Unmothering Disability

This chapter focuses on the ways in which reproduction has become a major site of intervention to cure inherited disability. Connected to the history of the colonial eugenics movement of the 1930s, the emergence of a “heredity drama” in literature exploits the emotions around the revelation of the inheritance of disability. Heredity is also invoked as a justification for rejecting marriage to a person with disabilities. Under the military regime, eugenics was legalized as a way to control the reproduction of disability. In the new millennium, preimplantation genetic screening appears as a way to enable the reproduction of disabled women. The analyses of literary texts, films, documentaries, and public policies reveal that the mobilization of biopolitics based on the presumed desire for disability’s absence often relies on disability’s continued presence at the margins of society to reinforce its “undesirability.”