CDSC Sponsored: “Menacing the Future”: Thinking with Carceral Eugenics Past, Present, and Future (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Join us for an author meets readers panel engaging with Jess Whatcott’s book Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (2024, Duke University Press). Menace to the Future discusses how the philosophy of eugenics influenced the administration of state hospitals, state homes, and reformatories in California in the early twentieth century. Whatcott theorizes the concept of “carceral eugenics” to describe how the institutionalization of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people operated historically as a form of eugenics. Institutionalization was an explicit strategy to socially engineer human reproduction, and it also interrupted people’s abilities to participate in social reproduction and care work.

Scholars on this Critical Disability Studies Caucus sponsored panel will discuss how “carceral eugenics” shows up in their research historically and in the present. How does the historical record demonstrate that eugenics involves not just direct reproductive intervention through surgery, but also a wide variety of forms of confinement and containment, from the domestic to the group home to the institution to the prison? Scholars will also discuss how practices of neo-eugenics and carcerality impact disabled, mad, and neurodivergent; queer and trans; Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, and all diasporic colonized people in the twenty-first century. Most importantly, the panel will address how people have revolted against institutions, incarceration, and detention in ways both big and small. By fighting against specific institutions/prisons, creating networks of care, and affirming the value of life, communities targeted by eugenics have imagined alternative futures.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• T.L. Cowan, University of Toronto

Panelists

• Jess Whatcott, San Diego State University

• Jasmine Syedullah, Vassar College

• Jorge A Matos, Hostos Community College-CUNY

Virtual Accommodation Panelists

• Emily Thuma, University of Washington Tacoma

• Priya Kandaswamy, San Diego State University

Comment

• Liat Ben-Moshe, University of Illinois at Chicago

Biographical Information

Jess Whatcott (they/them) is an assistant professor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and is affiliated with LGBTQ+ Studies; the Center for Comics Studies; and the Digital Humanities Center at San Diego State University. Their research examines eugenics, the carceral state, and border imperialism, by applying methodologies of critical disability studies, abolition feminism, queer and trans studies, and scholar activism. Dr. Whatcott’s first monograph Menace to the Future: A Queer and Disability History of Carceral Eugenics is forthcoming by Duke University Press in August 2024. The book tells the story of California institutions that segregated disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people away from their communities and families in the early twentieth century. Dr. Whatcott theorizes that this was a practice of carcerality that enacted eugenics. The book connects this history of what Dr. Whatcott calls “carceral eugenics” to the continued reliance on psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and immigrant detention centers to control social reproduction. More of their writing on eugenics, prisons, and other state violence has appeared in Feminist Formations; Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society; Lateral; Politics, Groups & Identities; and edited book collections.

Emily Thuma is the Fred and Dorothy Haley Associate Professor of Humanities and an associate professor of politics and law at the University of Washington Tacoma, as well as an adjunct associate professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington Seattle.
Thuma is an interdisciplinary historian of the twentieth-century United States who works at the intersection of American studies, feminist and queer studies, critical race and ethnic studies, legal studies, and critical prison studies. Her research focuses on social movements, legal reform, and the politics and lived experience of criminalization and incarceration since the 1960s. She is the author of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence (University of Illinois Press), which won the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBTQ Studies and was a finalist for the 2020 Mary Nickliss Prize for Best Book in Gender and Women’s History from the Organization of American Historians and the 2020 Lora Romero Prize for Best First Book in American Studies from the American Studies Association.

Jasmine Syedullah is a co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation (North Atlantic, 2016) and an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Vassar College. Her published works can be found in Theory & Event, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International; Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics; The Journal of Contemporary Political Theory; Society and Space; Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and Truthout.

Jorge Matos Valldejuli is an Assistant Professor and Reference Librarian at Hostos Community College at The City University of New York. His research documents the history of race at the former institution for the developmentally disabled, the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York. His article "Together we arrived and together we shall leave': The Gouverneur Parents Association and the politics of disability and race in postwar New York," was published in Latino Studies in 2022. He's also published in the online journal The Activist History Review.

Priya Kandaswamy is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at San Diego State University. She is the author of Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform (Duke University Press, 2021), which documents how constructions of gendered citizenship articulated to curtail Black freedom during the Reconstruction Era continue to haunt more contemporary debates about public assistance and economic inequality in the United States. Bringing together insights from queer studies, feminist studies, and ethnic studies, her work is engaged with and deeply indebted to historical and contemporary movements for welfare rights, domestic workers’ rights, reproductive justice, prison abolition, and liberatory education.

Liat Ben-Moshe is an activist-scholar working at the intersection of incarceration, abolition and disability/madness. She is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020) and co-editor of Disability Incarcerated (2014). For more: https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/

T.L. Cowan (she/they) is an Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, as well as a cabaret and video artist. T.L.’s research focuses on cultural and intellectual economies and networks of minoritized digital media and performance practices. She is the director of a new research initiative: “Assisted Living in the Life of the Mind: Building Trans- Feminist & Queer Accessibility and Accountability Networks in the University” and co-author (with Jas Rault) of Heavy Processing (open access, punctum books 2024).