“Why shouldn’t I be wanted, even loved?”: Eugenics, Reproduction, and the Postcolonial in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on two postcolonial novels, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, and argues that through the novels’ explorations of sex, both narratives reconstruct eugenic views that haunt postcolonial societies today. Through sex scenes (and their interruption or absence), the novels illustrate how the characters from India and Sudan respectively experience oppression and discrimination. These experiences are direct outcomes of eugenic views on and practices aimed at selected groups. Through its focus on masturbation and female genital mutilation, as described in the two novels, this article frames the analysis of Animal’s People and Who Fears Death in relation to eugenics, sexual deviance, and sterilization, and foregrounds the ongoing oppression of postcolonial nations. This article carefully examines how eugenics has shaped or further intensified inequality. In particular, it draws parallels between eugenic practices and two kinds of oppression described in Animal’s People and Who Fears Death: the control exercised by the West over postcolonial countries, highlighted through western industrial capitalism’s lack of concern about the genetic health of postcolonial nations and the dysgenic impact of their industries, and patriarchal control of women.

The emergence of eugenics in the second half of the nineteenth century significantly contributed to the existing racist, sexist, and ableist views, reinforcing colonialism as well as exploitation, subjugation, and oppression that resulted from it. Eugenics preached that “women and people of color had smaller brains, were ‘by Nature’ less intelligent, psychiatrically inferior to men (labels such as ‘hysterical’ were applied), and less than human.”¹ Eugenics is, among other things, an ideology that helped reinforce the righteousness of colonialism and justify racism. Prominent disability studies and postcolonial studies scholar Karen Soldatic emphasizes that eugenics was “of strategic importance to the imperial colonial project.”² Exploitation and genocide of numerous colonized populations, destruction of and disrespect toward their cultural traditions, transformations of colonized environments, robberies that colonizers considered normal and essential for the development of their own societies (such as natural resources as well as physical labor enabled through enslavement) – all these criminal acts were described as legitimate and necessary to improve the lives of the “civilized” ones, i.e. colonizers. The transformation and destruction of colonized territories as well as murders, enslavement, and abuse of native populations were viewed as side effects of that important, practically divine mission.

Philippa Levine argues that colonialism and eugenics have directly shaped one another: “New ideas about heredity and evolution, coupled with a growing interest in colonial populations and mostly celebratory attitudes toward European imperial expansion, set the stage for the acceptance of eugenics in the twentieth century.”³ In particular, the scholar foregrounds the debates about “the savage,” which “in the nineteenth century deployed a range of ideas and terms around heredity, extinction, degeneration, and regression that were central both to scientific and imperial culture.”⁴ Eugenics is one way through which dehumanization of colonized peoples became scientifically and legally enabled and justified. It has largely shaped the meaning of human bodies that are non-male, nonwhite, and non-heterosexual as less-than-human bodies. People of color, disabled individuals, women, and numerous other groups have always been considered outcasts in the West in the colonial era, but eugenics further intensified this discrimination. In the nineteenth century, in the United States, for example, according to Sarah Jaquette Ray, “the purity of the body and the nation” was of crucial significance, and helped spread such ideologies as “wilderness, eugenics, and imperialism.”⁵ Jaquette Ray emphasizes that certain “discourses of the body” generate “cultural disgust” that “distinguishes between good ecological subjects and impure, dirty, unnatural ‘ecological others.’”⁶ Eugenics is one tool through which such “cultural disgust” has been formulated, discriminating against numerous individuals on the basis of their skin color, gender, age, (dis)ability, and other parameters. The nonhuman nature that eugenics assigns to selected individuals is the reason why these individuals are oppressed, abused, and politically and culturally muted. Gender difference is another example through which one can perceive inequality generated by eugenics. Thus, in the nineteenth century, “differences between men and women were a mark of progress and … their greater differentiation separated the primitive from the civilized.”⁷ Menstruation, for example, was seen as a sign of women’s nonhuman nature, allowing eugenicists to equate women to “the ‘lower’ animals and primitive men.”⁸ Gender equality was unacceptable for eugenicists because they believed that “the conservation of her energies for reproduction necessarily arrested a woman’s development in other areas.”⁹ Indeed, motherhood was the key activity that eugenicists associated with women; eugenicists, therefore, “honed and facilitated” this “duty,” “making them [women] efficient reproducers of the next generation.”¹⁰ It was believed that only a healthy woman could perform this role successfully: “A healthy mother, devoted to her children’s proper upbringing and care, would nurture healthy and productive citizens. Physical or mental infirmities, promiscuity, contagious illnesses (especially venereal disease), unhealthy behavior, and undisciplined family life were the weak links that threatened this evolutionary chain.”¹¹

Reproduction is one of the key concerns in eugenics. According to those who share the views of eugenics, only those who can help advance the human race should be allowed to have offsprings. Reproductive well-being of the colonized was, for the most part, a concern only because their children were viewed as a form of economic value, i.e., slaves, by colonizers. People of color were not perceived as capable of advancing the human race – because the present and the future of the human race was seen as an absolute domination of the white man.

This article focuses on two postcolonial novels, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Nnedi Okorafor’s award-winning Who Fears Death, written by a British author of Indian and English descent and a Nigerian-American author respectively. It argues that through the novels’ explorations of sex, both narratives reconstruct eugenic views that haunt postcolonial societies even today, when the colonial era is officially over. Through sex scenes (and their interruption or absence), the novels illustrate how the characters from India and Sudan respectively experience oppression and discrimination. These experiences are direct outcomes of eugenic views on and practices aimed at selected groups. Through its focus on masturbation and female genital mutilation, as described in the two novels, this article frames the analysis of Animal’s People and Who Fears Death in relation to eugenics, sexual deviance, and sterilization, and foregrounds the ongoing oppression of postcolonial nations. Eugenics is traditionally defined as “the science of good breeding,” “a movement committed to using the principles of heredity and statistics to encourage healthy and discourage unhealthy reproduction.”¹² This article carefully examines how eugenics has shaped or further intensified inequality. In particular, it draws parallels between eugenic practices and two kinds of oppression described in Animal’s People and Who Fears Death: the control exercised by the West over postcolonial countries, highlighted through western industrial capitalism’s lack of concern about the genetic health of postcolonial nations and the dysgenic impact of their industries, and patriarchal control of women.

Animal’s People is a fictional retelling of the tragedy known as the Bhopal disaster – a terrible industrial catastrophe that happened in 1984, killing thousands of people and leaving many more severely disabled.¹³ The novel tells the story of a young man called Animal who, while being a newborn, survived a terrible accident in a chemical factory in India. He is given this name due to his, as considered by the locals, inhuman posture: the man can stand and move only on his fours, his spine is crooked, and he can never stay straight. The article explores how the animal metaphor dehumanizes the main character. Animal falls in love with his friend Nisha yet believes that the able-bodied woman would not love a man like him. The article hence explores how the animal metaphor further challenges the protagonist’s identity. Through explicit scenes when Animal fantasizes about having sex with women, Animal redefines his identity as a man, a postcolonial subject, a disabled individual, and a representative of a racial minority. The animal metaphor also foregrounds a eugenic view on the postcolonial – the subject that, according to the novel, is not only deprived of sexual freedom but also made incapable of reproduction. Animal is sexually active, as the multiple musturbation scenes signify, yet he is portrayed as an impotent man due to his inability to engage in sexual intercourse with a woman. Moreover, the novel emphasizes animalistic nature of the man, making him appear as sexually deviant in the eyes of other characters.

Who Fears Death is a novel about a young girl Onyesonwu, a child of an Okeke woman who was raped by a Nuru man. The novel focuses on the adventures of Onyesonwu who, together with her friends, searches for her father Daib in order to kill him. Freedom and justice for women, among other issues, are largely explored in the novel. The article focuses exclusively on the graphic scenes of female circumcision described in the novel and interprets them as the acts of castrating the postcolonial. In the novel, mutilation of female genitalia is conducted to prevent women from having sex prior to marriage. Onyesonwu’s magic abilities help her grow her clitoris back and enjoy sex before marriage. This is an example of reclaiming female power in the novel.

Sex is not the only means of reproduction; neither does sex necessarily result in pregnancy; moreover, none of the characters in Animal’s People and Who Fears Death want to have children at the moment narrated in the two novels. Yet these novels showcase what can happen when sexual desires of some are perceived as sexual deviance. The article explores how Animal’s disability and Onyesonwu’s gender as well as the status of both characters as postcolonial subjects undermine their sexual potency and deprive them of sexual freedom. It argues that through the portrayals of suggested, imposed, and expected sexual impotency of the two characters, the novels reconstruct a eugenic view of the postcolonial.

The Animal Metaphor in Animal’s People

Lack of sexual freedom and the inability to have sex with another human, as portrayed in Animal’s People and Who Fears Death, might not be perceived immediately as means through which the postcolonial is dehumanized. Animal’s People, for example, provides a blatant image of the postcolonial as a dehumanized subject through its protagonist – a young man called Animal. He is not simply called this way by others; he himself truly believes that he is an animal, and thus largely sustains the image of himself as a being that differs dramatically from humans. He verses the lyrics for a song that American doctor Elli teaches him to play:

I am an animal fierce and free

in all the world is none like me

crooked I’m, a nightmare child

fed on hunger, running wild

no love and cuddles for this boy

live without hope, laugh without joy

but if you dare to pity me

i’ll shit in your shoe and piss in your tea¹⁴

The character perceives himself as a wild animal, describing himself as “fierce” as well as “free.” He underscores his uniqueness yet clarifies that it scares others: he is “crooked,” hungry, “wild,” and is awake at night. There is no human future for this man, and his present is filled with despair. Yet he has accepted this reality and does not want, or rather, does not expect anyone to invade his privacy. But should that happen, he will react as an animal would react: by defecating and urinating to scare the invader.

The desire to be an animal, however, is the protagonist’s reaction to protect himself from the others. By calling himself and insisting that he indeed is an animal, the character alienates himself from the world of humans. He emphasizes that unless he can be “cured,” he will continue to consider himself an animal: “[I]f I agree to be a human being, I’ll also have to agree that I’m wrong-shaped and abnormal. But let me be a quatre pattes animal, four-footed and free, then I am whole, my own proper shape, just a different kind of animal from say Jara, or a cow, or a camel.”¹⁵ Animal believes that while humanity rejects him because of his disability, perceiving him as an abnormally-shaped being, his ambiguous posture looks very similar to those of many animals. He thus can easier mingle with and remain unnoticed among animals. Other characters consider such behavior a way to “‘escape the responsibility of being human … . You run wild, do crazy things and get away with it because you’re always whining, I’m an animal, I am an animal’;” yet Animal himself poses a crucial question in response: “‘By my choice or because others named me Animal and treated me like one?’”¹⁶ The protagonist hence reminds the other characters and the reader that despite the multiple references to him as an animal, he is, in fact, a human being. Moreover, he makes it clear that he himself is aware of that, and that his choice to exclude himself from the human society is the result of discrimination and oppression that he has been experiencing since his illness became to progress. Society has dehumanized him first, and he himself only accepted such a treatment, being unable to see any other way out.

The protagonist’s animalism tells us not only about the societal fear and rejection of the disabled body. It projects the narratives of colonial oppression, postcolonial poverty, the ongoing subjugation of the nations from the Global South and domination of the West that results in and is sustained through exploitation of the postcolonial. Stacey Balkan interprets Animals as “a narrator whose mutilated body illustrates the toxic underside of industrial progress.”¹⁷ Balkan reminds us that “the uneven topographies of global capitalism have long demanded a tacit acceptance that third world toxicity is the necessary cost of global development and, consequently, first world prosperity. Western progress has hinged on such global asymmetries for centuries.”¹⁸ Animal is a vivid embodiment of the practice that Rob Nixon terms as “slow violence,” i.e., “a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”¹⁹ India and its local population had been exploited under the colonial rule; after decolonization, it, just as many other formerly colonized territories, has become a place where toxic industries could be relocated from the West to protect the health of the local environment and humans and nonhumans that inhabit it. For postcolonial countries that was an opportunity to gain economic stability. In this process, numerous postcolonial territories turned into dumps of toxic waste that harmed and destroyed the health of both humans and nonhumans in these regions, whereas the West could enjoy the profits from those industries.²⁰ Animal becomes the product and an extension of the omnipresent “slow violence,” and his posture is the most overt signifier of it. Justin Omar Johnston argues that through the animal-like posture of the protagonist, the reader can imagine “the factory living as a chemical prosthetic, traveling within Animal, touching and burning his hidden interior, neurological, and genetic self.”²¹ Similarly, Karsten Levinh-Kutzler claims that in the novel “toxic contamination has no recognizable end but engenders the experience of an on-going, never-ending endangerment.”²² “Slow violence” – that becomes tangible through the existence of the chemical factory, its explosion, and the never-ending fight of the locals for their rights and their plea to punish those whose actions have led to the disaster – not only causes a severe form of disability of the main character but also transforms his identity. In the fight for equality, it is easier for the protagonist to reject his humanity and pretend to be an animal than to be heard. Andrew Mahlstedt’s reading of the novel’s characters as a sight of “the spectacular invisibility that defines third-world poverty under recent globalization” is particularly helpful here.²³ Mahlstedt throws into relief the dual nature of postcolonial nations, and specifically of the poor among them, for the West, claiming that “they are both invisible and spectacle.”²⁴ Mahlstedt elucidates: “So even when the poor are seen, they are misrecognized, envisioned through spectacles shaped by unselfconsciously received narratives of destitute and hopeless or, alternately, romantic and idealized poverty … . Even when we ‘see’ the poor, preconceived narratives of poverty blind us to anything but our own vision of the world in front of us.”²⁵ To become invisible is an option that, through “slow violence,” wealthier states have given to the formerly colonized nations. Animal’s People illustrates this through the character Animal who is explicitly told that he is not a human and left to survive with no access to medicine and no financial support from the state or the owners of the chemical factory. In a eugenic manner, Animal is removed from the human species because he is nonwhite and non-able-bodied.

The postcolonial exists on two levels in the novel. On the one hand, the postcolonial is viewed by the West (and, specifically, by the American company) as both a place where toxic industry can be placed and a being (i.e., the workers employed at the factory and those who live in close proximity to it) that can be risked for the profit of the West. The local individuals whose lives are not viewed as human lives, or, to borrow from Judith Butler, as “grievable” human lives, are thereby dehumanized.²⁶ Animal can be dehumanized by the West, first, because he is a nonwhite person living in a formerly colonized country, and, second, because he is disabled. Lennard J. Davis claims that industrialization has irrevocably transformed the meaning of the body, and “the impaired body had become disabled – unable to be part of the productive economy, confined to institutions, shaped to contours defined by society at large.”²⁷ Relocation of western toxic industries to the city of Khaufpur in Animal’s People has not only intensified the ecological precarity of this postcolonial territory but also generated precariousness of postcolonial bodies that, while already being treated as less-than-human by the West, have been reclassified as disposable and excluded from the system imposed on postcolonial nations.

Animalization of the protagonist vividly illustrates how the postcolonial and the disabled have been continuously perceived as the Other.²⁸ Jennifer Rickel argues that by interpreting Animal’s People as a posthumanist narrative, one can see the consequences of “political violence” and its representation as “trauma.”²⁹ For Rickel, such a posthumanist reading “not only disrupts narratives of development that are grounded in humanist ideas about the formation of a ‘civilized’ subject but also critiques limiting conceptions of the ‘universal’ human that literary humanitarianism attempts to rescue.”³⁰ Through the character Animal, Animal’s People thus demonstrates how thinking beyond human can help one perceive the full scale of violence directed at the postcolonial. After all, Animal is a human being, and both the characters and the reader never doubt that. Yet thinking about him beyond human effectively reveals the scale of exploitation, abuse, and destruction that formerly colonized nations go through.³¹ One of the characters, Nisha, whom Animal is secretly in love with, once brings “[a] big book of animals from the library” where Animal cannot find anyone resembling him, and Nisha explains it as follows: “That’s because you are unique. Be proud of it.”³² This ambiguous uniqueness of Animal positions him both beyond humans (after all, he searches for his kind in a book about animals) and beyond animals (for Nisha confirms that he is not an ordinary animal). Toward the end of the novel, Animal dreams of being in paradise:

There are animals of every kind, leopards and deer and horses and elephants, there’s a tiger and a rhino, among them are small figures on two legs, except some have horns some have tails they are neither men nor animals, or else they are both, then I know that I have found my kind, plus this place will be my everlasting home, I have found it at last, this is the deep time when there was no difference between anything when separation did not exist when all things were together, one and whole before humans set themselves apart and became clever and made cities and kampanies and factories.³³

Animal identifies those who initiated industrial progress and who brought this progress to his home as humans. These are rich westerners. His desire to dissociate himself from that specific group of humans – whom he considers powerful and thus dominating the rest of humanity – generates animalistic images that accompany him throughout the narrative. These images remind the reader about inequality that Animal and his friends experience daily, being economically and politically too weak to withstand the powerful West. The West, in turn, in an explicitly dysgenic way, gets rid of the postcolonial bodies, bringing them into the state of poverty, poisoning their environment, provoking serious health issues, classifying these problems as unworthy of any concern and ultimately neglecting them.

Sex, Interrupted: Eugenics and Reproduction in Animal’s People

The environment in Animal’s People is not a mere background against which the postcolonial is narrated. It formulates the postcolonial. Through the environment, the novel communicates the relationship between the rich and the poor, the privileged in the West and the underprivileged in the East; it is also through the environment that the postcolonial subject is constructed as the Other – contaminated, disabled, and poor. The novel describes Khaufpur as an unhealthy, dangerous place to live in: “verything here is poisoned. If you stay here long enough, you will be too.”³⁴ Those who inhabit this place become part of the contaminated landscape; they, too, just as the locale itself, are invisible to those who allowed contamination and have not addressed the consequences.

The novel directly points to the ongoing inequality that formerly colonized nations face in matters related to ecology and the environment, economy, and politics, and the lack of justice. Environmental inequality is a consequence of economic inequality whereas economic inequality is further intensified through environmental inequality. The interconnection between the two issues reveals the influence of capitalism on the remapping of the world into regions with healthier environments and economic prosperity and those that absorb garbage and pollution coming from there.³⁵ The logic of a divided planet that results in environmental oppression of the postcolonial is a eugenic approach to selected nations, groups of people, and individuals. That their lives do not matter is a direct result of racist thinking that emerged in the colonial era and continues today. Contamination described in Animal’s People has not been done on purpose, yet the choice to open a factory in Khaufpur – a city located far away from the United States, where the owners of the company live – is directly formulated through racism and ongoing exploitation of the postcolonial. By risking to poison and eventually contaminating the citizens of Khaufpur, the owners of the company accept the consequences: thousands of people die and many more become disabled or suffer from serious health problems.

The novel emphasizes that “poison” is “in the soil, water, in our blood, it’s in our milk.”³⁶ The fact that contamination spreads through the environment and humans not only suggests the transformation of the city into an unfitting-for-living place but also foregrounds the irrevocable ramifications of poisoning on human health: without sufficient medical help, people suffer, die, and the poison goes onto the future generations. There is a “woman who poured her poisoned milk onto the ground” as well as “young girls who bleed three times a month and others who have one period in five months. No one knows how to treat them.”³⁷ While the novel does not suggest that these women are sterile, it emphasizes that they have serious problems with their reproductive system. It is also apparent that the toxins that are in their bodies can severely harm their children (consider, for example, the woman who gets rid of her breastmilk understanding that it is poisonous). Through such images, eugenics becomes part of the story of toxic contamination.

English scientist Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. The movement became particularly prominent in the first half of the twentieth century and included several solutions to how to control population and enhance biological capabilities of the human race. One of those was “negative eugenics” that “would restrict the reproduction of inferior people, while those having subnormal abilities would have to be physically prevented from perpetuating their infirmities.”³⁸ Reproduction was the key aspect in the pseudo-science eugenics. The method of “selective breeding” as well as “an inherent ethnocentrism and racism that included belief in the inferiority of some races or groups and superiority of others (a view extended to ethnic groups and social classes as well)” were important instruments in eugenics through which humanity could be dramatically changed into a better, healthier, stronger, and smarter species.³⁹ Sterilization came to be seen as one of the means through which reproduction could be controlled.⁴⁰ Crucially, with eugenics’ particular emphasis on the imperfection of nonwhite individuals and thus a racist approach to humanity at large, the goal of eugenicists was to improve the “civilized” white race; nonwhite populations, in turn, were considered “an impediment to progress and needed to be altered, improved, or eliminated.”⁴¹

In Animal’s People, the West does not try to “alter, improve, or eliminate” the postcolonial nation on purpose. Yet alteration and partial elimination of Khaufpur’s citizens are indeed the results of relocating the toxic industry to India, the explosion, and the refusal to bear responsibility for the tragedy and provide sufficient medical help to those whose lives were and continue to be impacted by contamination. In the words of Levinh-Kutzler, Animal’s People “evokes a sense of an endemic global endangerment that is selective and partial due to the structural racism of corporate globalism.”⁴² This careful selection of a formerly colonized nation in a eugenic way emphasizes that neither the place where the factory is located nor the individuals who live close to it matter to the Americans who own the company.

Another issue through which eugenics comes to the fore in Animal’s People is reproduction. The examples cited earlier reveal how toxic contamination has influenced reproductive health of girls and women in the area. Toxic contamination has become an instrument through which reproduction and health of future generations can be controlled: women experience severe problems with their reproductive system, those who give birth cannot breastfeed their babies because their breastmilk is poisonous, toxins that are inside the bodies of men and women influence the development of fetuses and health of born children. Toxic contamination in Animal’s People not only kills part of the local population but also causes deterioration of health of survivors and their children. The novel thus emphasizes the connections between “slow violence”⁴³ and the genetic legacy of locating toxic industries in formerly colonized countries, highlighting the impact this has had on the (reproductive) health of the locals.

Reproduction becomes part of the narrative through the character Animal. Animal has never had sex with a woman, and his desire to be with a woman turns into an obsession:

[A]ll this day I’ve thought of nothing but sex, it’s all I want. I want to fuck. Everyone’s at it, why not me? The whole world fucks away day and night, why am I the only one left out? Why shouldn’t I too have the pleasure, my thing aches with need of it, I mean need of the real thing, spit on your palm it’s not the same. It hurts when people hint, never do they say it to my face, that I should face facts, no woman will want me. Eyes, admit it, even you have thought this. Why shouldn’t I be wanted, even loved? Nisha loves me, okay not how I’d like, but she will when my back’s straight. It’s why even in his sickness I hate Zafar, he could have any woman, but he’ll take the only girl who treats me like normal, which by god I am, one day I’ll prove it by plunging this thing of mine into a living woman. I’ll pierce her and open her up until my cock is stroking her heart and she’s crying my name, “Animal! Animal! Animal!” and I will suck the sweetness of life from her lips.⁴⁴

Animal’s disability is described as the reason why he cannot have sex with a real woman. Animal himself believes that if/once his back is straight, he will have no problem with finding a woman who will have sex with him. This thinking echoes the concerns raised by disability studies scholars, namely that “compulsory able-bodiedness” and “compulsory heterosexuality” have been for a long time viewed as the only acceptable norms and thus resulted in social, cultural, political, and economic exclusion and stigmatization of numerous individuals.⁴⁵ As Animal explains to himself, a sexual relationship between him and American doctor Elli (an able-bodied woman) is impossible: “when you looked at her you thought sex, when she looked at you she thought cripple.”⁴⁶ While disability is blamed for the absence of sexual relationship in Animal’s life, the protagonist’s physical appearance is only a façade skillfully used to hide much more complex, eugenic reasons.

Animal is not an impotent man. His desire to have sex as well as multiple musturbation scenes described in the novel reveal that reproductively he is a healthy man. Whether Animal is capable of having children or not is not specified in the novel, however, that he can have sex is obvious. While disability is foregrounded as the primary reason why no woman has sex with Animal, this is, in fact, not true. Animal is prevented from having sex as becomes clear in several scenes. I interpret such prevention as a form of eugenic control exercised over the postcolonial.

Eugenic views on masturbation that were formulated at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries straightforwardly classified this “practice of non-reproductive sexual stimulation” as unethical.⁴⁷ Men who practiced masturbation were viewed as mentally disabled, whereas women as sex-obsessed nymphomaniacs (which was also interpreted as a reflection of women’s unstable psyche – the phenomenon that scientists argued was characteristic of the female gender as a whole).⁴⁸ Excessive masturbation, according to eugenicists, provoked “[f]eeble-minded[ness] and insan[ity].”⁴⁹ Moreover, eugenicists saw a direct connection between masturbation and reproduction, claiming that the former negatively influences the latter: leading to one’s inability to have sex with another individual, masturbation, from the perspective of eugenics, impeded reproduction.⁵⁰ Medical intervention was seen as one effective way to solve the problem of masturbation, according to those who practiced eugenics or shared eugenic views. In the nineteenth century, John Harvey Kellogg’s method was particularly influential as “the war against masturbation” was going on.⁵¹ Kellogg believed that through pain one could cure a masturbating individual. Men were treated by “insert[ing] a silver thread into the foreskin” while women by “burn[ing] the clitoris with carbolic acid.”⁵² Later, in the twentieth century, eugenicists continued to emphasize the effectiveness of medical intervention in questions related to masturbation. Zoё Benjamin, for example, suggested in 1916 to treat children who practice “precocious masturbation” in the following way: “a slight operation in the case of both boys and girls may be the only cure.”⁵³ The “slight operation” that Benjamin referred to was, according to Grant Rodwell circumcision (for boys) and clitoral circumcision or a clitoridectomy (for girls).⁵⁴ Masturbation, as eugenicists believed, had to be “controlled and cured.”⁵⁵ One effective way to do that was via sterilization. For example, in the United States, the prison doctor H. Sharp “sought to cure young men of excessive masturbation through sterilization,” which by 1907 led to legalization of forced sterilization of selected individuals in Indiana.⁵⁶ In Animal’s People, masturbation is used to reinforce the issue of postcolonial sterilization. Preventing the protagonist from having sex with women and meticulously focusing on musturbation acts, the novel promotes dismissive views on masturbation, portraying it as a form of obsession. What might seem as obsession, however, is, in fact, the character’s desire to be perceived as a sexually healthy man. Additionally, through masturbation, the novel hinders a possibility for reproduction, reinforcing the status of a sterilized subject on Animal. Albeit the man is sexually active, he is only given a possibility to practice sex in a form that cannot lead to reproduction.

When Elli just arrives in Khaufpur, Animal looks at her “sexy” body that, to him, appears very revealing: “The main thing I notice about her is that her blue jeans are so tight you can see everything. I half close my eyes and it’s as if she has naked legs. She sees me watching her with my eyes screwed up and gives me a smile.”⁵⁷ Yet as Animal is “about to wink back,” his friend Farouq “nudges me with his foot and says, ‘Look who’s got his hopes up.’”⁵⁸ In the scene, Elli is being friendly to Animal, yet her appearance evokes sexual fantasies in his mind. The sexual charge, however, is quickly interrupted by Animal’s friend who considers it preposterous and hilarious that Animal might even think about having sex with this woman.

The novel further develops the idea of interrupted/prevented sexual intercourse (even if only in Animal’s fantasy) in three scenes when Animal gets to see naked women: Elli, Nisha, and a local prostitute.

The first scene is when Animal, from a mango tree, spies on the American woman while she is taking a bath: “Her legs aren’t blue but as pale as milk. She reaches down and nothing is hidden from me. Next she’s soaping herself all over. Every part. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how a woman’s body is made, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen one naked.”⁵⁹ While this is the first time he sees a naked woman in real life, Animal confesses to the reader that in his dreams this has already happened multiple times:

Often I’d dream of making love with I won’t say her name. I never told anyone because if people got to know, what would they do, laugh at me, pity me? “Animal, don’t have those kinds of hopes,” I’d see the warnings in the faces of old women who caught me looking at her. Animal mating with human female, it’s unnatural, but I’ve no choice but to be unnatural. Many times I would dream that she and I were in love, sometimes we were married and naked together like in the movies having sex. In such dreams was my back straight? Did I stand upright? No and no. I was exactly as I am now and it did not matter. Such dreams! I woke from them shaking with hope. This frightened me, I despise hope.⁶⁰

Pivotally, even in his dreams sexual intercourse is interrupted as soon as Animal wakes up. Disability, in turn, is contested as the true reason why Animal cannot have sex with a woman.

While observing Elli, Animal begins to feel sexually attracted to her, and his body responds respectively: “I can’t move. There’s a furnace in my groin. No way will I go down and let them [his friends] see me in this state. I am going to be up here for some time.”⁶¹ While others are waiting for him to go down and tell them what he could see, Animal ironically notes: “Well, at least one part of me can stand upright.”⁶² Moreover, he emphasizes that his genitalia indeed work perfectly: “Man, this thing in my pants is hot and rigid, jutting that far it’s I’m thinking it’ll catch in the branches.”⁶³ Nevertheless, the masturbation is interrupted by Animal’s friends: he cannot continue because he is scared of his friends’ reaction. When Animal is down, Nisha wants to treat the scratches on his body that he has got hastily going down the mango tree. Animal becomes aroused again: “Her fingers touching me, I’m afraid my thing is going to come to life again.”⁶⁴ Yet the moment is interrupted by Nisha who, as Animal fears, might have realized what her actions were doing to Animal as well as by their friends who are impatiently waiting for the two to come inside the house.

In the second scene, Animal climbs up a mango tree again, but this time to observe Nisha. He witnesses Nisha undressing. Again, Animal’s body reacts to what he sees, and he begins to masturbate: “Try to understand, never in my life have I been with a woman yet have so badly wanted it for how I don’t know long. Like a performing bear that thing of mine stands up to dance. Lights are going on all over my body, senses are drowned in the rushing of blood, a pulse is thudding in my ears, do it do it, what? what? that that, no no, yes yes, really? really? yes yes, how? how? so so, o o, oh yes, oh no, oh fuck, that pattering in the leaves, it isn’t rain.”⁶⁵ While this scene is physically uninterrupted, and it is the first time Animal allows the reader to witness his masturbation until the end, interruption is suggested through moral hesitation that Animal experiences, knowing that Nisha is his friend and considering his behavior inappropriate.

Finally, the third naked woman whom Animal sees is a local prostitute. Animal does not have sex with her, despite the fact that she has been paid earlier. He asks her to show him her genitalia, which she does:

Dark it’s the outer parts look like the swelled lips of a large cowrie, within it’s more like a canna lily, two whorled petals whose edges are almost black, tinged with purple like the bloom on a grape. These edges are also somewhat frilly, do not join below, at the top they collide in a small peak that resembles a woman with her head veiled. This is it, the most powerful thing in the world because all men go crazy for it, more precious than gold since for its sake rich men lose fortunes, sweeter than power because craving for it makes leaders of countries risk their jobs, more powerful than honour because it makes fools of respectable men. What is this thing? It feels wrong to call it a thing, from nowhere the word grace jumps into my head.⁶⁶

Not only is sexual intercourse prevented in this scene, but also the way women’s genitalia are described suggests that Animal will never be able to have sex with a woman because, according to the excerpt, only rich men, “leaders of countries,” and “respectable men” can get access to a woman’s vagina.

The three scenes where Animal is given a chance to observe and/or be with a naked woman reveal the man’s inability to complete a sexual act. This is, however, done not because of some health issues but due to external factors that Animal cannot control. Sex does not equal to reproduction, yet it is one way reproduction can happen. Moreover, through sex, an individual’s freedom can be manifested. The novel, however, constantly prevents or interrupts Animal’s sexual fantasies and emphasizes that no matter how much Animal wants to have sex, wants to be with a woman, wants to be seen as a (healthy) man, these are privileges that are denied him. Importantly, even his genitalia are undermined through the word “thing,” suggesting the man’s impotency and symbolically castrating him.⁶⁷ Animal’s desire to have sex is depicted as a maniacal obsession and thus as a form of deviation – although he does not have sex in the novel at all. The postcolonial is thus constructed as a sexually deviant subject and, at the same time, deprived of an opportunity to have sex. These interruptions and deprivations emasculate Animal, metaphorically castrate him, emphasize his disability, and reclassify his body as an unfitting for reproduction in the human society. The contaminated body of the Animal is thus not simply a disabled body; it is a body that is removed from the human register in a eugenic manner.

Rape, Circumcision, and the Fear of Female Sexuality in Who Fears Death

While Animal’s People provides the reader with images of Animal’s metaphoric castration, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death includes scenes that I interpret as literal castration of the postcolonial. Both the metaphorical and literal types of castration described in Animal’s People and Who Fears Death illustrate the subordinate status of formerly colonized nations and emphasize the ongoing oppression that they experience. Okorafor’s novel is about female oppression and reclamation of female power. Who Fears Death is an afrofuturist postcolonial narrative. Through its focus on castration, the novel helps establish the link between sex, reproduction, and eugenics in a postcolonial context.

The protagonist in Who Fears Death is Onyesonwu – a girl who wants to find and defeat her father, a powerful sorcerer. Through Onyesonwu and her friends, the novel comments on the problem of tradition, female oppression, sexuality, and race. This section, and the article in general, focuses exclusively on the issues of female sexuality and circumcision, as depicted in the novel, to emphasize castration of the postcolonial as a eugenic way to oppress individuals.

Female genital mutilation is a practice that has been made possible through cultivation of peculiar cultural beliefs. To specify, from the first instances of female genital mutilation that took place 2000 thousand years ago until today, this procedure has been carried out in order to “control … the sexual behavior of women.”⁶⁸ Katherine Angela Luongo shrewdly observes that female genital mutilation is “an issue about women” yet “it was not an issue of women.”⁶⁹ Excluding women from this debate and depriving them of choice, patriarchy has been using female genital mutilation as one of the tools through which to establish control over the female gender in general and individual women in particular. In societies where female genital mutilation is practiced, this procedure is viewed as an effective method to preserve virginity and thus sustain the existing traditions about marriage; in eugenics, female genital mutilation is a means to control and largely subdue women’s sexuality.⁷⁰ Crucially, unlike male circumcision, female genital mutilation can “have a massive effect on her [a woman’s] [emotional, sexual, and psychological] life.”⁷¹ Examining female genital mutilation in Africa, Daniel Njoroge Karanja emphasizes the “permanent traumatic consequences” that this procedure has “in the lives of its victims.”⁷² Such a method of controlling female sexuality overtly echoes eugenicists’ views on female sexuality, when any form of deviation in sexual behavior from what was considered a norm could lead to forced sterilization.⁷³ Moreover, female genital mutilation itself can lead to infertility caused by infections that occur during or after the procedure.⁷⁴ Female genital mutilation can thus be interpreted as a eugenic practice – an act of castration – that aims to control women’s sexuality and women’s reproductive health. This is the perspective on female genital mutilation that Who Fears Death foregrounds, too.

In Who Fears Death, female circumcision is a traditional ritual that maturing girls undergo in order to preserve their virginity until marriage. Mutilation of female genitalia results in a creation of a peculiar bodily reaction: a circumcised girl cannot have sex because the act is simply too painful for her. Once the girl is married, however, the pain goes away (this is suggested in the novel, yet it is never proved). The locals have ambivalent attitudes toward this tradition, although the majority seem to support it. Onyesonwu and her three girlfriends, Binta, Luyu, and Diti, decide to follow the tradition and be circumcised.

The novel provides longer graphic descriptions of the procedure. Binta is first: “Before Binta could finish taking in her breath, the Ada took the scalpel to her. She went for a small perturbing bit of dark rosy flesh near the top of Binta’s yeye. When the scalpel sliced it, blood spurted. My stomach lurched. Binta didn’t scream but she bit down on her lip so hard that blood dribbled from the side of her mouth. Her body jerked but the women held her.”⁷⁵ Luyu’s and Diti’s cases are described graphically, too. When it is Onyesonwu’s turn, she shares with the reader how she feels about this situation, and her life at large: “I was a trapped animal. Not trapped by the women, the house, or tradition. I was trapped by life. Like I had been a free spirit for millennia and then one day something snatched me up, something violent and angry and vengeful, and I was pulled into the body that I now resided in. Held at its mercy, by its rulers.”⁷⁶ Through Onyesonwu’s inner monologue, the novel emphasizes that it is not the tradition or culture that oppress her – although banning women to have sex through pain and thus suggesting that only men can feel pleasure from sex is one way to oppress women – but “life” as such. One can speculate that Onyesonwu tries to foreground multiple instances of inequality that she or her friends and relatives have experienced: the rape of her mother, forced sexual relationship between Binta and her father, racism that mixed-race children like herself experience, female oppression, and so on. Kara Keeling argues that these are “genocide, rape, and exploitation through which the characters in this novel have come to be who they are.”⁷⁷ The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic Africa; the kinds of abuse that the characters experience are similar to abuse that resulted from racism and other ideologies that emerged in the colonial era. In fact, the novel’s story echoes the real genocide that took place during an ethnic war in Darfur, when nomadic Arabs were raping Black African women and young girls in order to eradicate the Black population.⁷⁸ Joshua Yu Burnett reads Who Fears Death’s post-apocalyptic setting as an opportunity to celebrate Black liberation and negotiate the true meanings of postcolonialism. Burnett reminds us that “postcolonialism” as a term has frequently been criticized because the reality that formerly colonized nations currently exist in can be better described by the term “neocolonialism,” for today these nations are exploited by and oppressed through Western capitalism. The Africa described in Who Fears Death is not a safe, idyllic place, yet, as Burnett asserts, “it is … a place where African nations are politically and culturally independent in meaningful ways and where cultural contact can happen on equal terms.”⁷⁹ Through the genre of speculative fiction, one can therefore produce “counterhegemonic discourse” and explore “possibilities that are not available within mainstream realist literature.”⁸⁰

Onyesonwu’s circumcision is described as a process of violating a woman’s body: “Halfway through my breath, she cut. The pain was an explosion. I felt it in every part of my body and I almost blacked out. Then I was screaming. I didn’t know that I was capable of such noise … . I would have gasped with terror if I had a mouth to gasp with. I would have screamed some more, thrashed, scratched, spit. All I could think was that I had died … ”⁸¹ The four examples of female circumcision foreground the unbearable pain that the girls feel during the procedure. But the novel further explores how this ritual transforms a woman’s body. As Mwita – a mixed-race young man whom Onyesonwu is in love with – explains to Onyesonwu later, “The scalpel that they use is treated by Aro. There’s juju on it that makes it so that a woman feels pain whenever she is too aroused… until she’s married.”⁸² The woman’s body is thus portrayed as a dangerous body that must be tamed: in the novel, this is done through rape or circumcision.

As Onyesonwu, to no avail, tries to find a way to become a student of powerful sorcerer Aro, Mwita explains to her: “He won’t teach you. You were born in the wrong body.”⁸³ Significantly, it is not a woman’s weakness or unreadiness or incapability to learn magic that is foregrounded here, but on the contrary, the power of women. And this power is largely feared. Mwita tells to Onyesonwu: “He won’t teach you because you’re a girl, a woman! … Because of what you carry here! You can bring life, and when you get old, that ability becomes something else even greater, more dangerous and unstable!”⁸⁴ Reproduction, and specifically the ability to “bring life,” thus makes a woman superior to a man. Control over a woman’s body that seems to be an overarching aim of many in the novel is exercised by patriarchy and the tradition. While it would be wrong to claim that eugenics is a way through which a woman’s body is approached in Who Fears Death, certain aspects certainly remind us about eugenics. For example, the refusal to teach a girl magic is a way to emphasize that she should remain primitive and should not have access to knowledge that is available to men. This largely mirrors eugenic views discussed earlier in this article, according to which “encouraging intellectualism in women spelled humanity’s extinction.”⁸⁵ Circumcision is another way to control a woman’s body. While circumcision is not castration per se, I argue that in the novel it functions as a form of castration: metaphorically, as it deprives a girl of her freedom, and literally, as the pain during sexual intercourse leads to an interrupted or prevented sexual act – a technique similar to the one discussed earlier in this article in the context of Animal’s People—and thus erases a possibility that a girl gets pregnant (before marriage in particular; but one can also speculate that the pain remains after marriage, too).

While the novel is filled with instances of how “women’s bodies must be suppressed,”⁸⁶ it also celebrates female power. Onyasonwu, for example, can change into other creatures, yet, she can only become “a female version” of them.⁸⁷ Julia Hoydis argues that Onyesonwu herself embodies an act of woman’s “rebellion at the moment of violation,” being a child of rape.⁸⁸ Yet more importantly, Onyesonwu finds a way to grow her clitoris back and thus “reclaim[s] control over her sexuality.”⁸⁹ Onyesonwu comments on the significance of that act: “That tiny piece of flesh made all the difference. Growing it back hadn’t been hard and it pleased me that for once in my life obtaining something of importance was easy.”⁹⁰ Onyesonwu understand the kind of power that the restoration of her genitalia gives her and how, through her gender and reproductive organs, her body can be controlled, oppressed, discriminated, and abused. Violence committed toward women in the novel is race-based and gender-based; it is a form of castration that dehumanizes the postcolonial. The overcoming of female genital mutilation in Who Fears Death can thus be read as a counter-hegemonic narrative. That Onyesonwu, unlike Animal in Animal’s People, succeeds in reclaiming her body and thus her power, including through sex, both highlights the problem of oppression and gives hope for postcolonial liberation – the kind of “hope” that Animal cherishes yet is deeply anxious about.⁹¹

Conclusion

Colonization has formulated racial discrimination as a norm, which has led to exploitation, abuse, and extermination of people of color and native populations. Decolonization of peoples and territories that largely took place in the twentieth century, while freed individuals from military oppression and legal governmental control of former colonizers, did not eliminate the principles on which colonialism as an ideology has been built. Discrimination against the postcolonial at large has continued. Racist attitudes of the West toward the postcolonial have manifested themselves in various matters related to politics, economy, and culture. Formerly colonized nations are both exoticized, i.e., in the words of Graham Huggan, viewed in such a way that they become “strange” in the eyes of the West, and neglected, remaining, as Mahlstedt asserts, invisible to or simply being “ignored” by the Western world because of their incapability to compete economically with the West.⁹² Othering the postcolonial, imagining that it is simply not there, or considering it lower (read: less human) than the West results in, among other problems, environmental racism. Animal’s People effectively describes how environmental racism not only helps preserve environmental health in the West while largely harming the nations from the Global South but also becomes a method through which to eradicate the postcolonial. Toxic contamination in Animal’s People destroys the environment and negatively influences health of individuals, provoking various disabilities. In the end, it also literally and figuratively impacts reproduction and processes related to it, including sex. The images of girls and women that suffer from various reproductive illnesses as well as Animal himself whose sex life is interrupted revoke the images of eugenic practices that through control of reproduction aimed at eliminating postcolonial populations and breeding a better white (hu)man. Who Fears Death vividly illustrates how controlling the bodies of the oppressed through circumcision can be seen as eugenic. The two novels thus reveal contrasting perspectives and consequences of oppression experienced by formerly colonized nations, i.e., internalization of eugenic control practices and effective resistance to such practices. While uncovering racism, sexism, and ableism experienced by postcolonial nations, both Animal’s People and Who Fears Death foreground the fight of the postcolonial for equality and over their own bodies.

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Tatiana Konrad

Tatiana Konrad is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Austria, the principal investigator of “Air and Environmental Health in the (Post-)COVID-19 World,” and the editor of the “Environment, Health, and Well-being” book series at Michigan State University Press. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Marburg, Germany.

Notes

1. Anthony J. Nocella II, “Defining Eco-ability: Social Justice and the Intersectionality of Disability, Nonhuman Animals, and Ecology,” in Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, ed. Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 142.

2. Karen Soldatic, Disability and Neoliberal State Formations (London: Routledge, 2019), 1.

3. Philippa Levine, “Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 43.

4. Ibid., 44.

5. Sarah Jaquette Ray, “Risking Bodies in the Wild: The ‘Corporeal Unconscious’ of American Adventure Culture,” in Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, ed. Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 47.

6. Sarah Jaquette Ray, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 1, 2.

7. Levine, “Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics,” 54.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 31.

11. Ibid.

12. Philippa Levine, Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1.

13. For more on the Bhopal disaster, see Edward Broughton, “The Bhopal Disaster and Its Aftermath: A Review,” Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source 4, no. 6 (2005): 1–6, accessed January 29, 2021, http://www.ehjournal.net/content/4/1/6.

14. Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (London: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 172; italics in original.

15. Ibid., 207, 208.

16. Ibid., 209.

17. Stacey Balkan, “A Memento Mori Tale: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the Politics of Global Toxicity,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25, no. 1 (2018): 117.

18. Ibid.

19. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.

20. For more, see, e.g., Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

21. Justin Omar Johnston, “‘A Nother World’ in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” Twentieth-Century Literature 62, no. 2 (2016): 119.

22. Karsten Levinh-Kutzler, “Toxic Terror and the Cosmopolitanism of Risk in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” in Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires, ed. Barbara Buchenau and Virginia Richter (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 379.

23. Andrew Mahlstedt, “Animal’s Eyes: Spectacular Invisibility and the Terms of Recognition in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” Mosaic 46, no. 3 (2013): 60.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).

27. Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), 74.

28. Helen Meekosha and Karen Soldatic, “Human Rights and the Global South: The Case of Disability,” Third World Quarterly 32, no. 8 (2011): 1385.

29. Jennifer Rickel, “‘The Poor Remain:’ A Posthumanist Rethinking of Literary Humanitarianism in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 43, no. 1 (2012): 89.

30. Ibid.

31. Animal studies and vegan studies scholars argue that imagining humans as animals and animals as humans can entail dangerous cultural and political consequences. For more on animalization/dehumanization of humans and deanimalization/humanization of animals, see Carol J. Adams, 1990, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015); Laura Wright, “Doing Vegan Studies: An Introduction,” in Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism, ed. Laura Wright (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2019), vii-xxiv; Laura Wright, The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).

32. Sinha, Animal’s People, 223.

33. Ibid., 352.

34. Ibid., 108.

35. Levinh-Kutzler, “Toxic Terror,” 372.

36. Sinha, Animal’s People, 107–108.

37. Ibid., 322.

38. Frank Dikötter, “Eugenics in Asia,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 233.

39. Garland E. Allen, “Eugenics as an International Movement,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 224.

40. Diane B. Paul and Marius Turda, “Eugenics, History of,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 252; Garland E. Allen and Marius Turda, “Eugenics as a Basis of Population Policy,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 219.

41. Richard S. Fogarty, “Eugenics in Europe,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 239; Patience A. Schell, “Eugenics in the Americas,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 251.

42. Levinh-Kutzler, “Toxic Terror,” 372.

43. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2.

44. Sinha, Animal’s People, 231.

45. Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: Modern Language Association, 2002), 92; Alison Kafer, “Compulsory Bodies: Reflections on Heterosexuality and Able-bodiedness,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 3 (2003): 79; Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 632.

46. Sinha, Animal’s People, 72; italics in original.

47. Paula Larsson, “Masturbation,” April 29, 2014, n.p., accessed March 25, 2021, https://eugenicsarchive.ca/database/documents/535eecd47095aa000000023c.

48. Ibid.

49. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, 1948, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 513.

50. Larsson, “Masturbation,” n.p.

51. Osmo Kontula, Between Sexual Desire and Reality: The Evolution of Sex in Finland (Helsinki: Väestöliitto, 2009), 96.

52. Ibid.

53. Zoё Benjamin qtd. in Grant Rodwell, “Curing the Precocious Masturbator: Eugenics and Australian Early Childhood Education,” Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 59 (1998): 82.

54. Grant Rodwell, “Curing the Precocious Masturbator: Eugenics and Australian Early Childhood Education,” Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 59 (1998): 82.

55. Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, Sexual Behavior, 513.

56. Horst Biesold, Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany, trans. William Sayers (Washington D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1988), 15.

57. Sinha, Animal’s People, 67.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., 78.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 79.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 81.

65. Ibid., 117.

66. Ibid., 243.

67. Ibid., 79, 117.

68. Comfort Momoh, “Female Genital Mutilation,” in Female Genital Mutilation, ed. Comfort Momoh (Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing, 2005), 5.

69. Katherine Angela Luongo, “The Clitoridectomy Controversy in Kenya: The ‘Woman’s Affair’ that Wasn’t,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 28, no. 2–3 (2000): 105; italics in original.

70. Momoh, “Female Genital Mutilation,” 5; Rodwell, “Curing the Precocious Masturbator,” 84; Kirsten Moore, Kate Randolph, Nahid Toubia, and Elizabeth Kirberger, “The Synergistic Relationship between Health and Human Rights: A Case Study Using Female Genital Mutilation,” Health and Human Rights 2, no. 2 (1997): 139.

71. Rodwell, “Curing the Precocious Masturbator,” 82.

72. Daniel Njoroge Karanja, Female Genital Mutilation in Africa: Gender, Religion and Pastoral Care (Maitland: Xulon Press, 2003), 17.

73. Jess Whatcott, “Sexual Deviance and ‘Mental Defectiveness’ in Eugenics Era California,” Notches, March 14, 2017, n.p., accessed March 25, 2021, https://notchesblog.com/2017/03/14/sexual-deviance-and-mental-defectiveness-in-eugenics-era-california/.

74. Gaia Vince, “Female Genital Mutilation Can Cause Infertility,” New Scientist, July 29, 2005, n.p., accessed March 25, 2021, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7752-female-genital-mutilation-can-cause-infertility/.

75. Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death (New York: DAW Books, Inc., 2010), 42; italics in original.

76. Ibid., 43.

77. Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 210.

78. Jane Bryce, “African Futurism: Speculative Fictions and ‘Rewriting of the Great Book,’” Research in African Literatures 50, no. 1 (2019): 11.

79. Joshua Yu Burnett, “The Great Change and the Great Book: Nnedi Okorafor’s Postcolonial, Postapocalyptic Africa and the Promise of Black Speculative Fiction,” Research in African Literatures 46, no. 4 (2015): 134.

80. Ibid.

81. Okorafor, Who Fears Death, 43.

82. Ibid., 82.

83. Ibid., 69.

84. Ibid., 68; italics in original.

85. Levine, “Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics,” 54.

86. Chielozona Eze, Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature: Feminist Empathy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 105.

87. Okorafor, Who Fears Death, 69.

88. Julia Hoydis, “A Darker Shade of Justice: Violence, Liberation, and Afrofuturist Fantasy in Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death,” in Postcolonial Justice, ed. Anke Bartels, Lars Eckstein, Nicole Waller, and Dirk Wiemann (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 182.

89. Ibid., 184.

90. Okorafor, Who Fears Death, 140.

91. Sinha, Animal’s People, 78.

92. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), 13; Mahlstedt, “Animal’s Eyes,” 60.