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

优生学是20世纪初流行的一套跨越政治、社会和科学领域的思想，它关注的是在世界各地的不同国家保持和加强“种族”的“质量”。如今，优生学这个词与纳粹在“低级”人类和死亡集中营上进行的可怕的“实验”联系在一起，历史学家警告说，不要从优生学的“终点”来理解优生学，也就是强制绝育和消除“不适合的人”。在过去的30年里，学者们并不主张以任何方式忘记或最小化这些联系，而是试图将不同国家的优生学运动理解为特定的创造，源于特定地理区域正在发挥作用的社会、政治和科学环境。这些运动的特点、基本假设和抱负可能与上世纪30年代和40年代纳粹德国的优生学截然不同。这种背景下的更广泛的观点使得对阶级灌输的优生学的研究成为可能，比如在英格兰发展起来的优生学，特别强烈地承认了诸如“弱智”等概念中的体质继承特征，产生了对不同基调的优生学的研究，如西班牙和拉丁美洲的形式，更侧重于一位英国优生论者，就巴西而言，被称为基本的圣词和基本的性学，并鼓励了对其他形式的研究，例如苏联的优生学，它试图在表面上是马克思主义的政治框架内将优生学和生物改良统一起来。因此，优生学，而不是一套严格定义的理论或甚至是种族改进的方法论它是根据多种因素来反映的，如：那个时期民族科学文化的性质和流行的“好”和“坏”特征的遗传传递模式；采纳或批准优生学的政治制度，无论是德国的纳粹主义还是斯堪的纳维亚的社会民主制；宗教疑虑或反对的存在，如在天主教会特别有影响力的葡萄牙；种族理论的作用以及一个国家与其帝国或外国邻国的关系。然而，如果说有什么能将这些不同的表达方式联系在一起的话，那就是担心失去对特定人群生殖和性生活方式的控制，这是这场运动的核心。这反过来又导致了一系列优生学配方，以改善种族和阻止物种退化。最近的优生学史学认识到了这些变量和这些核心特征，并超越了讨论所谓的主线国家--英国、德国和美国--的优生学，将目光扩展到波兰、瑞士、西班牙和匈牙利等较不常被研究的国家。然而，尽管人们对优生学史重新产生了兴趣，但葡萄牙对这一科学的接受程度迄今几乎没有得到审查；1998年只发表了一篇葡萄牙语版的学术文章。该项目旨在填补这一史学空白，同时也旨在为葡萄牙的历史做出重大贡献，因为在葡萄牙，政治史占主导地位，而科学、性和文化研究的社会历史远远不是常态。最后，该项目旨在促进当前关于过去用途的辩论，为当前关于21世纪初‘新优生学’的讨论提供信息，这是一个由科学进步和个性化消费选择相结合的基因选择时代。与2007年春季出版的《新形态：文化/理论/政治杂志》类似，这项研究的重点是“新”和“旧”优生学以及两者之间的关系，本研究旨在强调人文科学在阐明这类分析方面的作用和相关性。

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.