1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910172226903321

Autore

Horn David G. <1958->

Titolo

Social bodies : science, reproduction, and Italian modernity / / David G. Horn

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, N.J., : Princeton University Press, c1994

ISBN

1-282-75204-9

9786612752049

1-4008-2145-2

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (203 p.)

Collana

Princeton studies in culture/power/history

Classificazione

LB 40255

Disciplina

304.6/32

Soggetti

Human body - Social aspects - Italy

Human body - Symbolic aspects - Italy

Fertility, Human - Government policy - Italy

Fascism and culture - Italy

Fascism and women - Italy

Human reproductive technology - Italy - History - 20th century

Italy Politics and government 1914-1945

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-181) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- CHAPTER I. Technologies of Reproduction -- CHAPTER II. Social Bodies -- CHAPTER III. The Power of Numbers -- CHAPTER IV. Governing Reproduction -- CHAPTER V. The Sterile City -- CHAPTER VI. Beyond Public and Private -- Notes -- References Cited -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Using as his example post-World War I Italy and the government's interest in the size, growth rate, and "vitality" of its national population, David Horn suggests a genealogy for our present understanding of procreation as a site for technological intervention and political contestation. Social Bodies looks at how population and reproductive bodies came to be the objects of new sciences, technologies, and government policies during this period. It examines the linked scientific constructions of Italian society as a body threatened by the "disease" of infertility, and of women and men as social bodies--located neither in nature nor in the private sphere, but in that modern domain of



knowledge and intervention carved out by statistics, sociology, social hygiene, and social work. Situated at the intersection of anthropology, cultural studies, and feminist studies of science, the book explores the interrelated factors that produced the practices of reason we call social science and social planning. David Horn draws on many sources to analyze the discourses and practices of "social experts," the resistance these encountered, and the often unintended effects of the new objectification of bodies and populations. He shows how science, while affirming that maternity was part of woman's "nature," also worked to remove reproduction from the domain of the natural, making it an object of technological intervention. This reconstitution of bodies through the sciences and technologies of the social, Horn argues, continues to have material consequences for women and men throughout the West.