The Aesthetic Turn in Degeneration and Disability

As degeneration theory proliferated at the turn of the century, its social, medical, and carceral projects became more explicit attacks on disability aesthetics. Purportedly a strict science, retrospectives clearly show the ways degeneration was always an aesthetic project—one meant to villainize and exclude undesirable communities based on class, race, gender, disability, and social location. This essay shows how degeneration theory hinged increasingly on carefully crafted dichotomies of fitness and disability, culminating in an expressly aesthetic rehearsal of health as metric for political exclusion.