Discourses of Eugenic Science in Portugal, 1900-1950: Degeneration, Race and Sexuality

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Eugenics, a set of ideas popular in the early twentieth century that cut across political, social and scientific fields, was concerned with maintaining and fortifying the 'quality' of the 'race' in different countries across the world. While the term nowaday is associated with the appalling Nazi 'experiments' on 'inferior' human beings and the death camps, historians have warned against understanding eugenics from its 'end point', that is, forced sterilization and the elimination of the 'unfit'. Over the last thirty years, without advocating that these links should be forgotten or minimized in any way, scholars have tried to understand different countries' eugenics movements as specific creations coming out the social, political and scientific circumstances at play in a particular geographical area. The characteristics, underlying assumptions and aspirations of these movements may have been very different to the eugenics of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Such a contextualised broader view has enabled the research of heavily class-imbued eugenics, such as that which developed in England, with a particularly strong concession to constitutionally inherited characteristics within concepts like 'feeble mindedness', has produced examinations of eugenics of different tenors such as Spanish and Latin American forms which focused more on what one British eugenicist, for the Brazilian case, qualified as basic santitation and elementary sexology, and has encouraged the study of other forms, such as Soviet eugenics, which attempted to unite eugenics and biological improvement within ostensibly Marxist political frameworks.Eugenics, then, rather than a strictly defined set of theories or even methodologies for racial improvement, was inflected in accordance with a variety of factors such as: the nature of the national scientific culture of the period and the models of hereditary transmission of 'good' and 'bad' characteristics that were prevalent; the political regime that adopted or sanctioned eugenics, whether Nazism in Germany or social democracy in Scandinavia; the presence of religious misgivings or opposition, as in Portugal where the Catholic church was particularly influential; the role of 'racial' theories and a country's relation to its empire or foreign neighbours. However, if anything unites these diverse expressions, it was the fear of losing control over the ways in which a given population reproduced and lived its sexual life that was at the heart of the movement. This in turn led to a vast range of eugenic recipes for racial improvement and for a halt to the degeneration of the species.Recent historiography of eugenics has recognized both these variables and these core features and has moved beyond discussing eugenics in so-called 'mainline' countries - Britain, Germany and the United States - to extend its gaze to less commonly examined countries such as Poland, Switzerland, Spain and Hungary. Despite renewed interest in the history of eugenics, however, Portugal's reception of the science has barely been examined to date; only one academic article has been published in 1998 in Portuguese. This project seeks to fill this historiographical gap and in doing so also aims to make a significant contribution to the history of Portugal, a discipline where political history predominates and social histories of science, sexuality and cultural studies are far from the norm. Lastly, this project aims to contribute to current debate on the uses of the past to inform present discussions of the 'new eugenics' of the early twenty-first century, an era of genetic choice led by a combination of scientific advances and individualized consumer options. In similar ways to the spring 2007 issue of New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, which focused on 'new' and 'old' eugenics and the relations between the two, thisstudy aims to highlight the role and relevance of the humanities in articulating such analyses.