Menace to the Future

“Menace to the Future clearly and accessibly shows that institutionalization is (racialized and gendered/queered) disablement, detention is eugenics, and reproductive justice and abolition are key to liberation. Constructing an original anti-eugenic archive, Jess Whatcott provides an indispensable intersectional analysis of carceral eugenics that cannot be unthought once read. To truly understand why reproductive justice means abolishing confinement and/as carceral eugenics (as Whatcott calls segregation based on biological traits), you need this book in your activist and scholarly toolbox.” - Liat Ben-Moshe, author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

“In this illuminating and incisive book, Jess Whatcott makes sophisticated and potent arguments about eugenics and carcerality, showing how the early twentieth-century institutionalization of people was just as much eugenics as it was sterilization and other forms of biopolitical control. This outstanding book, sustained by a lush combination of archival research and critical analysis, is a welcome and searing addition to scholarship on eugenics, the carceral state, reproductive justice, and disability capitalism.” - Alexandra Minna Stern, author of Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination

"Menace to the Future raises fundamental questions for both historical methodology and contemporary activism. It is an important contribution to the study of carceral eugenics in both past and present." - Beans Velocci, Catalyst

"Whatcott’s book is thoughtprovoking. It forces us to define what and where we think eugenics is, past and present, and will find eager readership in upper-level women’s studies seminars and graduate classes." - Tina A. Irvine, American Historical Review