“From The Kallikaks to The Kallikaks: Hillbilly Elegy and the Legacy of Eugenics”

Abstract

Ron Howard’s popular adaptation of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy treated the New York Times bestselling book as an answer to the politics of Appalachia, offering insight into understanding Trump’s popularity. Yet with Trump’s recent endorsement of Vance for a Senate run, this reading of Vance’s text requires an update. One that looks to the larger context of hillbilly-themed representations. American eugenics offers such a view. For over 100 years the American eugenics movement used the hillbilly stereotype to justify its surveillance, categorization, institutionalization, and sterilization of what they called “defectives” in promoting its image of “whiteness.” Popular media was an integral part of these efforts. The foundational narrative of the American eugenics movement, Goddard’s 1912 text The Kallikaks is also the name of a hillbilly-themed sitcom produced in 1977. Utilizing Lisa Cartwright’s Screening the Body, Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture, this article argues that the narrative of the hillbilly stereotype in American eugenics has been an integral part of cinema and television history, extending back to the motion studies. A history that finds its extension in Howard’s adaptation of JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy.