Morphological Freedom and the Construction of Bodymind Malleability from Eugenics to Transhumanism

This dissertation examines how the human bodymind has been seen as malleable by science, technology, and policy practitioners from the Eugenic era in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, to the future imaginaries of Transhumanists and technology innovators. I critique the main goal of these practitioners – to perfect the human bodymind and through that perfection, perfecting human society – as utopic, impossible, and amoral. I argue instead, that we are intra-dependent – dependent on and through each other and our ecological contexts. I ground this argument both in the lived experience of those whose bodymind arrangements go against our normative expectations – folks like disabled people, queer and transgender people, body modders, and more – and in the philosophical metaphysics of Karen Barad's Agential Realism. I argue that we can only produce a future where bodymind alteration is acceptable if we first value different bodymind arrangements. I argue both that we cannot consider ourselves individuals, separate from the world or each other, and that multiplicity of bodyminds is a generative, heterotopic (neither utopic nor dystopic), force toward which we ought strive through engaging intentionally with each other in care relations.