Governing the Living, Controlling Human Reproduction. (Post)colonial Trajectories of Eugenics – EUGENE

How did eugenics, which posits an ontological inequality between individuals, come to find itself embedded in the universalist thought of the modern state? Instead of being banished after Nazism used it to murderous ends, the reference to eugenics has witnessed a number of reconfigurations and endured up to the present day. This project precisely intends to shed light on the under-the-radar trajectory of eugenics, by studying reproductive control policies in France and the USSR with an emphasis on their imperial dimensions. In the two societies, eugenics, while it did not translate into policies labelled as such, initially enjoyed a fair amount of recognition before coming under critical fire and undergoing multiple redefinitions. There is, indeed, significant evidence that a concern for improving the ‘quality’ of the population lingered even after 1945 – including in (formerly) colonial and peripheral areas, where eugenicist ideas and practices were fueled by concerns about a perceived demographic explosion of some categories of the population.
To retrace the successive chains of re-elaboration of the eugenicist project, we adopt a threefold approach. 1°) A comparative approach, drawing on three case studies (Réunion, Algeria and Tajikistan), will be used to understand how (formerly) colonized and peripheral areas came to serve as laboratories for eugenics, when its social acceptability was contested. This will inspire a reflection on the nature of imperial dominion and how it combined with eugenicist thought and practices. 2°) This comparison will be complemented by a transnational approach, examining the circulations of ideas and models initiated by the USSR, which in the twentieth century was held up as a reference in the field of the fight against colonial, racial, social and gender-based dominations. By studying their appropriations in France – on the mainland and in the colonies – we intend to highlight the interweaving of eugenicist thought with ostensibly universalist, egalitarian or emancipatory political ideologies (socialism, feminism, republicanism, anti-racism), and to show how these convergences permitted the emergence of a relative eugenicist consensus and nipped radical critiques in the bud. 3°) Lastly, to document the globalization of eugenicist practices and its underlying center-(ex)peripheries dynamics at work since the 1960s, we will conduct a multi-site study on Depo-Provera, a birth-control drug that was for a long time banned for its adverse effects on women’s health, but extensively used to curb the reproduction of specific populations. We will focus on its use in the French space since the 1970s (in psychiatric hospitals and in the (formerly) colonized regions) and in the post-Soviet space since the 2010s.
Situated at the intersection of the history of knowledge and political ideas and of the socio-history of public policy, this research project will draw on distinct archival corpuses (from various levels of government, as well as scientific and political archives) and confront them with other types of materials (scientific, bureaucratic and activist literature; interviews). Thanks to this diversity of sources, we will be able to retrace the often underground paths travelled by eugenics and to shed light on its current seemingly paradoxical status – that of a scholarly ideology that is morally reprehensible, and associated with the twentieth century’s worst atrocities, yet is still very much alive and used in population policies. In the process, this research project will contribute to public debates on questions that remain topical, pertaining to the control of the reproduction of individuals who are discriminated on biological, social or cultural grounds, and to the elimination of lives considered unfit to be lived.