Biologisms on the left and the right

Abstract

Victorian Britain saw the rise of biologism, the practice of attributing biological cause to that which is explicable either wholly or in part by environment. Its most extreme expression was eugenics, first disseminated by Galton through Macmillan’s Magazine in 1865. I explore early British eugenics as a biologistic discourse centred on class which took aim primarily at the “residuum”, or “submerged tenth”, the section of the working class alleged to be least productive. It was framed by racism, the biologism on which much late-Victorian imperialism was based. I consider ways in which biologisms inform distinct twenty-first-century discourse and practice, from policies around child benefit to Covid19, and focus on one thread of biologistic thought as it extends to debates on gender identity–the idea that gender is both a feeling but also innate and brain-based. I conclude that gender identity theory risks, however inadvertently, reinscribing biologistic ideas and stereotypes.