ABSTRACT
Mobilising the theory of eugenics, the state of California in the western United States of America (US) undertook programmes to contain the “defective classes” in the early twentieth century. These programmes included the forcible commitment of thousands of women and girls to state hospitals, state homes for the feeble-minded, and youth and adult reformatories, as well as the reproductive sterilisation of inmates in these facilities. This chapter shows that California eugenics practices of institutionalisation and sterilisation constructed gendered categories of disability, madness and sexual deviance. Further, the chapter argues that these categories were co-constituted. First, the sexual deviance of girls and women was articulated as a kind of mental and bodily disability. Second, the physical and mental disabilities of women and girls—then called “mentally defective” and “feeble-minded”—were constituted as inherently sexual deviant. Reassessing California’s eugenics era as a co-history of disability, madness and sexual deviance is politically risky, in that this reassessment re-opens wounds from the campaign to undo the treatment of homosexuality as a pathology in the US. However, this co-history also creates new possibilities for urgently needed political coalitions across what have become single-issue movements around sexuality and disability in the present.
(eugenics, institutionalisation, women, California)
