtonpost​.­com​/­entry​/­bill​-­gates​-­foundation​ -­uk​-­end​-­malaria​_­us​_­571e494be4b0d4d3f723f727. 3. “Gene​-­ocide: The Promise and Peril of ‘Gene Drives,’ ” The Economist, September 17, 2016. 4. For a history of U.S. experiments in insect warfare, see Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Six-­ Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5. Ahuja, Bioinsecurities, 11. 6. A big thank-­you to Joe Rouse for suggesting that a critique of the microbiome would strengthen my work on obesity and interspecies organ transplantation. 7. Peter J. Turnbaugh et al., “The H ­ uman Microbiome Proj­ect: Exploring the Microbial Part of Ourselves in a Changing World,” Nature 449, no. 7164 (2007): 804–10. 244  Notes to Chapter 6

8. In previous time periods, microbes’ “liveness” has been understood in ambiguous terms, due to the simplicity of their form, replicability, and seeming lack of agency. The rise of microbiomics marks a reconsideration of microbes as more complicated than initially understood; ­here, agency and intentionality may be understood in relation to the logic of population shift or prerogative. My use of liveness and in/animacy h ­ ere follows Chen’s argument in Animacies, particularly chapter 5, “Lead’s Racial Mattering,” 159–88. 9. Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” Quarterly Review of Biology 87, no. 4 (2012): 326. 10. Since the early twenty-­first c­ entury, ­there have been dozens of articles addressing all of ­these issues. On the incredible growth of yogurt sales in the United States, see, for example, Joe Satran, “Yogurt Sales Growth,” Huffington Post, February 22, 2013, http://­www​.­huffingtonpost​.­com​/­2013​/­01​/­31​/­yogurt​-­sales​-­growth​-­study​_­n​_­2574626​ .­html; and Margy Slattery, “What Explains the Remarkable Growth in Greek Yogurt Sales?,” New Republic, August 13, 2011, https://­newrepublic​.­com​/a­ rticle​/­93638​/g­ reek​ -­yogurt. On immunological responses to germs, see, for example, Stephanie Watson, “Good vs. Bad Germs, Healthline, January 29, 2016, https://­www​.­healthline​.­com​/­health​ /­cold​-­flu​/­good​-­bad​-­germs; Linda Carroll, “Is It Pos­si­ble to Be Too Clean? Researchers Say Yes,” nbc News, November 2, 2015, https://­www​.­nbcnews​.­com​/­news​/­other​/­it​ -­possible​-b ­ e​-­too​-c­ lean​-­researchers​-­say​-­yes​-f­ 1C6345427. On issues related to breast feeding, vaginal births, and infant microbial health, see Rachael Rettner, “Why ‘Vaginal Seeding’ with Mom’s Microbes May Be Risky for Newborns,” Live Science, October 24, 2017, https://­www​.­livescience​.­com​/­60762​-­vaginal​-­seeding​-­recommendations​.­html; Ed Yong, “Breast-­Feeding the Microbiome,” The New Yorker, July 22, 2016, https://­www​ .­newyorker​.­com​/­tech​/­elements​/­breast​-­feeding​-­the​-­microbiome. 11. See, for instance, Martin Katzman and Alan C. Logan, “Microbiota: Coevolution and the Modern Environment,” Journal of Physiological Anthropology 36, no. 1 (2016): 1–4; see also nih ­Human Microbiome Proj­ect, www​.­hmpdacc​.­org. 12. Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life,” 326–27. 13. Jane Bennett, Vibrant ­Matter: A Po­liti­cal Ecol­ogy of ­Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), see chapter 1. 14. Bacterial “transplants” have been successful in addressing a number of pathologies, including autoimmune diseases. See F. Baquero and C. Nombela, “The Microbiome as a ­Human Organ,” Clinical Microbiology and Infection 10, no. 1111 (2012): 2–4. 15. See, for instance, X. Pang, X. Hua, Q. Yang, D. Ding, C. Che, L. Cui, W. Jia, P. Bucheli, and L. Zhao, “Inter-­species Transplantation of Gut Microbiota from ­Human to Pigs,” International Society for Microbial Ecol­ogy Journal 1, no. 2 (2007): 156–62; B. P. Willing, A. Vacharaksa, M. Croxen, T. Thanachayanont, and B. B. Finlay, “Altering Host Re­sis­tance to Infections through Microbial Transplantation,” PLoS One 6, no. 10 (2011): e26988; and M. Wang and S. M. Donovan, “­Human Microbiota-­Associated Swine: Current Pro­gress and ­Future Opportunities,” Institute for Laboratory Animal Research 56, no. 1 (2015): 63–73.

Notes to Conclusion  245

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INDEX

able-­bodiedness, 7, 21, 66, 164, 166, 170, 188, 204. See also disability abortion, 114, 117; compulsory, 129, 132; selective, 118–20, 133, 205 Adams, Alice, 120 Adams, Carol, 15 adaptation. See evolution Addams, Jane, 35–37 Adorno, Theodor, 85 Aedes aegypti, 197, 199 Africa, 63, 78; animals of, 60, 140, 151, 152; and hiv/aids, 149–50, 153–55; ­people of, 60–61, 65–66, 71, 140, 152–53, 157 African ancestor, 57, 60–61, 65, 74–75, 77, 79 African Americans, 32, 65, 119, 127, 131–32, 179; activism of, 18, 132, 157, 177; and health, 132–33, 144, 167–69, 183–84, 186; and hiv/ aids, 144, 157–58 Agamben, Giorgio, 7, 10–12 Ahuja, Neel, 7–8, 12, 14, 15, 27, 199 Akeley, Carl, 66 alien, extraterrestrial. See extraterrestrial life “alien,” foreign-­born U.S. resident, 96, 99, 101, 103, 116 alien hand syndrome, 108 allotransplantation, 183, 193 alterity, 14, 22, 24, 27, 168–69 American Medical Association (ama), 48, 101 American Playground Association (apa), 35–36

American Psychological Association (apa), 62 American Society for the Prevention of ­Cruelty to Animals (aspca), 31–32 amniocentesis, 118–20 And the Band Played On (1993), 155–56 Anderson, Warwick, 6 animacy, 14, 17, 244 animal abuse, 5, 127, 151–52, 204 animal experimentation, 1–3, 63, 127, 173, 202–3, 206 animal-­human boundary, 14, 18, 56–58, 82–83, 128, 141, 150–54, 180, 197, 200, 207 animality, 9, 14, 24, 40, 56–57, 129, 163, 176, 202 animal rights, 9–11, 15–18, 22, 30, 126–27, 152, 157, 197 animal studies, 11, 14–15, 27 animal welfare, 15, 31–32, 151, 165. See also nonhuman; personhood Anthropocene, 204 Anthropocentrism, 4, 7, 9, 57–59, 67, 86, 196 anthropometry, 170 anthropomorphization, 4–6, 9, 10, 28, 31, 57, 59, 174, 179; deanthropomorphization, 6, 10, 28, 31 antibiotic, 111, 201, 204, 206 Arendt, Hannah, 81, 146 arms race, 102–4, 116. See also weaponry artificial intelligence, 82, 106 astrobiology. See exobiology

atomic bomb, 95–98, 102, 105–6; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 95–97; survivors of, 97, 106, 108, 223n39; and war, 21, 81–82, 86, 88, 100, 103–4, 107–9, 115, 121, 129–31, 163 Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (abcc), 97–98 Australopithecus Africanus, 60–61, 74, 77 autoimmunity. See immune system Avian Flu, 136, 159 Bacon, Chris P., 180–81 bacteria, 100, 109, 112, 116, 196–97, 201–2; extraterrestrial, 111–15. See also gut flora; microbiome bacteriology. See ge­ne­tic bacteriology Baden-­Powell, Robert S. S., 37–38 “bare life,” 7, 10, 11 Bass, Margaret K., 167–68 Beauchamp, Daniel, 147, 151 Bennett, Jane, 204 Bergh, Henry, 31–32, 127 Bikini Atoll, 98, 223n39 bioethics, 11, 14, 126, 139, 172, 174, 184 bioexpansionism, 20, 26 biological: citizenship, 13, 147–49; essentialism, 6, 9, 19, 20, 23, 64, 74, 79, 109, 133, 150, 154, 174, 187, 193, 204; warfare, 111, 115–16, 121, 127, 228n34 biomedicalization. See medicalization biopolitics, 10, 26, 129, 147–49, 158, 168 blackface, 175–76 Black Lives ­Matter Movement, 17. See also African Americans; Martin, Trayvon black market, 171–72 blackness: condition of, 10, 32, 176; cultural repre­sen­ta­tions of, 38, 57, 186–87; and ­personhood, 7, 32. See also gorilla; race black “plague,” 112, 116 Black Power Movement, 131–32, 177–78 blood, 51, 132, 194–95, 239n38, 242n69; ­bloodlines, 176, 186, 194; as contagious, 145–47, 149, 153; transfusions of, 139, 149, 185 Bordo, Susan, 164, 168 Boyce, W. D., 37, 39–40, 214n34 Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca. See scouting movement brain imaging, 9, 114

264  Index

brainwashing, 92, 103 Brand, Paul, 100, 224n51 breeding, 107–18, 124; for animal experimentation, 63–64, 67–68, 151, 163, 182; for pet keeping, 137, 180–81, 239–40n41, 241n52; at zoos, 130, 151 Breed Specific Legislation (bsl), 18 Buckley, William F., 135, 145–46 “bushmeat” trade, 144, 151–54, 157 Butler, Judith, 11, 85, 142 Cacho, Lisa Marie, 10, 12 cannibalism, 153–54 Carson, Rachel, 130 Cartesian dualism, 50, 166, 202 Caucasian, 64–65, 167, 183. See also whiteness Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc), 144, 156, 167 Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 93 Chen, Mel, 14, 245n8 child abuse, 5, 30–32, 186–90 childhood, 20, 27, 30–32, 34, 48, 50, 189, 191 child psy­chol­ogy. See psy­chol­ogy, child ­children: and/as animals, 5, 26–27, 29–31, 36–37, 41–42, 52, 54, 69, 174, 178, 180–81; cultural repre­sen­ta­tion of, 20, 29–30, 34–37, 40–43, 47, 55, 69, 76, 178, 181; and evolution 27, 29–30, 34–37, 48, 52, 54–55; and health, 48–49, 145, 165–67, 186–87, 189–91; and ­labor, 30, 32, 35, 47; and negative societal attitudes ­toward, 120, 132, 145, 166, 186–87 child welfare, 27, 31–33, 35, 38, 47, 48, 189 Child Welfare League of Amer­ic­ a (cwla), 189–90 chimera, 137, 163, 173–74, 182, 194–95, 203, 238n26. See also hybridity; xenotransplantation chimpanzee, 1–3, 140–41, 149, 151–52, 192, 195, 204; as entertainers, 76–77; as meat, 153–55, 157, 179; photography and, 67–70; and sight, 67, 69–70; “whiteness” of, 28, 57–66, 71, 74–75, 78–79 citizenship, 32–33, 49, 102, 128, 147–49, 166 “civil death,” 12 civilization, as paradigm, 25, 27, 31–32, 36–37, 40, 50, 64, 66, 67, 76–77, 150, 164, 186

civil rights, 23, 82, 126–29, 131 Civil War, 5 Clark, Kenneth, and Mamie Clark, 165–66 Clarke, Adele E., 13 class divisions, 6, 15, 62, 98, 117, 131, 132, 137, 163, 167–68, 188–89 “clinical l­ abor,” 13, 172 “clinical practice,” 13, 48. See also medicalization cloning, 114, 120, 182 Clynes, Manfred, 121 cognitive capacity, 9, 21, 50, 53, 61, 66, 174, 187, 200, 204 Cold Spring Harbor, 114 Cold War, 98–99, 115–17, 199; and “aliens,” 87–89, 96–97, 103, 105; narratives of, 82, 102, 136; and space flight, 104, 117 Collier, John, 76 colonialism: neo­co­lo­nial­ism, 141, 157; postcolonialism, 14, 23, 27. See also imperialism communism, 88–89, 124 computer, 107, 124, 163. See also Internet; robotics Condon Committee, 93–94 consciousness, 26, 67, 82, 85, 126; ocular, 59, 67; unconsciousness, 50, 92, 94 contagion, 14, 48; obesity as, 166, 167; sexually transmitted, 139, 143, 145, 155; zoonotic (cross-­species), 10, 136, 140–41, 154 Cooper, Melinda, 13, 171–72 Cousins, Norman, 99–100, 224n46, 224n51 criminalization, 30, 151, 193; and incarceration, 11, 100, 157, 165, 191–92; and obesity, 189–90; and race, 12, 189 critical race studies, 129, 188 critical species studies, 27. See also animal studies cross-­species disease. See zoonoses cross-­species organ transplantation. See xenotransplantation cyborg, 21, 105–6, 121, 124–27, 128, 163 Darwinian theory of evolution, 39, 50, 54, 57, 59, 74; and “social Darwinism,” 56, 75, 79 Davenport, Charles, 25 Dayan, Colin, 12 Declaration of Geneva, 101 degeneracy, 2, 21, 40, 201

dehumanization, 10, 16, 67, 82, 124; and gender and sexuality, 136, 141–43, 146, 148; and genocide, 86, 101, 146, 179; and ­human rights, 9, 11, 142, 147; and the infrahuman, 3, 6, 24; and race, 7, 12, 18, 57, 66, 129, 154, 158, 188, 192–93, 197 Derrida, Jacques, 14–15 Dershowitz, Alan, 139, 158, 185 Descartes, René, 50, 166, 202 devolution, 57, 75, 77, 159–60, 162, 193. See also degeneracy diet, 47, 54; “American,” 96, 159–60, 174, 177–78, 186–87, 204, 245n10; “foreign,” 22, 96, 136, 140–41, 150, 154, 197 dinosaurs, 77, 105 disability, 12, 15, 87, 126, 160, 163; and ge­ne­ tics, 118–20, 199; intellectual, 40, 109, 118, 187; and ­mental illness, 48–49, 166, 187; and obesity, 188, 237n16; and war, 99–100, 108–9. See also able-­bodiedness disgust, 106, 148, 154 di Stefano, Christine, 23 dogs, 15, 178, 180 domestication, 29, 54, 180–81, 239n41 domesticity, 67, 69, 71, 104, 180 Dr. Doolittle series (1920–1952), 75–76 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 106–8 dummies, crash test, 88–90 Duster, Troy, 12–13, 185 Ebola, 155–56, 197 ecofeminism, 128, 152 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 104 empire. See imperialism endangered species, 129–31, 151–52, 198 Endangered Species Act, 130 enhanced interrogation. See torture the Enlightenment, 7, 31, 50, 86, 151 entomological weaponization, 22, 199, 205 environment: pollution of, 106, 117, 119, 121, 129–30; sustainability of, 5, 109–10, 199, 201 environmental activism, 121, 128–31, 152 ethnic cleansing. See genocide ethnicity, 50, 58, 62, 74, 132, 178, 183; academic study of, 188 ethno-­racism, 141, 149

Index 265

eugenics, 5, 62, 109, 133, 188; early twentieth-­ century movement of, 10, 12, 20, 22, 28, 30, 49, 51, 62–63; neoeugenics, 14, 22; post­ eugenics, 13, 58, 82, 108, 114–15; and race/ species, 64–65, 67, 79, 117; and reproduction, 118, 124–25, 130–31, 198–99, 205; and war, 108–9 euphenics, 114–18, 128, 131, 205, 227n27 euthanasia, 58, 114, 118 evolution, 3–5, 20–22, 24–30, 37–40, 48, 50–67, 70, 74–83 exobiology, 21, 82, 111–12 extermination, 126, 131, 197, 199, 202 extinction, 11; ­human, 81–82, 106, 118, 127; nonhuman, 50, 65–66, 130, 152, 196, 201. See also survival extraterrestrial: diseases, 111, 121; life, 10, 21, 24, 82–83, 87–95, 101, 103–8, 110–13, 116, 127; encounters with the, 89–93, 204; filmic repre­sen­ta­tion of, 97, 103–8; “sightings” of, 82–83, 87–89, 92–94. See also “short grays” eyesight, 42–43, 53, 67, 219n38. See also ocular “Fair Deal,” 101–2 ­family unit, 99, 104, 145, 148, 152, 177, 189 fascism, 97, 124, 146 fat, 137, 159, 167; ­children as, 165–66, 190–91; cultural repre­sen­ta­tion of, 160, 164–65, 175–76; and prejudice ­toward, 168–69, 188–91, 237n16 Fausto-­Sterling, Ann, 87, 142, 219n42 feminism, 23, 126; ecofeminism, 14, 128, 152; second wave, 128, 152; and ­women of color, 129, 231n79 feral, 54, 216–17n80 fetus: imaging of, 118–21, 202; rights of, 119–22 film, 87, 103–8, 187 “First World,” 102, 116, 234n34 The Flintstones, 104 food, 46, 51, 182; animals as, 126, 140, 150–54, 175, 194–95, 240n52; justice, 102, 104, 129, 131, 174, 205; as meta­phor, 176, 178, 186; and obesity, 159, 163–67, 186–89 Fossey, Dian, 152, 157 fossil, 59–61, 74, 112–13, 217n10 Foucault, Michel, 11–12 frontier, 38, 214n34; “final,” 10, 81, 104, 112

266  Index

Furness, William H., III, 1–3, 20 futurity, 20–21, 37, 87, 105, 159, 163, 192, 226n8 Gaard, Greta, 14–15 gargantua, 78 gender, 10, 12, 15, 23, 143, 168–69; and embodiment, 50, 141–42, 168; identity, 148, 188; performativity, 30, 38–39, 142; transgender, 188 gene drive, 198–99 ge­ne­tic: bacteriology, 110–11, 115; defect, 119, 132–33; engineering, 13, 21, 82–83, 98, 108, 110–20, 124–25, 130, 133, 136, 164, 182, 196, 198–99; inheritance, 162, 166–67, 186, 192–93, 200, 205; mapping, 201; mutation, 97–98, 182; and prenatal counseling, 119–20, 132; and race, 13, 132, 186, 192–93, 204. See also ­Human Genome Proj­ect (hgp) genet­ically modified organism (gmo), 182, 196, 198 genocide, 87, 132, 146, 179. See also Nazi Holocaust Germany, 60; and World War II, 85–86, 96, 99–100, 146. See also Nazi Holocaust Gilroy, Paul, 7, 192 Girl Scouts of Amer­i­ca. See scouting movement gorilla, 1–3, 62, 151, 152, 154; “blackness” of, 57, 64–79 Gould, Stephen J., 170 Gulick, Luther H., 36 gut flora, 201–7. See also microbiome Haeckel, Ernest, 50, 54 Hall, G. Stanley, 50–54 “the Ham-­Fat Man,” 175–76; 239n33 Hammonds, Evelynn, 186 Haraway, Donna, 14–15, 56, 58 Harper, A. Breeze, 129 Hill, Barney, and Betty Hill, 89, 91 Hinton, Sebastian, 29–30, 35–36, 39 Hippocratic Oath, 101–2 Hiroshima Maidens Proj­ect, 87, 98–100 historiography, 24, 26, 57, 65, 89, 98, 143 Hitler, Adolf, 97, 108 hiv/aids, 22, 144; detection of, 135–36, 145–46, 194; and gender and sexuality, 141–43, 148;

and racism, 149–50, 154, 157–58; stigmatization of, 139–40, 145–47, 157, 166, 179, 185; as zoonosis, 136, 140, 151–55, 159, 163, 179 hooks, bell, 176–77 ­human: “almost,” 21, 56, 62, 69; ancestry of, 3, 38, 43, 55, 59–61, 74–75; difference, 4–5, 9, 79, 116, 126, 192, 207; experimentation, 5, 85, 87, 100–101, 184, 242n69; and gender, 141–43, 233n17, 234n32; genome, 110, 173, 182, 192–93, 200, 204; hierarchization of, 7, 10–11, 17–18, 24, 40, 62, 79, 116, 120–21; intelligence, 1, 3, 9, 61–62; humanization, 4, 6, 16, 57, 67–69; as plural, 200–207; racial groupings of, 5, 28, 40, 57, 60, 97; research, 1, 3, 14, 25; rights, 4, 8, 11, 16, 23–24, 30, 82, 127–28, 141–43, 146–49, 192, 198, 201, 204; sanctity of, 9, 13, 172, 174; as a species, 4–6, 10–11, 23–24, 51, 65, 76, 117, 142–43, 200–201, 204, 207; subhuman, 7, 27, 141; superhuman, 21, 88; as “universal,” 9, 54, 127–28, 153; and the visual, 59, 67; as “white,” 8, 20, 30, 76–77, 129–30. See also animal-­ human boundary; evolution; infrahuman; nonhuman ­human–­animal studies. See animal studies humane, 5–6, 8, 31–33, 128; inhumane, 8, 33, 114, 118, 146, 152–54 ­Human Genome Proj­ect (hgp), 192–93, 200, 204, 205 humanism, 7–8, 10, 82, 86, 102, 124, 126–28. See also posthuman/ism humanitarianism, 30–33, 47, 98–102, 110, 117 ­Human Microbiome Proj­ect (hmp), 205. See also microbiome “­human race,” 29, 31, 97; imperilment of, 81, 85, 95, 104–8, 129; improvement of, 117, 137; membership in, 9, 66, 116 hybridity, 3, 185; cyborgian, 125; infrahuman, 171, 203; multinational, 99. See also chimera; porcine hybridity hygiene, 196; of ­children, 43, 47–55; eugenic, 132, 146; sexual, 147–48 immune system, 144–45, 194, 198–99, 201, 206, 245n14 imperialism, 5, 32, 154, 197; and race, 8, 14, 27, 56, 117, 141 Indian, 216–17n80. See also Native American

industrialization, 5, 20, 27, 30, 35, 66, 124, 196; postindustrialization, 131, 162 industrial warfare, 22, 85, 95, 100, 109, 115 infant: ­human, 51–54, 114, 118, 126, 201; nonhuman primate, 67, 70, 71 infectious disease, 5, 116, 166, 197. See also contagion information technology, 164 infrahuman, 3–10, 16, 19–20, 22, 24–25, 211n1; child as, 30, 51–54; extraterrestrials as, 105–6; and hybridity, 193–95, 201–3, 206–7, 238n26; infrahumanism(s), 4, 6, 9–10, 25; obese body as, 159; and speciation, 4; Yerkes’s definition of, 62–63. See also ­human; primate inhuman, 7, 66, 103, 114, 132, 141, 146, 153 inhumane. See humane insect. See entomological weaponization; mosquito intelligence: of nonhuman animals, 1, 9, 61, 66, 76, 152, 173, 180, 193; testing of ­human, 62, 67, 107. See also artificial intelligence; cognitive capacity Internet, 164, 170, 180; meme, 160, 188, 193, 195 intrauterine: diagnosis, 83, 115; engineering, 118; imaging, 83, 118 intravenous drug use, 135, 139, 143, 144, 172 Islam. See Muslim ­people Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 74, 219n44, 223n36 Japan, 92–93, 95–99, 102; “war brides” and “moral adoptions” from, 98–99, 223–24n42 Japa­nese American Internment, 96, 224n40 The Jetsons, 104 Jewish ­people, 126, 146–47, 177, 179 Jung, Carl G., 95–96 jungle gym, 29, 35–39 Kim, Claire Jean, 16 Kincaid, James, 34 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 131 King Kong (1933), 59, 75–78 kinship, 10, 26, 31, 71, 77, 180, 194 Kipling, Rudyard, 41, 215n44, 216–17n80 Kline, Nathan S., 121 Kline, Wendy, 58, 117

Index 267

Kodak Brownie camera, 43, 47 Kramer, Larry, 146 Kubrick, Stanley, 107–8, 121 ­labor, 1, 172; and workers’ rights, 129, 150, 164. See also ­children laboratory, 25, 63–64, 74, 79, 206 Latina/o, 119, 144, 167–68, 184–85, 188, 237–38n19 “Latina/o Paradox,” 185 Leakey, Louis S. B., 61, 151–52 LeBesco, Kathleen, 164, 188 Lederberg, Joshua, 82, 110–18, 124, 136, 205, 227n27, 228n39 Lederer, Susan E., 185–86 Linde, M. Susan, 97–98 Linke, Uli, 146–47 Lopez, Ian Haney, 187, 243n92 Luria, A. R., 52–54, 216n77 Mad Cow disease, 136 Mallery, Otto T., 35–36 mammal, 125, 239–40n41 Marks, Jonathan, 192–93, 244n93 Martin, Trayvon, 18, 119, 179, 195 materiality, 57, 85, 89, 94, 105, 169, 204 matterable life, 6, 8, 11–12, 16–18 Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanesta, 179–81 Medicaid, 102, 117, 183 Medicare, 102 medicalization, 13, 167, 172; biomedicalization, 11, 13–14 microbiology, 196 microbiome, 22, 196, 199–207 Miller, Stanley, 113 Miller, Stuart Creighton, 33 Mills, Charles, 8 “missing link,” 3, 26, 50–51, 55, 57, 59–61, 76, 153, 217n6 modernity, 79, 86; antimodernity, 40–43, 98, 124, 162–63; and the “child,” 20, 26–27, 30, 33–35; and medicine, 22, 48, 55, 100, 116–17, 136, 143, 154, 164; postmodernity, 23, 85, 87, 163; and science, 1–3, 20, 25–26, 31, 50, 55, 56, 58, 100; and technology, 43, 59, 67, 70–71; and the “West,” 5, 11, 31, 150, 153, 157 monogenesis, 61, 113. See also “missing link”; polygenesis

268  Index

monstrosity, 52, 65, 75, 88, 105–6 Moon, Michael, 169–70 moral economy, 7, 15, 120, 126, 148, 205 morality: biomorality, 205; and ­children, 34–35, 51; and hiv/aids, 139–40, 145–47, 149; and obesity, 137, 164, 188; and the treatment of animals, 5, 151, 153; and xenotransplantation, 172–73 “moral majority,” 145 morphology, 25, 27, 29, 32, 61, 167, 216–17n80 mosquito, 196–201, 205–7 Muhammad, Elijah, 177–78 multiculturalism, 4, 19, 23, 168 ­music, 65, 178, 189 Muslim p ­ eople, 131, 177–78, 192 nationalism, 12, 23, 127 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa), 93, 104, 110–13, 123, 225n66 Native American, 37, 40, 43, 64, 214n34 Nazi Holocaust, 11, 99–100, 127, 146–47; and animality, 126, 179; medicine and science during, 58, 85, 93, 101, 107, 114; U.S. repre­ sen­ta­tion of, 86–87, 108 neoliberalism, 129, 196–97 Ngai, Sianne, 34, 181 nonhuman, 3, 7, 9–11, 41, 59; speciation of, 6, 10, 14, 17, 20, 124; subjectivities of, 18, 26–27, 204. See also animal rights; ­human; personhood non/personhood. See personhood nuclear warfare. See atomic bomb Nuremberg ­Trials, 85, 87, 100–101 Nussbaum, Martha, 9 Obama, Barack, 158, 179, 183 Obama, Michelle, 158, 189 obesity: and ­children, 189–91; as “epidemic,” 22, 159, 163–67, 205; and ­human “devolution,” 159–60, 162, 169, 193; mea­sure­ment of, 165, 187, 190; in relation to race and class, 137, 167–68, 186–93, 205; and xenotransplantation, 163, 169–70, 181, 194–95 ocular, 54, 78; anthropomorphism, 57–59, 67–71. See also eyesight; photography “one body,” 143, 147, 151, 154, 158 ontoge­ne­tic recapitulation, 50–54, 59 Operation Overcast, 93

orangutan, 1, 3, 60, 64, 152 Ordover, Nancy, 12–13 organs, 51, 54, 172; chimeric, 163, 169, 194; donation of, 170–71, 183–85, 194; mechanical, 114, 124, 169, 171, 174; and race, 183–86; sale of, 171–72, 174; as standardized, 124, 171, 173, 181, 195, 206; shortage of, 137, 170–71, 174, 182, 184, 195; transplantation of, 114, 124, 170–71. See also xenotransplantation Orgueil Meteorite, 113 Ornish, Dean, 159–60 outer space, 21, 81; colonization of, 104–5; fictional repre­sen­ta­tion of, 103–8; life in, 10, 82, 93, 111, 121. See also extraterrestrial paleontology, 59–60, 77 panspermia, 113 parks and recreation movement, 20, 35–38 Parmelee, Maurice, 125–26 Patterson, Orlando, 10, 12, 210n15 Pauling, Linus, 132–33, 135, 232n96 Pearson, Susan J., 32 pediatrics, 5, 30, 34, 48–55. See also c­ hildren; psy­chol­ogy Peppa Pig, 178–79, 239–40n41 personhood, 4, 7, 12, 110, 202; fetal, 119–21; ­legal, 6–9, 16, 103, 110, 119, 192; nonhuman, 9–10, 16, 126, 152, 173, 196–97, 210n10; nonpersonhood, 4, 6–8, 10 pests, 131, 179, 197 pets, 67, 180, 194, 240n49 phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal industry, 140, 147–48, 150, 164, 172, 195 the Philippines, 32–33 photography, 86–89, 92, 95–96, 103 physicians’ rights, 145 pigs: cultural repre­sen­ta­tion of, 169, 174–79, 194, 239n38, 239n40, 239–40n41; “guinea-­,” 97, 100, 224n44; and h ­ uman devolution, 159–60, 188, 193–95; as h ­ uman flora-­associated piglet models (hfas), 206; as meat, 177–81, 187, 195; as pets, 180–81, 195, 241n52; and xenotransplantation, 22, 137, 163, 174 Piltdown Man, 60–61, 217n6, 218n10 plastic surgery, 98, 100–101 playground movement, 27, 35–38 pollution, 106, 129, 131

polygenesis, 61, 65, 77, 113 porcine hybridity, 22, 137, 160, 163, 174, 181, 193–95, 206 postcolonial. See colonial posthuman/ism: as beyond humanism, 7–8, 12, 14–15, 21–22, 24, 126–28, 204; as beyond “the ­human,” 82, 83, 125–26, 136, 160, 192. See also cyborg postmodern, 23, 85–86, 163 postnuclear age, 102, 129–31 postracial, 10, 192–95 Precious (2009), 186–87, 191 pregnancy. See reproduction primate (nonhuman), 56–57, 75; as endangered, 152, 157; as infrahuman, 3, 56, 62; as meat, 153–55, 157, 179; as a “missing link,” 3, 26, 59; personhood of, 126, 152, 173; popu­lar repre­sen­ta­tions of, 75–79, 151–52; racialization of, 10, 21, 57–63, 179; as research subject, 1–3, 62–63, 152–73; speciation of, 3, 10, 20–21, 57–65, 71, 74; as vector of contagion, 144, 149, 155 primatology, 1, 5, 20, 28, 56–59, 64, 74, 151–52 “primitive,” 22, 25, 27, 56, 60, 76–77; ­children as, 36–40, 43, 50, 52–53; nonwhite/non-­ Western ­peoples as, 43, 50, 56, 77, 94–95, 151, 153–54 prison industrial complex. See criminalization Proctor, Robert, 146–47 Progressive Era, 5–6, 27, 34, 35 Proj­ect Paperclip, 93 Proj­ect Sign, 93 prostheses, 100–101, 108, 114, 124, 169 psy­chol­ogy, 3; child, 20–21, 35, 48–55, 216– 17n80; and eugenics, 62; and primates, 64 public health, 6, 34, 49, 101; and hiv/aids, 139–40, 145, 147; and obesity, 166, 171, 186–89; research related to, 116, 185, 197–99 queer, 14, 141; embodiment, 13, 145, 148, 188; liberation, 13, 15, 149; pathologization of, 13, 146, 185 queer studies, 15, 188 race: and criminalization, 12, 188–89; and ge­ ne­tics, 13, 132, 186, 192–93; and imperialism, 8, 14, 27, 46, 117, 141; and obesity, 137,

Index 269

race (continued) 167–68, 186–93, 205; and organ transplantation, 183–86. See also black; dehumanization; racism; white racism, 149, 153; and animality, 16–18, 128, 153, 178–79; antiracism, 4, 7, 127; scientific, 20–21, 57, 79, 186–87 radiation, 96–98, 106, 113, 119 Raffles, Hugh, 146, 179 recreation, 20, 27, 35–36, 38, 47. See also parks and recreation movement Rajan, Kaushik Sunder, 13 Reagan, Ronald, 139, 144 Rejali, Darius, 8 religion, 15; and Christian sects, 145, 157, 164, 177. See also Jewish ­people; Muslim ­people remoralization, 140, 148 reproduction: artificial, 114, 118–20, 132, 199, 205; and eugenics, 58, 117–18, 205; politics of, 13, 58, 117, 128–32, 202–3 Riis, Jacob, 35 risk: assessment, 13, 120, 165, 182–83, 205, 206; groups constructed as at risk, 144, 165, 190; marginalization and, 172–73. See also endangered species Roberts, Dorothy, 12–13, 117, 185 robotics, 104–5, 121, 124, 171. See also artificial intelligence Roo­se­velt, Franklin D., 101 Roo­se­velt, Theodore, 32–33, 37 Rose, Nikolas, 13 Ros­well, New Mexico, 88–92 Rus­sia, 52, 68. See also Soviet Union Sagan, Carl, 112, 221n9 Sanchez-­Eppler, Karen, 34 sars, 22, 136, 197 savage, 27, 50; savageness, 57, 77, 153 science fiction. See film scientific industrial complex, 191 scientific racism. See racism scouting movement, 27, 30, 39–43, 47, 214n37; and Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca, 33–34, 37–38, 45; and Girl Scouts of Amer­i­ca, 37–38, 44, 46 secularity, 2, 164 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 169–70, 188 sentience, 30–31, 128. See also consciousness

270  Index

Serlin, David, 100–101 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 34, 37, 40–42 sexology, 13 sexual contact tracing, 140, 194 sexuality, 7–8, 12, 15, 23, 78, 129, 150, 158, 164; and health, 13, 136, 140, 144–45, 194; polygamous, 66; popu­lar cultural repre­sen­ta­tions of, 107, 155–56, 186–87; practices of, 22, 107, 140–41, 143, 148–49; and reproduction, 111, 120; and vio­lence, 152, 186–87. See also queer Shah, Nayan, 6 Sharp, Lesley A., 172–73 “short grays,” 89, 92, 111 sickle cell anemia, 132–36 “sign talk,” 41–42 simian. See primate Sinclair, Upton, 163, 244n98 Singer, Peter, 9, 126 skeleton, 51–52, 60 skin, 201, 238n26; cyborg, 121; extraterrestrial, 89, 92; porcine, 160, 195; primate, 65–66 slavery, 1, 2, 12, 32–33, 65, 132, 177; antislavery, 4, 26 “social death,” 10, 12, 210n15 sodomy, 22, 136, 145 Solovay, Sondra, 188 sonogram. See fetus Sontag, Susan, 86 Soviet Union, 82, 89, 101–3, 116 space age, 81–82, 110–16, 123 speciation, 19, 179, 196, 199, 202–3; infrahuman, 3–7, 10, 18, 207; of primates, 20, 57–59, 63–66, 78; and racialization, 57–59, 63–64, 66, 78; re-speciation, 61, 196, 199, 201, 206–7 Stanescu, Vasile, 15 sterilization, 131, 199; compulsory, 58, 117, 119, 129 Stern, Alexandra Minna, 12–13, 58 Stoler, Ann Laura, 79 subaltern, 10, 27, 212n2 surveillance: of ­children, 34, 36; of diseases, 194, 202, 207; of public health, 13, 48–49, 116, 147, 190 survival, 11, 65–66, 130; fetal, 119–21; of the fittest, 16, 19, 39, 65, 67, 79, 109, 119, 167, 188, 200, 214n34; species, 5, 27, 43, 51, 117,

129–30; survivalism, 37, 39, 96, 106, 121. See also extinction survivor. See atomic bomb; Hiroshima Maidens Proj­ect; Nazi Holocaust symbiosis, 22, 196, 200–201, 203–4, 207 Tarzan, 59, 75–79, 216–17n80 technology, 5, 48–49, 59, 89; as boundary-­ crossing, 24, 125, 163; cyborgian, 21, 105–6, 115, 125; ge­ne­tic, 13, 182, 199; nanotechnology, 124; as negative, 22, 81–82, 106, 115, 163; and outer space, 94–95, 105, 121; photographic, 59, 67, 70, 86; as positive, 21, 43, 70–71, 101, 104, 117, 151; reproductive, 118–21, 202, 205; war­time use of, 82, 86, 89, 96, 103. See also atomic bomb “Third World,” 10, 116–17 Ticktin, Miriam, 8, 142 Tompkins, Kyla Wazana, 176–77 torture, 8, 11, 99–100, 151 totems, 43–44 transgender, 188 transplantation. See organs; xenotransplantation Truman, Harry S., 97, 101–2 Tuan, Yi-­Fu, 180 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, 184, 242n69 ufo, 92–94 United Nations, 101–3, 116 United States, 2; demographics of, 118–19, 144, 182–83; and international conflict, 32, 86– 88, 96–99, 104, 106, 115–16, 151; as a “model” nation, 32–33, 102, 127; popu­lar lit­er­at­ ure of, 76, 215n40, 216–17n80; public opinions of, 143, 145, 157–58; scientific practice within, 62–64, 130, 144 Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights (udhr), 101, 127 Urey, Harold, 113 veganism and vegetarianism, 15, 129, 239n38 venereal disease, 136, 140, 143, 242n69 Vietnam War, 115, 132 visuality, 24, 42–43, 56, 67; in popu­lar culture, 77–78, 89, 188; and primates, 58–59, 62, 67,

69; and public health, 188, 191, 197. See also ocular; photography Vygotsky, L. S., 52–54, 216n77 Wailoo, Keith, 185 Waldby, Catherine, 13, 171–72 weaponry: atomic, 21, 106, 109, 115, 223n39; biological, 21, 115–16, 228n34; chemical, 115; entomological, 22, 199, 205–6 Weheylie, Alexander, 12, 129 welfare state, 117, 119, 127, 165 White, Ryan, 144, 148–49 whiteness, 87, 98, 104, 165–66, 177–78, 185; and black-­white binary, 58, 74, 176; and humanity, 8, 20, 30, 76–77, 129–30; and manhood, 32–33, 37, 40, 50, 149, 161–62, 202; nonwhiteness, 10, 12, 57, 76, 87, 129, 141, 188, 204; and survival, 39–40, 66, 75, 94, 160, 188, 193; and womanhood, 77–78, 128, 151. See also Caucasian; chimpanzee; race Whyte, William H., 125 Wolfe, Cary, 14–15, 211n26 ­Women’s Rights, 8, 128–29, 132, 142 “Woodcraft Indians,” 37, 40, 43 World Health Organ­ization (who), 101, 194 World Medical Association (wma), 101–2 World War II, 58, 81–82, 86–89, 92, 100, 102. See also Nazi Holocaust X, Malcolm, 131 xenophobia, 8, 20, 149, 153 xenotransplantation, 163, 172–74, 182, 193–94, 206 Yerkes, Robert Mearns, 1–6, 20, 58–59, 62–78, 125 Zika virus, 197 zoology, 3, 43, 54, 61, 67, 200 zoonoses, 10, 22, 136, 156–57; hiv/aids as, 136, 140, 151–55, 163, 179; as unforeseen, 155, 173, 182, 194, 197. See also Ebola; Mad Cow disease; sars; Zika virus zoo, 75, 130, 151, 188

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