Summary of Susan Antebi's Embodied Archive

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The author’s personal and professional journey leads him to Urzaiz’s Eugenia, and the eugenic project of early twentieth-century Mérida. While focused on a particular writer and his work, the reading explodes outward to take on not only the question of historical context, but the far-reaching resonance of disability and eugenic discourse across time and space.
#2 The scene in question is striking for its brief but vivid physical descriptions of the characters involved, specifically the Africans, the physician, and the young Ernesto. While the history of eugenics is a history of racism, within the novel itself, eugenics functions to erase negatively perceived physical and psychological conditions.
#3 The novel centers around the story of Ernesto, a young and physically ideal male, and his older, intellectually gifted partner and former teacher, Celiana. Toward the beginning of the novel, Ernesto, thanks to his physical endowments, is selected by the state to be an official reproducer of the species.
#4 Eugenics and the romantic plot work in tandem with a political backdrop in which Mexico is on the brink of a potential trade war with Cuba, due to disagreements regarding the price of sugar.

Sujets

• Social sciences
• Général

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 04 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669349501
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Susan Antebi's Embodied Archive
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The author’s personal and professional journey leads him to Urzaiz’s Eugenia, and the eugenic project of early twentieth-century Mérida. While focused on a particular writer and his work, the reading explodes outward to take on not only the question of historical context, but the far-reaching resonance of disability and eugenic discourse across time and space.

#2

The scene in question is striking for its brief but vivid physical descriptions of the characters involved, specifically the Africans, the physician, and the young Ernesto. While the history of eugenics is a history of racism, within the novel itself, eugenics functions to erase negatively perceived physical and psychological conditions.

#3

The novel centers around the story of Ernesto, a young and physically ideal male, and his older, intellectually gifted partner and former teacher, Celiana. Toward the beginning of the novel, Ernesto, thanks to his physical endowments, is selected by the state to be an official reproducer of the species.

#4

Eugenics and the romantic plot work in tandem with a political backdrop in which Mexico is on the brink of a potential trade war with Cuba, due to disagreements regarding the price of sugar.

#5

The novel deals with the question of how to deal with the undesirable effects of human disqualification, and the novel’s aesthetics and ambivalence regarding human embodiment contribute to this question.

#6

The eugenic project seeks to erase certain traits in people, such as madness. But as Dr. Urzaiz points out, the very concepts of sane and insane are relative, since they depend on which side of the fence the one who judges or classifies them is standing.

#7

The novel suggests an aesthetic paradox by combining this projected erasure with the detailed inclusion of imperfect characters. The female protagonist, Celiana, writes about the decadent aesthetics of two or three centuries past, but describes herself and her body as characters in decadence.

#8

The lines used by Celiana to describe the aesthetics of a prior age are a clue to the novel’s place in relation to Urzaiz’s thinking, and to the larger trajectory of his professional development. In 1902, Urzaiz presented his undergraduate thesis to the Facultad de Medicina y Cirurgía de Yucatán, with the title El desequilibrio mental.

#9

The aesthetic problem exists in the present day, and it stems from the fact that Urzaiz’s younger self wrote about a society that was prone to mental instability. Without such elements of difference or strangeness, the novel would be lacking in narrative interest.

#10

The novel features a framework that is simultaneously medical and aesthetic. Disabilities, which require surgical intervention in the form of sterilization, are a product of this framework. They are a departure from both the ideal and the norm.

#11

The novel Urzaiz writes deals with the eugenic debate, and the author himself is both a product of that debate and a part of it. He writes about the ways in which people have been classified as unfit to reproduce, and how this has been used to discriminate against groups of people.

#12

The question of whether or not the novel critiques aspects of the racist and eugenic future society it represents is crucial, but it is also undecidable. The reader must navigate the dynamic of intercorporeal observation and aesthetics in order to make such a distinction.

#13

The author of an article about Eugenia published in the journal Science Fiction Studies argues that the novel is a dystopic satire, and that its conclusion, in which the young couple retreats to a chalet outside Villautopía, is a critique of the politics of the Bureau of Eugenics.

#14

The Yucatec doctor, Dziubinski, and the French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, were both influential in the development of psychiatry as a field.

#15

The inclusion of two African doctors in the novel Eugenia, and their names Booker T. and Lincoln, recalls the fraught political climate of Cuba at the time. The caricatured image of the doctors is reflective of the racism prevalent in the United States at the time, and in Cuban society as well.

#16

The author’s fascination with Cuban independence and his affinity for José Martí, which inspired him to write the book, La familia, cruz del apóstol, centered on the role of family and love as encumbrances to the leader’s true revolutionary cause.

#17

Urzaiz’s fascination with Martí stems from his belief that the Cuban was a prime example of the cerebral type, which he defines as los grandes pensadores y filósofos, los hombres de ciencia, los literatos, inventores y reformadores.

#18

The gaze of Urzaiz’s portrait of Martí is between the author and his compatriot, as it tightens but never fully closes. It is a queer encounter for its suspension of defined selves and positions.

#19

The question of viewpoint arises in the case of Martí, who is a towering literary and intellectual figure, with his own geopolitical itineraries. He has views on eugenics and racial and ethnic difference, which he expresses in his writings.

#20

The transnational movement of eugenicist perspectives complicates their positionality, while at the same time making clear that such perspectives, when emerging from a face-to-face encounter, are necessarily fleeting and dependent on a tangible embodiment.

#21

The history of eugenics is rooted in the idea that human movement through geographic space creates and defines racial difference, and that this difference must be purged. Mexican eugenics failed to follow this logic on a massive scale, but it did repeatedly promote the racial conundrum of the mestizo as both the emblem of a perfected people and an internally ambiguous source of potential contamination.

#22

Eugenics was a complex mix of both potential vast migratory distances and a fear of close proximity. The tension between these two facets of the ideology is what made it so contradictory, and ultimately racist.

#23

The reader is also a participant in the gaze that Charcot used to observe and diagnose his patients. The fragmentation of perspective that occurs when observing and understanding racialized difference is a key aspect of eugenics.

#24

The scene of observation is a dynamic one, because for Charcot and his contemporaries, expression and t