Visual Arts and Genetics

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seem normal and natural to desire to have BOOK REVIEW sexual contact with the delectable body for ‘rational procreation’. Conversely, the abject image was designed to evoke repulsion: aver- Visual arts and genetics: lessons sion to emulation of and sexual contact with the degenerate body compounded its align- from the past ment with syphilis and other forms of sexual ...... contagion. Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti To summarize the content of the eight chapters, first is the ‘measurement of man’ Visual Arts and Genetics: Lessons from the past and the ‘ranking of race’, particularly once the Edited by Fae Brauer (Author) and Anthea Callen ideal body was established through canoniza- ISBN-10: 0754658279; ISBN-13: 978-0754658276 tion of the statues Apollo Belvedere Published by: Ashgate (Leochares, 350 BC; frontispiece image) and Price: d65.00 Gladiateur Bourgeois (Denis Diderot and Jean ...... le Rond d’Alambert, 1770; Figure 4.2). Second is the mapping of the body through Nicola Marziliano ...... anthropometry, craniometry and metric photography and through ways in which European Journal of Human Genetics (2011) 19, 122; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2010.155 these microscopes of conduct inscribed nor- mality and beauty upon the fit body, as well as degeneracy upon the body as a result of o doubt our contemporary age is domi- and well in the Popular Front France: León alcohol, criminal activities, prostitution, N nated by images. Moreover, beauty and Blum’s Socialist government that reputedly syphilis or colour and upon Modernist art. appearance are a must in Western society. stood against Fascism. Such artworks indeed Third is the function of eugenics as a scientia This book is an extremely elegant, multi- had an integral role in popularizing French sexualis through the scripting of sex and the cultural and multidisciplinary voyage into eugenics and desiring a eugenics body. The roles of art and visual cultures in making the roots of ‘distortion’ that led the desire different ways in which the body became the eugenic body appear delectable. Fourth is of a fit and beautiful body, which always inscribed as the prime site of delectation the role of nakedness in body cultures and accompanied the human spirit (irrespective through the interplay between art and visual fine art. Fifth is the stripping of race. Sixth is of the culture to which one belonged), to the cultures, modern medicine, science, anatomy, the posing of the eugenic body to incite promulgation in 1934 of the Eugenic anthropology, anthropometry, criminology exhibitionism and voyeurism. Seventh is Sterilization Law from the Third Reich: and eugenics in North America, in the French the idealization of the naked male with 250 000 people diagnosed with alcoholism, Third Republic, Victorian and interwar body to arouse emulation and heterosexual manic depression, schizophrenia, hereditary Britain, the Weimar Republic and Nazi association, as well as homosociality and epilepsy, blindness and deafness, congenital Germany, the Soviet Union, Australia and homoeroticism. The last and eighth chapter mental deficiency, hereditary disease and New Zealand are examined in each chapter is on the representation of woman as a physical deformity disrupting locomotion of this book. In aestheticizing health, art was titillating eugenic body to signal her ripeness were sterilized. This was the first step in a able to inscribe fitness as natural, evolved, for procreative sex and nurturance of a complex and systemic eugenic campaign civilized and beautiful. new race. culminating in the extermination of Jews, Sex and eugenics have been historically We congratulate the two editors, Fae homosexuals, gypsies, political dissidents positioned as an oxymoron. The very term Brauer and Anthea Callen, on the enormous and others classified as physiologically or eugenics signifies control of sexuality in terms effort of smoothly pooling together the psychologically ‘degenerate’. of its rationalization or strict management different perspectives that arose from the The concept behind the three words to ensure that nothing is wasted away in contributors, among others, of a controversial ‘Art, Sex and Eugenics’ is made available securing the betterment of a society, race or topic that is always up-to-date, such as thoroughly in the eight chapters of this book. nation. By contrast, the word sex conjures up eugenics and its corollary implications’ Art (or better visual art) was of great an action so excessive and uncontrollable by support in the Nazi eugenic campaign. nature that it is capable of corrupting and Through films, posters, leaflets and carefully contaminating an entire national order. Sex Dr Nicola Marziliano is at the Molecular staged photographs, Jewish people and peo- beyond imperative procreation was called Pathology Laboratory, Azienda Ospedaliera ple of colour were inscribed as diseased and ‘excessive’ and ‘unnatural’. Constantly, warn- Ospedale Maggiore Ca` Granda Niguarda, deformed, as well as morally and culturally ings were issued about its destruction of Piazzale Golgi 2, Milan-IT, Italy. degenerate. However, not only was such energy and ambition, its weakening of Tel and Fax: +390264444696; culture present in the Third Reich (ie, let us virility and potency and its contamination E-mail: Nicola.marziliano@ think of the artworks celebrating sports at the of thousands. Through nudity and provoca- ospedaleniguarda.it, 1936 Olympic Games) but it was also alive tive posing, aspirational imagery made it http://:www.ospedaleniguarda.it