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Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to sexologist Havelock Ellis, produced a suite of political essays and fiction at the turn of the twentieth century that explored questions of racial citizenship, reproductive politics, and women's rights through the discourse of eugenics. Reading Ellis's 1906 My Cornish Neighbours in relation to current debates surrounding queer theory reveals an important relationship between the history of eugenics and current queer theories of futurity and abjection. By examining early twentieth-century discourses of reproduction, kinship, and citizenship through the lenses of feminist geopolitics and queer temporality, the article illustrates how Ellis's articulations of alternative kinships and queer eugenics might move current work in queer theory to consider the embedded structure of racial hierarchies in discussions of futurity, and the relationship of normative and oppositional kinship structures to the geopolitical.
Keywords: British nationalism / Cornwall / eugenics / lesbians / modernity / queer theory / reproductive futurism
"In the future, sexual knowledge will form part of every educational scheme, and the study of Eugenics will be as important to the school curriculum as botany or Euclid."
-Edith Ellis, The New Horizon in Love and Life ( 1921)
"It is important not to hand over futurity to normative white reproductive futurity."
-José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia ( 2009)
What happens when we think about early twentieth-century race, empire, gender, and sexuality through the lens of twenty-first-century queer theories of subjectivity? Edith Lees Ellis, now remembered most for her marriage to British sexologist Havelock Ellis, has been labeled a socialist, a eugenicist, a lesbian, and a wife. None of these terms fully address the complex politics of her work, nor do such discrete assessments alone account for the intractable connections among British understandings of race, gender roles, and nationalism to the emergence of twentieth-century sexual identities. The oeuvre of Edith Ellis allows us to understand the ways in which the nationalist feminism of British social reformers contributed to the formation of the racialized classification systems that undergird twentieth- and twenty-first-century understandings of sexuality. By examining early twentieth-century discourses of reproduction, kinship, and citizenship through the lenses of feminist geopolitics and queer temporality, I hope to illustrate how Ellis's articulations of kinship, eugenics, and subjectivity in her fiction and nonfiction...