“Gender, Race, and Dangerous Mothers in the Old and New Bioscience”
George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology
Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania
Casting mothers as dangerous reproducers reinforced patriarchal and racist ideologies and justified surveillance, control, and punishment of women’s childbearing. Rather than explain social inequality as biologically predestined through inheritance, an emerging biosocial science, including epigenetics and the neuroscience of poverty, investigates how social inequality produces disparate biological outcomes. But does the new biosocial science replicate or contest the role of dangerous mothers in justifications for social injustice?