Operationalizing Aesthetics Within the Eugenics Movement: Cautionary Implications for Aesthetic Education

• In Event: 63.020 - Surveilling Toward Disembodiment: Technologies of Humanity

Abstract

Since the 1950’s, music education has increasingly embraced the aesthetic as a mode of teaching and learning (Mark, 1999). However, scholars often take an uncritical stance that assumes a certain level of neutrality and ignores the ways in which aesthetics can act as an oppressive social technology. To illustrate how aesthetics can produce forms of pastoral control (Foucault, 1982), I analyzed writings from The Eugenics Review to develop a eugenical theory of aesthetics. This analysis shows how eugenicists used aesthetics to divide and oppress populations through pseudo-scientific claims bolstered by white supremacy. This aesthetic theory also emerges through the writings of Seashore (1947), a known eugenicist (see Cowan, 2017) and monumental figure in the history of music education research.

Author

• Peter Jacob Woods, University of Southern California