Eugenic Afterlives in Anorexic Geographies through Italian, Mediterranean, and European 1960s Human Sciences

Erin Clancy, University of Wisconsin-Madison

As postcolonial Italian studies scholars have established, the close of WWII signaled the simultaneous dissolution of formal fascist and colonial regimes, which (once more) destabilized the national identity - Italianità - and required its re-negotiation of race, gender, power, and reproduction. This requires approaching them as entwined: Italianità as shaping and shaped by both Mediterranean and European geographies. This paper analyzes the late psychoanalytic and early systems work on anorexia and family therapy by Dott.sa Mara Selvini Palazzoli (c. 1959-1971), key member of the Milan Group (1967-). The transitional period of her work developed from her position at a key Italian university for postwar eugenics and human sciences and international travel. Selvini Palazzoli’s dissemination of her work with anorexia patients and their families animates the role of psychoanalysis and the human sciences in the layered negotiations of Italian status. I apply a transnational feminist geographic and critical psy-science histories lens to track Selvini Palazzoli’s contributions to the 1965 International Anorexia Symposium in Germany and publications up to 1971 in Italian and English-language human science journals. I argue this work illuminates the flexible processes of spatial differentiation and stretch of fascist and colonial (eugenic) visions as they played out at different sites of knowledge production and social reproduction (e.g., in the family). In turn, this paper has implications for the scope of inquiry in psy-science histories, re-evaluating human science histories of eating disorders, and for further mapping of eugenics’ afterlives.

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 Presented in Session 113. Sexuality, Race, and the Regulation of Difference