2025 Workshop

Liat Ben-Moshe

Associate Professor, Criminology, Law and Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago

Resisting Carceral Eugenics and Forging Palestinian Futures

Futurity, and the attempt to thwart it for Palestinians, plays a key role in Israeli regime of settler colonialism, occupation and militarized and administrative violence. In addition to the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing and displacement, preventing Palestinian futurity is also done through means of incarceration and debilitation. 

Instead of perceiving ‘women and children and the disabled’ as ‘collateral damage’ of occupation and militarized colonialism of Palestine, I take these concepts and populations as the core of the analysis.  Under this framework, targeting reproduction (social, material, maternal) is seen as a core feature of settler colonialism and incarceration.

In their recent book “Menace to the future” feminist disability studies scholar Jess Whatcott conceptualizes carceral eugenics as “a concept that analyzes how state confinement functions to control the reproduction and life chances of groups of people who have been deemed biologically undesirable.” Meaning, that even absent direct sterilization, state confinement is a form of eugenics or preventing reproduction and futurity. Connecting it to Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s extensive work on unchilding and to the work of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and black feminists in the US, clarifies that incarceration is a targeted biopolitical tool of genocide and a feminist reproduction issue. 

What I add to the discussion is the analytical frame of feminist disability studies and abolition in understanding how incarceration and its resistance operates. This talk (based on a larger book in progress) builds on what I previously called racial criminal pathologization – a cradle to death surveillance, criminalization and pathologization not for (supposedly wrong) doing but for being. This makes incarceration (of indigenous and communities of color) a eugenicist practice at the core of settler colonialism (elsewhere I discuss this as oriental-sanism, rendering Palestinians as inherently backwards, mad, unwell as a settler colonial practice). 

In addition, Sde Teiman and other current Israeli military prisons show what I demonstrated was true for all prisons - they are disabling by design and a form of torture. 

After discussing this context and framework, I will focus on forms of resistance to carceral eugenics: the practice of sperm smuggling as a source of literal and symbolic ways to “build the future”; the longstanding embodied resistance practice of hunger strikes and lastly, the abolitionist writing and praxis of Palestinian prisoners (Especially Walid Daqqa, whose recent death in an Israeli prison as a result of deliberate medical neglect demonstrates carceral debilitation and its resistance).  I will connect it to a disability studies analysis of steadfastness (Sumud) and caution from interpretations of these acts that leads to view disabled/mad/ill as either helpless (ableism in the service of calling for action), unavoidable (“everyone in Gaza is disabled”) or exemplary.  

Liat Ben-Moshe is an activist-scholar working at the intersection of incarceration, abolition and disability/madness. She is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020) and co-editor of Disability Incarcerated (2014). For more: www.liatbenmoshe.com