For the past two centuries deaf people in the United States have faced more or less intense skepticism about their marriages to each other, largely due to fears of inherited deafness. Theses fears, while always present, have waxed and waned over time, becoming most prominent during the eugenics era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At Gallaudet University, they were repeatedly expressed by the faculty and administration in a variety of forms and contexts, and echoed by many its students. This dissertation demonstrates the significant influence of these ideas at Gallaudet University on the wider deaf community over the last century; it traces how skepticism toward deaf marriage was framed in terms of hereditarian and, for a time, eugenic ideals; and it explored other more subtle but similarly effective attempts to influence marriage decisions by deaf people. The idea that deaf people should not marry one another was embraced by faculty in Gallaudet’s early decades, diffused from administration to faculty, from faculty to students (deaf undergraduates as well as hearing students studying deaf education), and ultimately carried to other deaf educational institutions via the alumni. While student responses to these ideas were fluid, their adoption by early administration and faculty had a profound and lasting impact. One result was that, during much of the early twentieth century, deaf people were less likely to marry, and when married less likely to have children.

Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, theories of race contributed to the justification and authorization of global European imperialism and the colonization of indigenous people. In Canada, racial theories influenced perceptions of each citizen as either superior or inferior. Although European and American theorists constructed hundreds of ideas about race, there are several key ideas that continue to linger in the minds of Canadians. This thesis examines the socio-ideological context of racial theories and provides an historical account of the construction of race. The historical account highlights four prominent ideas: white superiority, non-white inferiority (marked by low intelligence levels), the belief in inherent racial characteristics, and racial purity and contamination. In Saskatchewan, these ideas continue to surface in discourse about Aboriginal people and relations between the non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal population. Although constructed ideas about race are scientifically unsound and grounded in the belief in white superiority, these ideas are often normalized as common sense and not easily recognized as constructed. Discourse and practices that appear to be emancipatory for Aboriginal people but rely on constructed ideas about race need to be re-examined. This thesis provides several examples of where these ideas surface in Saskatchewan discourse and recommends anti-racist education as an alternative.

Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, theories of race contributed to the justification and authorization of global European imperialism and the colonization of indigenous people. In Canada, racial theories influenced perceptions of each citizen as either superior or inferior. Although European and American theorists constructed hundreds of ideas about race, there are several key ideas that continue to linger in the minds of Canadians. This thesis examines the socio-ideological context of racial theories and provides an historical account of the construction of race. The historical account highlights four prominent ideas: white superiority, non-white inferiority (marked by low intelligence levels), the belief in inherent racial characteristics, and racial purity and contamination. In Saskatchewan, these ideas continue to surface in discourse about Aboriginal people and relations between the non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal population. Although constructed ideas about race are scientifically unsound and grounded in the belief in white superiority, these ideas are often normalized as common sense and not easily recognized as constructed. Discourse and practices that appear to be emancipatory for Aboriginal people but rely on constructed ideas about race need to be re-examined. This thesis provides several examples of where these ideas surface in Saskatchewan discourse and recommends anti-racist education as an alternative.

This study examines the problems which are created by assisted reproductive techniques on the individuals and their decisions about the reproduction. In the study, the data of a field study which was conducted in 2010 is used in order to make the examination deeper and to give a qualitative and quantitative dimension to the theoretical framework. Through the sociological analysis of both controversial issues occurred by pre-natal reproductive technologies such as sex selection, abortion, PGD, IVF babies, disability, etc. and personal decisions which are impossible to be given independent from the social environment, providing a contribution to the development of sociology of reproduction is desired. In this study it is claimed that assisted reproductive techniques are power which will possibly get ahead of natural reproduction and reduce and even erase the biodiversity and coincidental characteristics of human reproduction, and increase the inequalities in the society. Thus this power may courage the reproduction of &lsquo / desirables&rsquo / and prevent &lsquo / undesirable&rsquo / ones from living and even insemination anymore. Another argumentation which is under discussion is the illusion of all these activities and problems were taking their sources from the own decisions of prospective parents. Reproductive biotechnology commerce hopes to people through its economy, cuts across all boundaries through the bounties of its technical abilities and by doing so it does not see a drawback in making people &lsquo / victims&rsquo / of their choices that regarded as &lsquo / rational and free&rsquo / which in fact mere &lsquo / irrational&rsquo / preferences. Thus in this thesis, the theoretical foundations and social results of this technology which extending up to the pre-natal processes are discussed to contribute a more democratic policies

No description available.

This dissertation examines the historical relationship between eugenics, the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA), and the gendered professions of teaching, public health nursing, and social work in Alberta. In the wake of the Leilani Muir trial, scholarship on Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act (1928-1972) has tended to centre on male medical professionals, and the largely male run provincial psychiatric institutions. When a female is mentioned she tends to be someone in a position of power, including members of the Famous Five whose feminism and support for eugenic thought have often been viewed as incompatible. The historiography has consequently constructed an image in which male medical professionals, and a few exceptional women controlled the reproductive rights of largely female patients, overlooking the women that served on the program’s frontlines. By recasting the province’s eugenic sterilization program within a broader public health framework, and focusing on the UFWA, teachers, public health nurses and social workers, this dissertation not only provides a more comprehensive understanding of how the legislation functioned at the ground level, but also challenges prevailing ideas about maternalism, feminism, women’s professional work, and eugenics in Canada. It offers an alternative reading of eugenics in Canada by moving beyond formal institutions to the significant role played by gendered political organizations and health, welfare, and education professionals in the community. The Canadian mental hygiene and eugenics movements, which were fundamentally connected, provided them with an opportunity to maintain and extend their authority, and to meet their political and professional goals. The gendered, classed, and ethnic stereotypes that defined public nursing, teaching, and social work allowed them to define a niche for themselves within the eugenics program, but also limited the extent to which they operated as authorities of mental hygiene and eugenic science.

Nuestro interés por recuperar trayectorias discursivas que se ocuparon de lo que hoy denominamos derechos (no) reproductivos y sexuales y de las mujeres en Argentina, nos condujo al análisis de las locuciones del movimiento anarquista. En nuestras primeras pesquisas, las voces de dos médicos anarquistas se destacaron en el tratamiento del problema que nos interesaba abordar. Asimismo, la presencia de ideas provenientes de la eugenesia en los planteos de estos profesionales para el desarrollo de un discurso emancipatorio para las mujeres en relación del derecho a la autodeterminación sexual y reproductiva, nos condujo a focalizar en las distintas apropiaciones de la eugenesia dentro del campo médico. Ante este panorama, nuestra investigación tiene por objetivo general analizar, fundamentalmente, el discurso médico del movimiento anarquista referido al control de la natalidad, la maternidad y el placer sexual en la Argentina durante el período 1931-1951. En este sentido, nos interesa ocuparnos del debate sobre estos temas –más o menos explícitamente enunciados- en el campo médico y, a partir de allí, desprender la particularidad libertaria. La hipótesis general que demostrará esta tesis sostiene que, a partir de la consolidación del pensamiento eugénico anarquista local a través de su propuesta de control de la natalidad, se fortaleció y se legitimó el discurso sobre los derechos de las mujeres a decidir sobre su capacidad de gestar y su derecho al placer sexual sin que interviniera la reproducción como único destino. / Our interest in recovering discursive trajectories that dealt with what today we call sexual and (non-) reproductive rights and women rights in Argentina, lead us to the analysis of the speech of the anarchist movement. In our fist inquiries the voice of two anarchist doctors stood out from our treatment of the previous problem. Likewise, the presence of eugenic ideas in those professionals arguments for the development of a emancipatory discourse for women in relation to the right of sexual and reproductive self determination lead us to focus on different appropriations of eugenics within the medical field. In accordance with this setting, our investigation has for general objective to analyze the medical discourse of the anarchist movement in reference to birth control, motherhood and sexual pleasure in Argentina during the 1931-1951 period. Our interest is to center on the debate around these issues – more or less explicitly enunciated- in the medical field and from there highlight the libertarian stance. The general hypothesis demonstrated by this thesis argues that the women‘s right to decide over gestation and sexual pleasure, without reproduction as a sole destiny, was strengthen and legitimated by the consolidation of the local anarchist eugenic thinking, particularly through its birth control initiative.

This thesis is a study of contemporary British fascist ideology as expressed in the texts produced by or in association with the British National Party (BNP). It differs from previous studies in that it starts at the depth of the ideology and examines its rhetorical and ideological structure. Drawing on the theory and methodology of critical discourse analysis, this thesis explores the rhetorical and presentational strategies used in contemporary British fascist texts. As such, it examines how constructions of us and the Other are deracialised, warranted and constructed as fact. The thesis also differs from previous studies in that it explores the pattern of contemporary British fascist ideology and emphasises its intrinsically gendered nature. Eugenics is taken as the core ideological theme of fascism, whose focus is on breeding a racially pure and healthy nation. The notion of breeding ensures that gender lies at the core of the ideology. Drawing on the idea of a polarised rhetorical and argumentative structure, this thesis also examines how fascism constructs the ideological opposites of eugenics. The first opposite to eugenics explored in this thesis is liberal ideology and specifically feminism. The analysis examines how fascist opposition to these is based on the essentialist belief in the fixed biological nature of both race and gender. The analysis looks at the presentational strategies as well as the argumentative content of antifeminist discourse in contemporary British fascist texts. The second opposite to eugenics explored is multiculturalism. The thesis explores how stories about rape simultaneously construct race and warrant arguments about the harmful effects of their presence on our society. The analysis examines the various presentational strategies used to portray üs as the victims of the Other. It is by studying the interconnection between these three themes that this thesis argues that fascism, with its eugenic orientation, is not only a racial ideology but a gendered one. The analysis of contemporary British fascist accounts undertaken in this thesis goes some way to providing an understanding of the relationship between gender and race that is at the essentialist core of fascist ideology.

This analysis examines the implicatedness of the self as an embodied space of marginality, knowledge, and resistance to the discursive and material effects of systemic oppression. It explores the implications and possibilities as they relate to social collectives [in nation-state contexts] in resisting and contesting the constraining forces of dominant/dominating institutionalized power and authority in the context of speaking and/or enunciating from the space of abjectification, racialization, and outcastness that has been constructed historically by the nation-state of Britain as a body codified as included-as-excluded-as-removed from the dominant sociopolitical collective’s sense of self and identity? This study argues that enunciation in this form carries with it a politics of ontological transformation that has profound implications for the social collective that is Britain as a whole specifically in the context of social justice affirmation and the reclamation [and assertion] of a collective sense of self that is grounded in a refusal and contestation of the multi-layered hegemonic conceptual frameworks that continue to naturalize, {re}produce and sustain systemic oppression as a state of permanency [Bell, 1992]. This study will explore the permanency of oppression further in relation to the discursive and material negation and amputation of social difference [i.e. class, gender, disability, and sexuality] while centering race [and its prostheticization] as a salient organizing tool in the (re)production of a hegemonic social order. To this end this study utilizes two key interconnecting concepts, internal/internalized colonialism, and racialization. ii It suggests that racialization mediated and channeled by and through a process of internal/internalized colonialism underpins the hegemonic social order of Britain and as such both terms are re-conceptualized and subjected to a complex analysis. Finally, this study examines the theoretical possibilities for developing an anti-racialization framework as a politics of enunciation that makes usage of the concept of racialization as a tool for [1] demystifying systems of oppression, [2] understanding the processes of collective implicatedness in oppression, [3] refusing pathologization and [4] mobilizing transformation through and within a refusal of the amputative and negative capacities of the racialization process.

This analysis examines the implicatedness of the self as an embodied space of marginality, knowledge, and resistance to the discursive and material effects of systemic oppression. It explores the implications and possibilities as they relate to social collectives [in nation-state contexts] in resisting and contesting the constraining forces of dominant/dominating institutionalized power and authority in the context of speaking and/or enunciating from the space of abjectification, racialization, and outcastness that has been constructed historically by the nation-state of Britain as a body codified as included-as-excluded-as-removed from the dominant sociopolitical collective’s sense of self and identity? This study argues that enunciation in this form carries with it a politics of ontological transformation that has profound implications for the social collective that is Britain as a whole specifically in the context of social justice affirmation and the reclamation [and assertion] of a collective sense of self that is grounded in a refusal and contestation of the multi-layered hegemonic conceptual frameworks that continue to naturalize, {re}produce and sustain systemic oppression as a state of permanency [Bell, 1992]. This study will explore the permanency of oppression further in relation to the discursive and material negation and amputation of social difference [i.e. class, gender, disability, and sexuality] while centering race [and its prostheticization] as a salient organizing tool in the (re)production of a hegemonic social order. To this end this study utilizes two key interconnecting concepts, internal/internalized colonialism, and racialization. ii It suggests that racialization mediated and channeled by and through a process of internal/internalized colonialism underpins the hegemonic social order of Britain and as such both terms are re-conceptualized and subjected to a complex analysis. Finally, this study examines the theoretical possibilities for developing an anti-racialization framework as a politics of enunciation that makes usage of the concept of racialization as a tool for [1] demystifying systems of oppression, [2] understanding the processes of collective implicatedness in oppression, [3] refusing pathologization and [4] mobilizing transformation through and within a refusal of the amputative and negative capacities of the racialization process.