Mind the Gap

The article argues that eugenics was motivated, in part, by human exceptionalism. It first explores the ways in which eugenics understood nonwhite race, disability, and animality as forces capable of exerting a drag on the forward thrust of eugenic progress. Next, it traces the incoherent discourse about animality within eugenics, demonstrating that while eugenic breeding—eugenic methods—relied on human animality, the fundamental goal of eugenics was to improve human beings by distancing us from that animality. The final part of the article explores the imbrication of animality, race, and disability in Aldous Huxley’s 1948 novel Ape and Essence , arguing that the novel is a dysgenic vision that substantiates the eugenic call to increase the evolutionary distance between human beings and other animals, to cement human domination—conceived of as white human domination—of the planet.