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theses

This project uses the body as a site to examine the complex relationship between science, culture, and politics in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, and the ways in which gender and sex can be used to conceptualize other categories of difference, such as race and sexuality. Scientists during this period naturalized racial difference and socio-political exclusion by insisting that the bodies of racial minorities were not fully male or female at a time when power, citizenship, property, and protection were conferred according to sex. My dissertation makes other important interventions in the existing scholarship on nineteenth-century racial and scientific thought, as well as American race relations. Rather than treating ethnology as static, I reveal significant change over time in scientific discourse on race with regard to gender and sex. Scientists' shifting uses of sex and gender to denote racial difference corresponded to larger shifts in American politics and culture, including Emancipation and the gendered questions of citizenship it raised, the rise of evolutionary theory, and turn-of-the-century fears about miscegenation, immigration, homosexuality, and "race suicide." This discourse was not one-sided or monolithic, however. Accordingly, I also explore tensions within and challenges to white racialist science. Moreover, I demonstrate that scientific discourse was not divorced from the lives of real people; it had a tangible impact on how living human bodies were treated. Finally, while recent scholarship has identified important parallels between racial and sexual science, my work reveals that ethnology and sexology not only shared similar cultural politics in America, they were literally populated by the same prominent scientists.
While at its core an intellectual history of scientific thought on race and gender, this dissertation is not concerned only with ideas and discourse, but how such ideas were received and how they shaped race relations. Thus, my work utilizes a variety of sources -- including scientific and medical texts, newspaper articles, private correspondence, political writing, and visual materials such as political cartoons and campaign posters -- to interrogate scientists' engagement with sociopolitical issues as well as the incursion of scientific thought into political culture.

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 338-346).

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.17397

ETD_924

doi:10.7282/T33F4PZV

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.

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