The Anti-Eugenics Project
Phase One: Dismantling Eugenics - A Convening, 9/27/21 - 10/2/21
< return to conference archive

‘Stand Up Straight!’: Surfacing Eugenics, Race, and Posture

    Accessibility Options

  • None
  • Spanish Interpretation
  • Closed Captions (English)
  • ASL

Cultural and literary historian Sander Gilman, discusses how discriminatory perceptions of postures and bodies perpetuated eugenic ideas and ableist notions of what is “healthy.” We will learn that being directed to correct our posture is a detrimental & eugenic attempt to improve humankind. 

Presenters

  • Sander Gilman
    Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor emeritus of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over one hundred books. His “I Know Who Caused COVID-19”: Pandemics and Xenophobia (with Zhou Xun) appeared with Reaktion Press (London) in 2021; his most recent edited volume is The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body (with Youn Kim) published in 2019 with Oxford University Press. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996 and 2014) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986, which is still in print.