Angela M. Smith > Quotes

“Motivated by the belief that “[s]ociety must protect itself; as it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life, so also it may annihilate the hideous serpent of hopeless protoplasm,” official eugenics directed much of its energy toward identifying, representing in monstrous terms, and seeking to control the agglomerate body of America’s and”
― Angela M. Smith, Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema

“Eugenic rhetoric thus remained dependent on the body exterior as a powerful “material metaphor” for mysterious genetic processes. The desirable stock of the “fit” was imagined in terms of whiteness, beauty, and physical fitness; embodied in the winners of the AES’s “Better Babies” and “Fitter Families” competitions; invoked in books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which described the progenitors of good American stock as “splendid conquistadores” of Nordic heritage with “absolutely fair skin” and “great stature”; and visualized in eugenic displays.37”
― Angela M. Smith, Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema