ABSTRACT
During the Eugenics Movement of the early twentieth century, government-backed eugenicists' main goals were population control and procreation of desirable qualities. These qualities consisted of a perfect White, middle-class, healthy race, with the end goal of breeding out "undesirable" qualities such as feeblemindedness and racial impurities. Using critical rhetorical analysis, This chapter interrogates how, class, gender, sexuality, whiteness, and disability shed light on the implications of biopolitics on bodies labeled feebleminded, White, poor, female, and supposedly heterosexual. It argues that this labeling of people is a norming mechanism of biopower. Bell believes that disability studies should be labeled "White Disability Studies" because the field itself fails to face issues of race and ethnicity. While the idea of the pure White race has been debunked as mere myth, at the time the notion of heredity was that undesirable traits could either be passed down through generations or environmentally attributed.
