confronting positive eugenicism

"What are you going to do when you're done?" - the question most asked of and dreaded by students of all kinds.

Though I always respond, "I don't know," my academic convictions have begun to mirror my personal interests, making academia an attractive career option. The imbrication of personal/political/academic makes for a great road sometimes. Nothing like experiential knowledge touching theoretical joys touching political stakes to stay enthralled in the journey.

Contrarily, when writing literature is tied to writing the self, fielding critique becomes a challenging exercise in resisting feeling personally attacked. I'm discovering that this is not a matter of compartmentalizing work and life, academic and personal. In my project, they bleed from the same vein. The fact is criticism of my research is a personal attack of sorts and the issue becomes how to cope when compartmentalizing is not possible or desirable.

My work was recently criticized for echoing pronatalism - the kind associated with imperialism, racism and eugenics. This...is not good. I take this critique and ask myself: why am I fighting for the right to be supported to have children when we have a problem of overpopulation and environmental crisis on this planet? Appreciating this at a philosophical level, I still want to ask my questions about the structural disenfranchisement of mothers in Canada. Mine is not a "life or death problem" (though it is in the Foucauldian sense of biolife and Puar's reiteration of necropolitics), but it's discrimination nonetheless. And if the institution of the school is a central generator of power relations (see Discipline and Punish), is not this an important system to interrogate?

Consumed with finding a way to reconcile this, I shunned a lunch to dig through pronatalist policies from Nazi Germany (you know I'm occupied when I shun a lunch). I tried to understand how my work differs from or reproduces these discourses or both. Given its reputation for macho nationalist rationale, Nazi population policy seemed an apt historical example to explore. In 1988, Robert Proctor wrote a book with the Harvard University Press called Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Chapter 5 is on the control of women.

I knew the machismo ideology of the regime, but couldn't have imagined to what extent. Family policies from criminalizing the abortion of a "German" fetus as a "racial crime" (a crime for which violators faced imprisonment) to the Honor Cross for German Motherhood (dollars and public props for babies), all intentioned the mass production of potential Nazi bodies. Policies targeted fathers too. Loans amounting to a year's salary were given to husbands whose wives agreed to leave paid labour for domestic life. For every child born, the principle was reduced on the loan by one quarter. By 1938, all public officials (men) (including academics) were required to marry or resign. These are only a couple of the masculine workfarist policies. Texts around standards of beauty and womanhood circulating through policies, media and political rhetoric enforced momism to the max.

Canada was reputed for pronatalism too. Small anecdote: in 1926, Toronto millionaire, Charles Millar, promised $700 000 to the woman who would have the most children by 1936 (The winner had 26 children by age 40. Holy...eff). As staggering as these incentives are to me, what is just as fascinating is the host of parallels between blatantly racist natalist policies in wartime Germany and contemporary family policy. Rewarding "upper"-class straight motherhood of the desired race for nationalist rhetoric is the obvious intention of pronatalist policies in wealthy nations like France, Japan and Canada. How do I defend my right to be assisted in raising my own children in this context? Maybe I shouldn't be. Help me out, y'all.