About

Dr. Whatcott is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an affiliate of LGBTQ+ Studies, the Center for Comics Studies, and the Digital Humanities Initiative at San Diego State University. They teach undergraduate and graduate classes in US history, feminist disability studies, prison abolition, and trans studies. They hold a PhD in Politics, with emphases in Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, from University of California Santa Cruz. Dr. Whatcott has co-chaired the Critical Disability Studies Caucus of American Studies Association since 2020.

Dr. Whatcott studies carceral and eugenicist state violence in jails/prisons, institutions for disability confinement, migrant detention centers, and other eugenics programs. Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics, which theorizes incarceration and disability institutionalization as on-going practices of state-sponsored eugenics, is out from Duke University Press. Looking historically at the early twentieth century development of the policy of “segregation” (institutionalization) in California, the book examines state hospitals, state homes for the feeble-minded, reform schools, and reformatories for girls and women from the turn of the century to World War II. Drawing on archival, public policy, literary, visual, and museum research, the manuscript theorizes carceral eugenics and makes links with current practices within the criminal legal system. The book uncovers how disabled, mad, neurodivergent, and queer people locked California institutions enacted abolitionist practices of anti-eugenics in the decades before organized self-advocacy and psych survivors movements.

Elsewhere, Dr. Whatcott has written about speculative fiction, including the stories of Octavia Butler (and here) and Ursula K. Le Guin, television shows like Orphan Black, and comics. Dr. Whatcott argues that pop culture is a site for political education about state violence, eugenics, and neoliberal precarity — past and present. They locate in speculative creations both a diagnosis of “the crisis” and the imagination of transformative abolitionist queer and crip futures.

Dr. Whatcott has been an abolitionist organizer for over 20 years. From 2003-2011, they were part of the Bar None collective working in solidarity with people incarcerated in far north California. They worked with youth to dismantle zero tolerance policies at schools. They were part of groups/communities responding to sexual violence and learned about the principles and practices of transformative justice. They contributed briefly to Sin Barras (Santa Cruz) and Decarcerate Alameda. From 2020-2024, they were part of the Detention Resistance collective and Free Them All San Diego working in accompaniment with people detained in the borderlands of southern California. They are excited to be part of the revival of Bar None, this time in San Diego.

Dr. Whatcott’s teaching, research, and organizing is shaped by their identities as a white, queer, nonbinary, neurodivergent person with invisible impairments/chronic illness, from a working-class family and a religious, politically conservative community.