ABSTRACT
In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, New England’s Brahmin/Puritan-descended, semi-aristocracy saw its survival threatened by waves of immigrants and by rise of women’s suffrage/New Woman movements. Anthropological portraits of “the Other” defined abnormal, unidealized body, in accord with repressive “cacogenics,” “negative eugenics” agenda of decreasing undesirable inherited traits in gene pool by forced sterilization or by discouraging breeding among those whose “hereditary forces” threatened “to pull society down.” This chapter examines composite portraits that did and did not conform to the upper-caste expectations, and explores the heated political and social rhetoric that informed their creation. As history has begun repeating itself, it is all more urgent to explore lessons of previous wave of US eugenics, its motivations, and its manifestations. Composite portraits thus offered a “real,” but not an “actual,” representation of class relations in the US in the 1880s, when this photographic practice peaked in popularity. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
