Book ID: CBB657227885

Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (2024)

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Whatcott, Jess (Author)


Duke University Press


Publication Date: 2024
Physical Details: 248
Language: English

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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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB657227885/

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Authors & Contributors
Dyck, Erika
Harris, Ben
Hogan, Andrew J.
Holmes, Martha Stoddard
Huff, Joyce L.
Leng, Kirsten
Journals
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Gender and History
History of Psychology
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Spontaneous Generations
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Publishers
Johns Hopkins University Press
University of Toronto Press
Cambridge University Press
University of California, Santa Cruz
Bloomsbury Academic
Brandeis University Press
Concepts
Disabilities; disability; accessibility
Disability studies
Mental disorders and diseases
Eugenics
Psychiatric hospitals
Public health
People
Francis of Assisi
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century
21st century
20th century, late
18th century
Places
California (U.S.)
United States
Great Britain
Massachusetts (U.S.)
New York (U.S.)
Europe
Institutions
Stanford University
National Institute of Health (U.S.)
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