Mocking Eugenics: American Culture against Scientific Hatred

Mocking Eugenics examines how American artists in the 20th century used humor to challenge and destabilize eugenic discourse, highlighting the conflict between scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics. It analyzes the films of Charlie Chaplin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity.

Format: Hardback
Length: 178 pages
Publication date: 29 July 2021
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilize what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humor to attack the contemporaneous science of heredity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American studies.

Weight: 424g
Dimension: 160 x 241 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032000893