ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between feminism and the science of heredity over the last 150 years, tracing the arc of an engagement which runs from closeness and collusion to contestation and critique. It considers the way in which eugenics was used by nineteenth century writers such as Sarah Grand to bolster women's status through the concept of 'civic motherhood' and tracks the ambivalence with which the ideal of rational reproduction was viewed by modernists like Virginia Woolf, who were both fascinated and appalled by its modernising logic. Although it is often assumed that the Second World War and the revelation of Nazi atrocities put an end to eugenics, the chapter argues that eugenic thought continued to inflect social policy in many post-war welfare states, including Britain. It also shaped the thinking of prominent geneticists, and in this sense, as Hilary Rose has argued, eugenics and genetics can be viewed as "conjoint twins" (Rose 2007: 13). Women writers like Doris Lessing were among the first to see this, laying the groundwork for wide-ranging feminist critiques of the genetic reification of race and sexuality. As genetic science has become a global enterprise and Anglophone literature has become increasingly global in its reach, the chapter goes on to read Zadie Smith's White Teeth alongside the influential fiction of Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood. It concludes with a brief account of the intersection of new feminist materialism and postgenomic science.
