title: Fashioning racial selves: reflexive practices in the Society for Racial Hygiene.
abstract: The paper examines the admissions practices of the German Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene) between 1905 and 1916. It assesses the Society's changing statutes and the various charts (genealogical, anthropological, and clinical) used to vet prospective members. The Society's admissions procedures were dual-use technologies, at once serving as evidence for both the larger goals of racial science research and the narrower aims of social inclusion/exclusion. But these procedures can also be interpreted as reflexive practices by which members fashioned their sense of racial self and cultivated relations to that self. Finally, the article situates these practices in the context of histories of human experimentation, the self, and biopolitics.
authors.affiliation: Department of History, Humboldt University, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany. engstroe@geschichte.hu-berlin.de
authors.forename: Eric J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Engstrom
mesh_terms: D004282:Documentation; D004608:Eligibility Determination; D005006:Ethnicity; D005053:Eugenics / Q000266:history*; D005858:Germany; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D011057:Politics; D044469:Racial Groups; D012649:Self Concept; D012952:Societies