Stein, Melissa Norelle (Author)
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
Bay, Mia
Edition Details: Advisor: Bay, Mia
Physical Details: 356 pp.
Language: English
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.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/10 (2009). Pub. no. AAT 3335559.
Similar Citations
Article
Vaught, Jeannette;
(2013)
Materia Medica: Technology, Vaccination, and Antivivisection in Jazz Age Philadelphia
(/isis/citation/CBB001201818/)
Article
Hamlin, Kimberly A.;
(2011)
The “Case of a Bearded Woman”: Hypertrichosis and the Construction of Gender in the Age of Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001201814/)
Article
Schuller, Kyla;
(2012)
Taxonomies of Feeling: The Epistemology of Sentimentalism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Racial and Sexual Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001201815/)
Book
Erica Fretwell;
(2020)
Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling
(/isis/citation/CBB457783202/)
Article
Tatjana Buklijas;
(2020)
Publicity, politics, and professoriate in fin-de-siècle Vienna: The misconduct of the embryologist Samuel Leopold Schenk
(/isis/citation/CBB014181121/)
Book
Evelleen Richards;
(2020)
Ideology and Evolution in Nineteenth Century Britain: Embryos, Monsters, and Racial and Gendered Others in the Making of Evolutionary Theory and Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB059744955/)
Book
Thorpe, Jocelyn;
()
Temagami's Tangled Wild: Race, Gender, and the Making of Canadian Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB001200652/)
Book
Fraser, Gordon;
(2012)
The Quantum Exodus: Jewish Fugitives, the Atomic Bomb, and the Holocaust
(/isis/citation/CBB001500182/)
Article
O'Brien, William E.;
Njambi, Wairim Ngar iya;
(2012)
Marginal Voices in “Wild” America: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and “Nature” in The National Parks
(/isis/citation/CBB001202113/)
Book
Roy, Parama;
(2010)
Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial
(/isis/citation/CBB001201388/)
Article
Katie Holmes;
(2021)
The 'Mallee-Made Man': Making Masculinity in the Mallee Lands of South Eastern Australia, 1890-1940
(/isis/citation/CBB873215377/)
Chapter
MacLean, Vicky M.;
Williams, Joyce E.;
(2005)
Sociology at Women's and Black Colleges, 1880s--1940s
(/isis/citation/CBB000931129/)
Thesis
Gonaver, Wendy;
(2012)
The Peculiar Institution: Gender, Race and Religion in the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1842--1932
(/isis/citation/CBB001561028/)
Article
Staum, Martin;
(2007)
“Race” and Gender in Non-Durkheimian French Sociology, 1893--1914.
(/isis/citation/CBB000930020/)
Book
Jones, Jeannette Eileen;
Sharp, Patrick B.;
(2010)
Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality
(/isis/citation/CBB001033825/)
Article
Kevin S. Weiner;
(2019)
Neuronomy, Education, and Outreach in Neuroscience: A Historical Case Study of Burt Green Wilder
(/isis/citation/CBB779751449/)
Book
Melissa N. Stein;
(2015)
Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934
(/isis/citation/CBB729336001/)
Multimedia Object
Candela Marini;
Kerr, Ashley Elizabeth;
(2020)
Ashley E. Kerr, “Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910)” (Vanderbilt UP, 2020)
(/isis/citation/CBB932736455/)
Thesis
Donovan, Brian Lane;
(2001)
The Sexual Basis of Racial Formation: Crusades Against Forced Prosititution, 1887--1917
(/isis/citation/CBB001562428/)
Article
Deslauriers, Marguerite;
(2008-9)
Sexual Difference in Aristotle's Politics and His Biology
(/isis/citation/CBB001032468/)
Be the first to comment!