Resisting Carceral Eugenics and Forging Palestinian Futures

• In Event: Cultivating resistance from within and beyond Palestine: Reflections on mass impairment, carcerality, and access-washing (HYBRID)

Abstract

Futurity, and the attempt to thwart it for Palestinians, plays a key role in Israeli regime of settler colonialism, occupation and militarized and administrative violence. In addition to the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing and displacement, preventing Palestinian futurity is also done through means of incarceration and debilitation.
Connecting feminist disability studies scholar Jess Whatcott conceptualization of carceral eugenics to Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s[i] extensive work on unchilding and to the work of the Palestinian Feminist Collective[ii] and black feminists in the US, clarifies that incarceration is a targeted biopolitical tool of genocide and settler colonialism.
In addition, Sde Teiman and other current Israeli military prisons show what I demonstrated was true for all prisons - they are disabling by design and a form of torture. After discussing this context and framework, I will focus on forms of resistance to carceral eugenics: the practice of sperm smuggling as a source of literal and symbolic ways to “build the future”; and the abolitionist writing and praxis of Palestinian prisoners (Especially Walid Daqqa, whose recent death in an Israeli prison as a result of deliberate medical neglect demonstrates carceral debilitation and its resistance).

[i] Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
[ii] https://palestinianfeministcollective.org/shut-down-colonial-feminism-2023/ “Gender and sexual violence is indispensable to settler colonialism and its intent to eliminate Indigenous peoples, steal their lands, and repress their resistance..”

Author

• Liat Ben-Moshe, University of Illinois at Chicago