Bodies at war : National Security in American controversies over animal & human experimentation from WWI to the War on Terror

Abstract

The rhetoric and apparatus of national security have played critical roles in American controversies over animal and human experimentation from the dawn of the Twentieth Century to today's "War on Terror." Drawing on archival and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) research, this dissertation traces how American partisans in the enduring vivisection controversy have sought to mobilize national security concerns to tar their domestic political adversaries as enemy agents of foreign enemies from the Kaiser and Hitler to Stalin and Al-Qaeda. Further, this study explores how these efforts have intersected with issues of gender, slavery, and the pathologizing of political dissent, as well as campaigns for the absolute freedom of research, the functioning of Nazism and the Holocaust in the American political imagination, civil liberties in the Post-9/11 world, and ongoing debates over animal rights, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and domestic terrorism.