The Eugenic Atlantic: race, disability, and the making of an international Eugenic science, 1800-1945

In this analysis the authors fold disability into a cross-national equation by including disabled people as part of a trans-Atlantic discussion of otherness. In naming this new cultural space the 'Eugenic Atlantic', we take up Paul Gilroy's analysis of cultural crossings in order to recognise the social construction of marginalised populations designated by virtue of their presumed biologically-based inferiorities. The analysis of a 'Eugenic Atlantic' seeks to analyse disability and race as mutual projects of human exclusion, based upon scientific management systems, successively developed within modernity. From the end of the eighteenth century to the conclusion of World War II, bodies designated as defective became the focal point of violent European and American efforts to engineer a 'healthy' body politic. While fears of racial, sexual and gender-based 'contamination' served as the spokes of this belief system, disability, used as a synonym for biological (or in-built) inferiority, functioned as the hub that gave the entire edifice its cross-national utility.