"Menace to the Future" by Jess Whatcott

October 21, 3 PM EST, Virtual - Menace to the Future with Jess Whatcott

In Menace to the Future, 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.

Jess Whatcott (they/them) is a teacher, writer, and abolitionist organizer located in the borderlands of San Diego, California. Dr. Whatcott is an assistant professor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at San Diego State University, where they are also affiliated with LGBTQ+ Studies and the Center for Comics Studies.

RSVP at this link.