You said:

The phrase "eugenic gaze" used by Lennard J Davis refers to a particular way of looking at and scrutinizing but this gaze is not just about individual observation, it is part of a broader social, scientific, and political process that categorizes bodies according to norms derived from statistical averages and eugenic ideologies. Through this gaze, people were often grouped with a wide array of other socially marginalized populations who failed quality control.

Davis writes: "So, for example, criminals, the poor, and people with disabilities might be mentioned in the same breath. Take Karl Pearson, a leading figure in the eugenics movement, who defined the “unfit” as follows: “the habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tuberculous, the insane, the mentally defective, the alcoholic, the diseased from birth or from excess” (cited in Kevles 1985, 33). In 1911, Pearson headed the Department of Applied Statistics, which included the Galton and Biometric Laboratories at University College in London. This department gathered eugenic information on the inheritance of physical and mental traits including “scientific, commercial, and legal ability, but also hermaphroditism, hemophilia, cleft palate, harelip, tuberculosis, diabetes, deaf-mutism, polydactyly (more than five fingers) or brachydactyly (stub fingers), insanity, and mental deficiency” (ibid., 38–9). Here again one sees a strange selection of disabilities merged with other types of human variations". Though they masquerade as rational and benevolent, lists like these demonstrate the arbitrary nature and the absurdity of such sortition processes.

This is a sharp and faithful reading of Davis’s use of the “eugenic gaze.” You’ve captured the crucial point: it is not simply about how one individual looks at another, but about a whole apparatus of classification, surveillance, and normalization that emerged from statistics, medicine, and state power. A few layers of context might deepen the analysis:

🔎 What the “eugenic gaze” entails

• Statistical normativity: As Davis emphasizes, the gaze is tied to the rise of statistics and the concept of the “average man” (Quetelet, Galton, Pearson). Once the “average” becomes the measure of health, intelligence, or ability, deviation is pathologized.
• Conflation of categories: Lists like Pearson’s collapse together disability, poverty, criminality, and disease into a single category of “unfit.” This reveals the arbitrariness of the classification system: it is less about empirical science than about enforcing social hierarchies.
• Institutional embedding: The gaze is not just discursive but institutional—embedded in laboratories, censuses, medical exams, and state policies. It becomes a way of managing populations, not just describing them.

⚡ Why it matters

• Masquerade of rationality: As you note, the lists present themselves as neutral, scientific, even benevolent. But their arbitrariness exposes the ideological function: to naturalize exclusion and justify intervention.
• Quality control logic: The metaphor of “failed quality control” is apt. Eugenics reframed human variation as defect, as if people were products on an assembly line.
• Absurdity and violence: The absurdity of lumping together “polydactyly” with “criminality” is not harmless—it underwrites policies of sterilization, institutionalization, and extermination.

The eugenic gaze does not see individuals; it sorts populations. It collapses poverty, disability, and deviance into a single defect, masquerading as science while enforcing hierarchy. Its lists are absurd, but their absurdity is lethal.

You said:

What do you think of Peasons list?

Karl Pearson’s list of the “unfit” is a striking example of how the eugenic gaze operated: it collapses together wildly different categories—criminality, poverty, illness, disability, even minor bodily variations—into a single register of defect.

Why it matters

• Arbitrariness: The list lumps together things with no intrinsic relation—like polydactyly (extra fingers) and alcoholism, or cleft palate and “professional tramps.” This reveals how much eugenics was driven by social prejudice rather than coherent science.

• Statistical authority: Pearson’s role as head of the Department of Applied Statistics gave these classifications a veneer of objectivity. Numbers and lists made ideology look like science.

• Moralization of biology: By grouping poverty and crime with congenital conditions, Pearson naturalized social inequality as biological inferiority.

• Absurdity with consequences: The absurdity is obvious now, but at the time it justified sterilization campaigns, institutionalization, and the exclusion of entire populations.

A polemical condensation

Pearson’s list reads like a taxonomy of fear: a jumble of illness, poverty, and deviance masquerading as science. Its absurdity is not harmless—it is the absurdity of power deciding who counts as human.

You said:

Can you speak more on the following point: Moralization of biology: By grouping poverty and crime with congenital conditions, Pearson naturalized social inequality as biological inferiority.

Absolutely—this is one of the most insidious moves of early eugenics, and it’s worth unpacking carefully.

🔎 What Pearson’s move does

• Collapsing social into biological: By placing poverty, criminality, and “degeneracy” alongside congenital conditions like cleft palate or hemophilia, Pearson reframed social problems as hereditary defects. Poverty was no longer seen as a product of economic structures, but as a symptom of “bad stock.”
• Moralization of biology: Once poverty or crime is treated as biological, it becomes moralized—those who are poor or criminal are not just unfortunate or shaped by circumstance, but inferior by nature. Biology becomes a moral verdict.
• Naturalizing inequality: This move makes inequality appear inevitable. If poverty is “in the blood,” then social reform is pointless; the only “solution” becomes exclusion, sterilization, or elimination of the “unfit.”

⚡ Why this matters

• Shifts responsibility: Structural causes (capitalism, labor exploitation, lack of access to healthcare or education) are erased. Responsibility is displaced onto the body of the marginalized person.
• Authorizes violence: Once inequality is naturalized, coercive interventions—sterilization, institutionalization, segregation—can be justified as “scientific” or “benevolent.”
• Creates absurd equivalences: The list equates having six fingers with being a “professional tramp.” This absurdity reveals the ideological function: the point was not science, but the consolidation of a hierarchy of worth.

🧩 The deeper logic

This is what Davis calls the “eugenic gaze”: a way of seeing that fuses statistics, morality, and politics into a single classificatory system. It doesn’t just describe bodies; it produces categories of inferiority. In this sense, Pearson’s list is not a neutral taxonomy but a performative act—it creates the very population of the “unfit” it claims to discover