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Art, Sex and Eugenics

This book, co-edited with Anthea Callan, reveals how eugenics functioned as an explicit political and social policy and as an insidious, coercive bioculture via the formative role of art in culture. In demonstrating how ‘healthy’ art in America, Britain, France, New Zealand, Communist Russia and Germany was lauded for inculcating a desire for the physically and genetically perfect body – the ‘corpus delecti’ – it establishes that eugenics functioned as a transnational bioculture. Far from eugenics being an isolated phenomenon, the eight chapters illuminate how Nazi eugenics was the extreme realization of transnational biocultures intended to cultivate corporeal perfection and to eradicate ‘degeneracy’. Brauer contributed a chapter 'Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics: The Body Stripped Bare during French Sexual Neoregulation', pp. 97-138.

This book received extensive reviews including:

Art Bulletin, Art History, The Art Book (see: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8357.2010.01079_4.x/abstract)Social History of Medicine Aug 2009, Vol 22 (see: http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/book-reviews/43979751/art-sex-eugenics-corpus-delecti)

European Journal of Human Genetics (see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039516/)

It was awarded the ‘Best Edited Book or Anthology' 2009 prize by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (see: http://aaanz.info/prizes/1011-2/).

The research spawned many conferences including ‘Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Degeneration and Regenerating in Modern Visual Cultures’ (Association of Art Historians, Milton Keynes, 2012); ‘Bloody Bodies’,(AAANZ conference, Adelaide 2011) and ‘Dirt, Disease and Degeneration’ ( Bingham Young University, Salt Lake City, 2009). Brauer gave plenary lectures: ‘L’Art Eugénique: Biopower and the Biocultures of Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics’ (Uppsala Universitet, 2011); “Brisk and Sturdy Son”: Performing Eugenic Regeneration’ (Sheffield University, 2010); and ‘Incriminating Evidence: Bodies, Skulls and Statistics at the Francis Galton National Eugenics Laboratory’ (ZfL, Von Humboldt University, 2008). This research underpinned the Wellcome Trust conference and exhibition, ‘Eugenics, Science and the National Body’, and the Australia Research Council’s support for the ‘Transnational Cultures of Eugenics and Genetics’ project (2012).