But Guthrie’s attention to these bodily features, and to people’s marginalization on the basis of them, drove his career as an artist with a guitar, a pen, or a paintbrush. He came to understand the shaming and stigmatization of certain bodies as working to isolate people, to prevent them from assembling as a collective—a proven way for those lacking financial resources to empower themselves—to demand a better life.
The origins of this viewpoint lay in Guthrie’s earlier life, in the tragedies that beset his family, all revolving around his mother’s mysterious condition, her undiagnosed Huntington’s disease.
Huntington’s disease has three major symptoms: dyskinesia, or involuntary movements; dementia; and “disorders of mood and perception, particularly depression,” though angry outbursts are also a noted symptom. Its symptoms typically begin showing themselves in early middle age, usually between the ages of 30 and 40, but they often appear as minor shifts in mood and disposition, making their initial manifestations difficult to discern. Yet, there are many variations among cases. Nora Belle Guthrie may have been a bit younger than 30 when her family and neighbors began to notice behaviors they deemed strange.
Until the second half of the 20th century, the condition was widely known as Huntington’s chorea, the Greek word for dance or chorus, that is, a group of dancers. It is hereditary, a gene mutation passed down through generations, and as of the early 21st century, incurable. A child with one parent suffering from the disease has a 50–50 chance of developing it as an adult.
Although the symptoms appear gradually, they eventually become dramatically visible—particularly as involuntary, jerky movements. This dyskinesia becomes far more drastic than the tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease—hence, the association with dance, a spectacle of the body. Consequently, people suffering from the illness have long been told their bodies were aberrant, and faced ostracism and discrimination.
Before Dr. George Huntington named it as a pathology in 1872, those stricken with the disease were frequently assumed insane, their outlandish physical symptoms considered a manifestation of a deranged mind. In the early 20th century, Alice Wexler’s research shows, scientists and physicians saw the condition through the lens of eugenic theory, the racial pseudo-science built on the principle that certain categories of people should be encouraged to reproduce while others should be discouraged.
Dr. Charles B. Davenport, a leading American eugenicist, “called for immigration restrictions, surveillance of families, and compulsory sterilization of people with Huntington’s.” In 1934, a British neurologist claimed that the mark of the illness spread beyond those carrying it, affecting their intimates as well; according to Wexler, “all members of families affected by Huntington’s disease were [in the neurologist’s words] ‘liable to bear the marks of a grossly psychopathic taint, and the story of feeblemindedness, insanity, suicide, criminality, alcoholism, and drug addiction becomes enfolded over and over again.’”
In other words, the widely respected theory of eugenics subjected them to the same authority-imprinted stigmas, in many of the same terms, as it did people of African origin, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and even, as we will see, some poor white Americans.