Too Fast, Too Slow: Girlhood, Temporality, and Eugenics in Twentieth Century Film

Author

Alessandra Occhiolini, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Advisor

Wayne Koestenbaum

Committee Members

Talia Schaffer

Kandice Chuh

Subject Categories

American Film Studies | Disability Law | Literature in English, North America | Visual Studies

Keywords

Disability, film, eugenics, Carrie Buck, sterilization, studio system

Abstract

“Too Fast, Too Slow: Girlhood, Temporality, and Eugenics in Twentieth Century Film,” connects the eugenic legislation of the 1920s with the aesthetic discourses around the ideal female body in the developing film industry. Just as film was an emergent technology in the early twentieth century, eugenics was an emergent science. While eugenics became more and more publicly unspeakable throughout the thirties with the rise of Nazism abroad, the American preoccupation with race science and reproducing ideal white bodies never went away. Starting with silent films such as GW Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), which directly parallels the Supreme Court Case, Buck v. Bell, which legalized sterilization, I move from how film directly replicates or responds to then-contemporary eugenics towards how eugenic discourse would both haunt and shape female representation and film technology for decades to come. In the postwar period, in the moment between eugenics and genetics, film technology mediated an aesthetic vocabulary of the ideal white female body when words became suspect. The project also explores how sterilization legislation framed deviant female sexuality as a site of disability, as I use this category overlap to both argue that disability as a category is profoundly temporally situated, and that eugenics play an important role in the formation of American sexual cultures.

The first chapter begins in the 1920s by contrasting the visual and legal figuration of Carrie Buck and Deborah Kallikak, two real “too-fast, too-slow” girls immortalized by the violence of the American eugenics movement, with the silent G.W. Pabst film starring Louise Brooks, Diary of A Lost Girl. While Diary of A Lost Girl translates a story much like that of Carrie Buck faithfully, the thirties turned to exploring the salacious and queer possibilities of girls with voracious appetites for sex and low morals: the second chapter reads Kay Francis’s queer, rhotacism-inflected performance in the illness drama One Way Passage as a site of queer-crip performance strategy. The post-war forties, in which American eugenics became unspeakable, translated these difficult conversations into an aesthetic context: films like the technicolor melodrama Leave Her to Heaven explored how the perfect white female body is always constructed through violence. The fourth chapter explores this violence at a systemic level, arguing that wartime development in technology reconfigured the body as something to be mechanically or surgically changed – both literally in the surgical construction of Marilyn Monroe from Norma Jeane, and more metaphorically in the creation of CinemaScope. When we reach Jackie and Josephine and Guy, I argue that Susann’s life and work can be read as a process of sifting the “incurably” disabled from the curably disabled, and how those categories collapse under our attention.

Finally, I conclude with an analysis of disability in the films of Edie Sedgwick, a performer whose life paralleled the experience of Carrie Buck, both in her forced institutionalization and surgical abortions. Throughout these chapters, I remain interested in temporality and disability, as well as how eugenics creates a language of temporality that haunts how we configure disability today.

Recommended Citation

Occhiolini, Alessandra, "Too Fast, Too Slow: Girlhood, Temporality, and Eugenics in Twentieth Century Film" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6551