Review: Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900–1950s, by Natalie Lira Available to Purchase

In Laboratory of Deficiency, Natalie Lira explores the ways in which “racism, ableism, and classism” (23) were mobilized to construct both the problem of feeblemindedness and its supposed solution in Southern California in the first half of the twentieth century. Lira uses Pacific Colony, a public psychiatric hospital established in 1917, as a case study and has divided her text into thematic chapters that examine the institution’s creation and operation, as well as what it represented to the government, stakeholders, and those whom it targeted and incarcerated. Employing the lenses and frameworks of reproductive justice and critical disability studies, Lira makes important contributions to the historiographies of eugenics, institutionalization, race, and reproductive justice at both the regional and transnational levels. In so doing, she demonstrates the ways in which “diagnoses of feeblemindedness and practices of institutionalization used the language of medicine and science to naturalize existing social hierarchies and...