Menace to the Future
eBook - PDF

Menace to the Future

A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics

  1. 248 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Menace to the Future

A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Menace to the Future by Jess Whatcott in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & LGBT Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. List of Abbreviations
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Prologue: Detention Is Eugenics
  6. Introduction: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics
  7. 1. Making the Defective Class
  8. 2. The Carcerality of Eugenics
  9. 3. The Political Economy of Carceral Eugenics
  10. 4. From Maternalist Care to Anti-eugenics
  11. 5. Menacing the Present
  12. Epilogue: Abolishing Carceral Eugenics
  13. Notes
  14. Bibliography
  15. Index