ABSTRACT

Although many associate eugenics with Nazi Germany, the United States employed a broad-based eugenics program that continued well into the 1970s. Twenty-thousand sterilizations were performed in California between 1909 and 1976 and North Carolina’s eugenics program, which allowed social workers to mandate the sterilization of anyone with an IQ below seventy, operated until 1977. As recently as 2013, the California Fourth District Appellate Court ruled that a developmentally disabled adult with “mild mental retardation” could be sterilized by court order, and in 2015 then-Presidential nominee Donald J. Trump publicly mocked New York Times journalist Serge Kovaleski for his physical impairment. The able-bodied bias that permeates contemporary American life is not limited to politics, however. Instead it is supported and disseminated by visual culture, which is dominated by what Lennard J. Davis termed the “hegemony of normalcy” and what Robert McRuer calls “compulsory able-bodiedness.” Art plays a dynamic role in perpetuating eugenic discourse and institutionalizing ableism, and the “spectacle of able-bodied heteronormativity” that underlies much of contemporary American discourse crystallized during the 1930s. To demonstrate my point, this chapter illustrates the ways in which the sculptural program of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, subtitled “Building the World of Tomorrow” and considered one of the most important cultural moments of the twentieth century, naturalized the “Average American” as white, fit, and heterosexual.