Birgit Lang

Eugenics and the Origins of Autism

Autism has become a deeply contested diagnosis. Whereas family advocacy organizations have long characterized the condition as a disorder in need of effective treatments, a growing number of adults who think of themselves as having high-functioning autism (or Asperger syndrome) insist that autism is an identity deserving of acceptance. The latter use the term “neurodiversity” to contend that autism should be regarded as a profoundly interwoven combination of intellectual gifts and social differences. Some even question the motivations underlying basic scientific research, arguing that genetic markers will be used in prenatal diagnosis to eliminate rather than improve the lives of people with autism.1 The debate over whether to consider autism a disability or identity is surely complicated by its expansion into a spectrum that encompasses a wide range of individuals and functioning. But this controversy is also rooted in a fundamental tension within the core definitions of autism as formulated in the 1940s by the 2 physicians credited for first describing the syndrome. Drs Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger both highlighted the presence of intellectual gifts in many of their patients, alongside social deficits and characteristic behaviors. This emphasis is best understood as … Address correspondence to Jeffrey P. Baker, MD, PhD, Pediatrics, Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine, PO Box 3040, Durham, NC 27710. E-mail: jeffrey.baker{at}dm.duke.edu

The Aesthetics of Sexual Ethics: Geschlecht und Gesellschaft and Middle-Class Sexual Modernity in fin-de-siècle Germany

Abstract From its fin-de-siècle inception against the backdrop of Wilhelmine-era body culture and Lebensreform movements, the liberal German periodical Geschlecht und Gesellschaft consistently worked to push the boundaries of sexual discourse within a framework of bourgeois respectability. Until the end of World War I, it did so by prioritizing aesthetic discourse, with contributors undertaking progressive, sexually explicit readings of the Western canon, challenging controversial censorship decisions — using ‘high’ culture to appeal to an educated Bildungsbürgertum readership — and exploring a new Darwinian-inspired sexual ethics. While the institutional and intellectual history of the furor sexualis as a paradigm of modernity has largely been mapped since Foucault, with historians charting the ‘scientification’, ‘biologization’ and ‘medicalization’ of German society in early twentieth-century modernity, this article positions aesthetic discourse as a key aspect of the pursuit of the truth of sex. It also shows how this cultural paradigm largely disappeared in the Weimar era, when shifts in middle-class demographics led to an increasing focus on science in discussions of sex. [Es scheint] mir angebracht, sich klar zu werden, was die Erotik in der Kunst, wie sie in unserm Buch zum Ausdruck kommt, bezweckt. Sie dient als Ausflußbett für alle Regungen im Menschen, die sexuellen Timbre haben und sich im Liebesleben nicht erschöpfen. Ihr Maß ist ein erhebliches, wird aber immer noch so völlig unterschätzt, daß man nicht klar und laut genug von ihrem Dasein sprechen kann. Emil Schultze-Malkowsky, ‘Die Erotik in der Kunst’ (1908)