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Sep 7, 2024
Menace to the Future
A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics
Summary
In Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (Duke UP, 2024), Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal that state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization were done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called menace to the future.
Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted.
Your Host
Kendall Dinniene
Kendall Dinniene is a PhD candidate in English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their dissertation excavates how American cultural production complicates and transforms dominant notions of fatness, revealing how these notions are intertwined with and produce ideas about race as well as gender, sexuality, health, and national identity. Their work relies upon queer theory, Black feminist theory, and fat studies scholarship alongside literary criticism to argue that how we understand fatness is crucial to the way we understand (and make) our world. Kendall's scholarship has appeared in Fat Studies: A Journal of Body Weight and Society and is forthcoming in Ethnic Studies Review.
