see attachments and please use as references
Please use quotes, stats, or other evidence from this week’s course materials to support your responses. Please use following resources https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/200 · What is eugenics? · What is the role of eugenics in disability history? · Are eugenics still practiced today? If so, how? · What was Buck vs. Bell? What was the verdict? · What was the historical impact of Buck vs. Bell? Is it still relevant today? In what ways? · How does Maybee frame eugenics? How does Sandel frame eugenics? How are these perspectives similar? Different? 119-MFP-206-20200110161749 2 A New Structure of Attitudes :-Jormalcy, Eugenics, the Ugly Laws, and Segregation n April 11 , 1890, at 3:30 in the afternoon, after four years ofliving in his private -~~ms in London Hospital, which came to be called "the elephant house," the .•:-famous twenty-eight-year-old Joseph Merrick, who had previously worked • • five years in the freak-show business as "the Elephant Man," was found lying d across his bed. In an account of Merrick's life, Dr. Frederick Treves, who had ..:n in charge of Merrick's care at the hospital, implied, bur did not explicitly rhac Merrick, who was required to sleep upright to avoid asphyxiation due to deformities, had committed suicide. Merrick did so, Treves said, because he d not "be like other people." As historian Nadja Durbach (2010) describes it, - !",es claimed chat Merrick likely committed suicide because Merrick could not eve normalcy" (56). However, Tom Norman, one of the best-known show- . of rhe day who had served as one of four of Merrick's managers when Mer- worked the freak-show circuit (33), challenged Treves's account of Merrick's •,·.·ation. Norman maintained, as Durbach summarizes it, chat suicide "was .rrick's only way out of being constantly interrogated by rhe medical gaze." ::0rding co Norman, Durbach says, Merrick's suicide was his "last expression of -:: control , an act of manly defiance chat was ultimately an explicit refusal to ·..rrher objectified and pachologized by medical science" (56). difficult to know what Merrick's own views were, because both Norman -:-reves represent themselves in rhe best light (Durbach 2010, 37). Durbach ms rhe contrast between Norman's and Treves's accounts of Merrick's life as "1ict between an older view, in which people with physical differences had ed on their status as "able-bodied" working people while earning a living ·enainers on the freak-show circuit, and a newer view, in which medical 41 42 Chapter 2 practitioners asserted power as experts while depicting people with bodily differ- ences in increasingly dehumanized ways as diseased and pitiful people who, being necessarily unable to work as a result of their deformities, were in need of charity. The competing accounts of Merrick's story are thus a sign of a cultural shift from an older understanding of ability and disability that developed during and after the Middle Ages, to a new understanding of disability that was taking hold in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries under industrial capitalism. In the older view, being "able-bodied," as Durbach (201 O) suggests, was not associated with deformity of the body but with the ability to labor (18). And, as historian Irina Metzler suggested (see chapter 1), during the Middle Ages and early modern periods, there was also a wider variety of acceptable forms of labor. However, as industrial capitalism's wage labor system and a new structure of upper-, middle-, ruling-class attitudes restricted the range of acceptable forms of labor, bodily differences came to be depicted in increasingly medicalized and dehumanized ways as necessary barriers to employment that should be addressed only through charity and segregation. Merrick himself was segregated from non- disabled people while in residence at the hospital and lived on charity. The Marxist-inspired or materialist social models of disability (see the intro- duction), which focus on the economic aspects of the third dimension of embodi- ment or institutional body, are often criticized for failing to take account of the effects that ideologfral and cultural aspects of society, beyond economics, have on the lives of disabled people (e.g., Metzler 2006, 26; Shakespeare 1994). This chapter explores the development of a structute of attitudes, ideology, or set of cultural beliefs that increasingly came to define disabled people, from the point of view of the third dimension or institutional body, not only as an excluded and disadvantaged group (see chapter 1) but also as a despised group. There was a shift in the nineteenth century in Western societies away from a view in which people were regarded as "dis-abled" insofar as they were excluded from or unable to work in the capitalist wage market, as the Marxist analysis sug- gests (chapter 1), toward a view in which disabled people came to be culturally defined in increasingly medicalized ways as diseased and despised outsiders. This shift is traced through the competing accounts of Merrick's life, the development of the idea of normalcy (and hence also abnormalcy), the eugenics movement, the so-called ugly laws, and the expanding segregation of disabled people, all of which either first appeared or increased in the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth. These developments solidified and are reflected in today's structures of public attitudes that largely regard disabled people as abnormal and as proper subjects only of medicine, charity, and segregation. Not only were these developments consistent with capitalists' aims, however, bur also a full account of them requires paying attention to the workings of the capitalist system. A New Structure of Attitudes Chapter outline: > Competing Accounts of the Life and Death of Joseph Merrick and the Development of the Concept of Normalcy > The Eugenics Movement > The "Ugly Laws" > Contemporary Segregation > Conditions in Segregated Institutions > Ending Segregation? > Is the Segregation and Abuse of Disabled People Malicious? > Positive Side Effects of Segregation > Conclusion COMPETING ACCOUNTS OF THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JOSEPH MERRICK AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF NORMALCY • Norman's Account of Merrick as a Defeated, Able-Bodied, Working- Class Man • Freak Shows and the Invention of Normalcy • Treves's Account of Merrick as Abnormal, Diseased, and Unemployable • Treves's Upper- and Middle-Class Account Becomes Dominant . ;orman's Account of Merrick as a Defeated, Able-Bodied, ·working-Class Man 43 Born into a working-class household in northern England in 1862, Merrick, ·ho began to develop deformities at an early age, had been employed in unskilled obs from age 11, including at a cigar factory and as a peddler. He was forced out of his home as a young teenager by family problems. After his mother died and his father remarried, his stepmother rejected him, apparently because she found • .im grotesque. He was taken in by a kind uncle who worked as a hairdresser, uc, not wanting to be a burden, Durbach (2010) reports, Merrick tried to live mdependencly "in cheap lodging houses, before eventually checking himself into che Leicester workhouse where he remained for almost five years" (36). The showman Norman, the working-class son of a butcher who, like Merrick, nad begun working at a young age and left home at age 14 (Durbach 2010, 37), reported that Merrick cook the initiative to reach out to a local variety theater 44 Chapter 2 from the workhouse "to seek employment as a novelty act," Durbach says. Ac- cording to Norman, Merrick then "struck a deal with a consortium of showmen, including Norman, who agreed to exhibit him as 'the Elephant Man' in several cities across Britain" (46-47). Durbach suggests that, in Norman's account, Mer- rick is described "not as a helpless invalid but as a fellow working man who suc- cessfully and shrewdly capitalized on an expanding consumer culture by selling the only thing he had left to commodify: his extraordinary body" (37). According to Norman, Merrick's career as a freak-show performer was profitable enough for Merrick to save "a sizeable nest egg for a working-class man" within the first five months (47). Norman maintained that Merrick's ability to earn his own wages was important to Merrick's sense of self, echoing "the discourse of working-class masculine self-reliance" of the day, in line with which the freak show could pro- vide a route for working-class people to "demonstrate that they were independent laborers, and thus to articulate their moral worth" (47, cf. 37). While the freak show was evidently not Merrick's first choice for working and making money-he had tried to obtain other work in the wage market of his day but was pushed out of that market and into the workhouse-it did provide him with a less ideal path for remaining economically independent and self-reliant. Norman's account of Merrick's attitudes toward his work as a performer is reinforced by Durbach's (201 O) arguments that freak-show performers were "heavily invested in their status as 'able-bodied"' working people (19). Durbach writes: "Freaks of all varieties tended to construct themselves as skilled per- formers whose bodies allowed them to lead normal, if not extraordinary, lives, a fact that was clearly central to their public personae" (20). This account of the attitudes of the freak show performers toward labor is also consistent with Metzler's suggestion that all the social strata of urban society came to adopt the elite's discourse on the intrinsic value of labor, and hence the value of being able to work, beginning in the late thirteenth century and certainly after the spread of the Protestant work ethic in the mid- l 600s (Metzler 2006, 43-44). As a result, when Treves confined Merrick to the London Hospital in 1886, he did not rescue Merrick from the "dismal slavery" of the freak show as Treves had claimed, Norman's account suggests, but instead "compromised [Merrick's] identity as an able-bodied, self-governing working-class man" (Durbach 2010, 46). As Durbach writes, ''After almost five years in the workhouse, Merrick checked himself out to begin life as a freak. After four years in 'the elephant house' he chose another means of escape" (55). During Merrick's career as a freak-show performer, Durbach (201 O) suggests, although Merrick was marketed as a half-human, half-animal "Elephant Man"- the animal/human hybrid was a common role adopted by freak-show performers (8-9)-he was presented as a wonder (45),