2025 Alison Piepmeier Prize
A01=Jess Whatcott
ableist confinement
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Angela Y. Davis
Author_Jess Whatcott
automatic-update
California
carceral eugenics
carceral humanism
carceral industrial complex
carceral studies
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JBFM
Category=JFFG
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
civil commitment
COP=United States
COVID-19
critical disability studies
Deinstitutionalization
Delivery_Pre-order
developmental center
disability justice
disability rights movement
disabled bodies
disablement
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
eugenics
feminist abolition
for-profit detention centers
forensic hospital
Frank Norris
Free Them All San Diego
genealogy
ICE
immigrant detention
institutionalization
juvenile justice system
Language_English
Liat Ben-Moshe
maternalism
medical abuse
medical neglect
Michel Foucault
migrant detention
National Women's Studies Association
NWSA Book Awards
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Forthcoming
punishment continuum
racialization
reformatories
refusal
reproductive justice
softlaunch
state hospitals
state sponsored eugenics
surplus population
Product details
- ISBN 9781478030751
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 Sep 2024
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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 is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University.
