The Myth of Intellectuality and Development: Exploiting the Feebleminded Subject in Discourses of American Philanthropy

Abstract

This dissertation is a polyvocal archive that approaches developmental and intellectual disability as a category of historical analysis, with a central focus on comparing how U.S. charity and philanthropy discourses have drawn upon, reinforced, or contested configurations of intellectuality and development. This dissertation is a political and intellectual project that seeks to explain the material ways in which the cultural discourses that conjured what I contextualize as the ‘exemplary feebleminded subject’ have influenced historical and current-day geopolitical practices. Newspaper stories at the onset of the twentieth century normalized the exemplary feebleminded subject while magazines, print advertising, books, science journals, and motion pictures popularized the idea that the so-called feebleminded class was both a burden and a threat to national and global progress. Institutions linked the feebleminded, idiot, imbecile, and moron classifications to physical, mental, developmental, and intellectual disabilities, and the exemplary feebleminded subject was endlessly adapted in discourses of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation.