Event Description
In the early years of the 20th century, researchers at the Eugenics Record Office and the Station for Experimental Evolution dreamt of achieving white perfection through science. As they set out to understand heredity and gain control over reproduction, much of their research came to be about sex and its role in making better forms of life. This talk explores the way that eugenic scientists deployed a capacious and often contradictory understanding of what sex was—static or malleable, hormonal or anatomical, binary or not—depending on what species they were using in their research and what kinds of problems they wanted to solve. Using animal sex studies to make claims about how humans should live, it turned out, wasn’t as simple as they had hoped.
Event Speaker
Beans Velocci, Graduate Student in History at Yale University
Event Information
Free and open to the public. Streaming available via YouTube. For more information, please visit the event webpage.
Hosted by the Science History Institute as part of their Lunchtime Lectures series.
