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

优生学是20世纪早期流行的一套思想，横跨政治、社会和科学领域，关注的是维持和加强世界不同国家“种族”的“质量”。在过去的三十年里，学者们试图将不同国家的优生学运动理解为特定地理区域的社会、政治和科学环境所产生的特定创造，而不是主张以任何方式忘记或最小化这些联系。这些运动的特点、潜在的假设和愿望可能与20世纪30年代和40年代纳粹德国的优生学非常不同。这样一种背景化的更广泛的观点使得对阶级影响严重的优生学的研究成为可能，比如在英国发展起来的优生学，对“弱智”等概念中的先天遗传特征做出了特别强烈的让步，产生了对西班牙和拉丁美洲等不同流派优生学的研究，这些优生学更多地关注于一位英国优生学家，在巴西的案例中，称之为基础性学和基础性学，并鼓励研究其他形式的优生学，比如苏联优生学，它试图在表面上的马克思主义政治框架内将优生学和生物改良结合起来。因此，优生学并不是一套严格定义的理论，甚至也不是一套种族改良的方法，而是根据各种因素发生了变化，例如：当时国家科学文化的性质以及普遍存在的“好”和“坏”特征的遗传传递模式；采用或批准优生学的政治体制，无论是德国的纳粹主义还是斯堪的纳维亚的社会民主主义；宗教疑虑或反对的存在，如在葡萄牙，天主教会特别有影响力；“种族”理论的作用和一个国家与其帝国或外国邻国的关系。然而，如果说这些不同的表达有什么共同点的话，那就是害怕失去对特定人群繁殖和性生活方式的控制，这是这场运动的核心。这反过来又导致了大量的优生配方，以改善种族，并停止了物种的退化。最近的优生学史学已经认识到这些变量和这些核心特征，并且已经超越了讨论所谓的“主流”国家——英国、德国和美国——的优生学，将其目光扩展到不太常被研究的国家，如波兰、瑞士、西班牙和匈牙利。尽管人们对优生学的历史重新产生了兴趣，然而，迄今为止，葡萄牙对这门科学的接受程度几乎没有得到检验；1998年只有一篇学术文章用葡萄牙语发表。该项目旨在填补这一历史空白，同时也旨在为葡萄牙的历史做出重大贡献，这是一门以政治史为主导的学科，而科学、性和文化研究的社会史远未达到标准。最后，本项目旨在为当前关于利用过去为21世纪初“新优生学”的讨论提供信息的辩论做出贡献，这是一个由科学进步和个性化消费者选择相结合主导的基因选择时代。与2007年春季出版的《新形态：文化/理论/政治杂志》（关注“新”和“旧”优生学以及两者之间的关系）类似，本研究旨在强调人文学科在阐明此类分析中的作用和相关性。

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.