Modern paternity is not simply a question for empirical analysis: “Who is the father?” Instead, as Nara Milanich argues, paternity must also be understood through normative inquiry: “What do we want him to be?” In her recent book Paternity (2019), Milanich captures the social and material histories of the new paternity science, delineating the instrumentalisation, bioethics, and ideologies of paternity blood tests. Milanich investigates how the search for the father is invested in social, cultural, and political structures across global history. She demonstrates in what ways gendered and racial links constitute the politico-legal histories of paternity, informing the development and integration of the paternity blood test into modern society. The study follows the convergence of science, the state, and mass media by examining paternity laws from Ancient Greece to 19th century England and 20th century Germany. Paternity thus provides a complex and interlinking portrait of medical technologies, population control, heteropatriarchy, and politico-legal enforcement of radicalized bodies.
Questions of paternity have historically arisen in the context of disputes over child support and inheritance. Historical paternity has largely been driven by politico-legal cases which sought to determine the “right” father to attribute to disputed offspring. As Milanich writes: “Whereas a mother's identity can be known by the fact of birth, the father has always been maddeningly uncertain” (3). Historical paternity was measured according to the father's social investment in the child, notably his marriage status, his perceived rearing of the child in the public eye, and his financial support. Until the 19th century, historical paternity was examined according to community social networks, oral tradition, and the father's claims or dismissals of the child itself. Eugenics projects in the 19th and 20th centuries offered new “scientific” methods and analyses of paternity, including bodily measurements, photographic resemblance, and claims to “serological” kinship following the discovery of ABO blood types. Consequently, the 20th century marked a new era for understanding kinship, which Milanich describes as the “new paternity science.”
Milanich analyses the global history and expansion of modern paternity science, remarking the transition from premodern paternity, which focuses on relationships deduced from social behavior and social conventions, to modern paternity, which understands the physical body as a source of truth and employs scientific methods to reveal paternity on/in the body. The book follows the invention of several scientific paternity tests beginning in the 1920s, including Albert Abrams's oscilloscope machine, which measured “rates of blood vibration” (36); the use of ABO blood typing to distinguish “impossible fathers” (59); and the “somatic expertise” of anthropological assessments and exhibitions of physical bodies according to individual appearance, gait, or gesture (103). Entangling the social, scientific, and political, then, the new paternity science coincided with new fields of expertise in the late 19th century, such as criminology, eugenics, social hygiene, public health, and identification sciences (98).
Racial serology (60) and female credibility (79) played an important role in the entanglement of the new paternity science and eugenics at the beginning of the 20th century. “Paternal uncertainty seemed to enable racial mixture, pollution, and indeterminacy,” Milanich writes. “In the transatlantic imaginary, the abiding belief that paternity is inherently uncertain provided fertile ground for racial anxieties to bloom” (27). Hence the search for the father was bound up with the eugenics and patriarchal social projects, informing medical and social science on both sides of WWII and ultimately informing ongoing projects which demonstrate the scientific pursuit of racial and gender(ed) difference. Milanich helpfully notes that the paternity test and “the genetic makeup of the child was merely a convenient way to assess a mother's moral standing and by extension whether the male defendant could be held responsible for illicit sex with her” (79). In short, modern paternity testing has always been bound up in hygienist projects to maintain social order, optimize public health, advance ethical and moral imperatives, and oversee global population control.
Throughout the book, Milanich provides careful accounts of legal proceedings across many regions, including North America, South America, Europe, and China. Looking specifically at the processes of “paper kinship” in the United States, for instance, Milanich details how some immigrants from China interacted with US immigration procedures to demonstrate and contest citizenship through rudimentary kinship tests (214). This final case study provides an excellent example of the complexities of modern paternity, describing how and why family structures have changed according to politico-legal jurisdiction. It interrogates a troubling connection between state immigration procedures, medical testing, genetic markers, and kinship and problematizes the technoscientific methods for attributing paternity and inter/national family ties across history.
Paternity is a richly detailed study of modern paternity science which will interest scholars examining the social histories of modern medicine, scientific methods, and migration. Milanich's careful analysis of ongoing gendered and racial hierarchies will equally appeal to researchers in global history, the history of science, gender and sexuality studies, bioethics, and more. The study provides grounds for further analysis of the racialised and gendered valences of paternity testing in the 21st century, contesting the increasing commercialization of kinship tests sold to consumers as personalized products. Supplying a vast and intelligible network of social, economic, political, cultural, scientific, and medical ties, Paternity demonstrates a strong addition to intersectional social and historical research.