Lindsey Drury: Degeneration, Degeneracy, and the Colonial Purity of the Natural Body

This paper inquires biological metaphors that have long contributed to sustaining binaries of natural and unnatural, purity and contamination, growth and decay in ways that conflate normative embodiment and health with so-called civilizational progress. Popularized in the first centuries of colonisation, expanded by colonial scientistic research, and retrofitted to Nazi “folk” medicine and concepts of racial hygiene, purifying visions of individual and collective health have in the twentieth century variously informed everything from fascist ideologies of the body to neoliberal cultures of bodily self-optimisation. In a series of connected stories, this paper unearths veins of “contamination” that undermine the ideological material through which the natural body, degeneracy, and their mutual otherization are constructed. We begin with the bones of two late-medieval medical theorists of syphilis – idealized by the Nazis as models of masculinity – but exhumed by scientists whose biological definitions would not allow either skeleton to be classed as “male”. As “patron saints” of Nazism, these two medieval figures also “meet” in a 1943 fascist, expressionist propaganda film that features the queer Ausdruckstänzer Harald Kreutzberg – a poster boy of Nazi dance – who performs a triumphant St. Vitus dance that incites collective hysteria in the film’s sentimental allegory of fascist heteronormativity and Rassenhygiene. The paper draws from the ideological collapse of Nazi thinking about bodily and social health in these materials to think critically about a shared biological imaginary that continues to accommodate different, even antagonistic, political projects with concepts of the natural body and forms of biological metaphorization. Of particular interest here are pseudoscientific theories linking epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, and how the fetishization of “biological truth” continues to inform theories and practices of embodiment among somatic practitioners and experimental dancers.

Trained as an early modernist, Lindsey Drury is an historian and performance studies scholar who works on dance, colonial history, and the ethnological archive. She holds a PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin and University of Kent-Canterbury and currently works as a Postdoc within Critical Dance Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she researches, teaches, and organizes the Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship program.

This event is a cooperation of the ICGP with the FWF project Dramaturgy after Postdramatic Theatre.

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