Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women. Gena Corea , Renate Duelli Klein , Jalna Hanmer , Helen B. Holmes , Betty Hoskins , Madhu Kishwar , Janice Raymond , Robyn Rowland , Roberta SteinbacherReproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and Contraceptive Choice. Betsy HartmannReproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine. Michelle Stanworth

Signs ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 400-405
Author(s):  
Peggy L. Chinn
Keyword(s):  
Population Control ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Contraceptive Choice

Eugenics, Reproduction, and Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asha Nadkarni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Population Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian American Women ◽  
Asian Populations ◽  
Asian Immigration

Asian American literature has capaciously explored the issues of gender, sexuality, and reproduction that have been so foundational to Asian American racial formation. It has likewise engaged, directly or indirectly, with “eugenics,” a pseudoscience by which nation states sought to improve their populations through managing reproduction. Eugenics, a term coined by Charles Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton in 1883, spans the late 19th to the early 21st centuries, where it continues in the form of population control and the “new” eugenics of genetic and reproductive technologies. In some national sites eugenics was aligned with feminist movements for birth control, whereas in others, such as the United States, they were largely opposed. Nonetheless, eugenic feminists argued that women’s right reproduction was the necessary mechanism by which women should gain rights within the state; as a formation, moreover, eugenic feminism specifically targeted Asian American women as standing in the way of US feminist advance. As such, one of the key ways eugenics was practiced in the United States in relationship to Asian populations was through immigration policy. The history of Asian exclusion in the United States therefore speaks to a larger eugenic project predicated on the notion that Asian immigrants embodied a public health threat in terms of diseases and deviant sexualities of various sorts. The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act opened up Asian immigration to the United States and also gave rise to a new set of stereotypes, gendered and otherwise, about Asian Americans as model minorities. Asian American literature has critically mined these issues, with some Asian American literature acceding to eugenics by stressing an assimilationist politics and with other works challenging it by critiquing eugenics’ reproductive logic of purity.

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