Art, Sex and Eugenics

Illuminating how art proved instrumental to arousing desire for it and enhancing its sexual performance, this book reveals how art and sex promoted the eugenic quest for the perfect body. Its eight chapters demonstrate the uncanny resemblances between eugenic sexual management and body imagery in France, Britain, Communist Russia, Nazi Germany and America both before and after the Second World War. Traced back to the 'measure of man' and ranking of race in the eighteenth-century anatomy lesson, the perfect eugenic body is shown to have been imaged as much after the Bolshevik sexual revolution as in democratic nations and fascist regimes as athletic, hygienic, 'pure-blooded' and sexually potent. Persistently posed naked, these images of the perfect eugenic body proved to be unashamedly exhibitionist and voyeuristic. Not only were they commended for soliciting the spectator's gaze but also for motivating them to act out their passion. An examination of the counter-archives of Maori and African Americans also expose how biologically racist eugenics could be equally contested by art. Ultimately this book establishes that art inculcated sexual desire for procreative heterosexuality with the corpus delecti - the healthy, wholesome delectable body sanctioned by eugenics for genetically improving the Western race.