Intimate Betrayals: Uncovering Eugenicist Logics in the Stories of Two Black German Women

This paper draws on data from an ongoing qualitative research study on the educational experiences and identities of Black transnational women to explore the question: “What can be learned about the transnational legacies of eugenicist thought as we examine the stories of two Black German women?” These data are represented in two vignettes crafted from interviews, conversations, and memories to explore the implications of eugenicist logic in the lives of Black German women. Decried as an ableist, racist, misogynistic, and pseudoscientific project that sought to improve “human stock,” the objectives of the eugenics movement of the early 19th century have been rejected in most scholarly fields of the 21st century. However, the narratives centered in this paper show that eugenicist logic, ideologies, and discourses remain persistent, insidious parts of contemporary discourses. Theoretically and methodologically, the paper engages a Transnational Black Feminist approach (Burkhard, 2019, 2021) to qualitative research to attend to the ways in which eugenicist ideologies are narrated and reproduced in intimate moments of everyday life, highlighting the continuous need for contemporary feminist scholarship to consider global, transnational, and local lenses in knowledge production.