Jess Whatcott, Associate Professor
Office: AL 315 | Phone: (619) 594-2861 | Email: [email protected]
Website | Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Jess Whatcott (they/them) is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies. They are affiliated with the LGBTQ+ Studies program, the Center for Comics Studies, and the Digital Humanities Center. Dr. Whatcott teaches undergraduate courses on gender in U.S. history and introduction to trans studies, as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in feminist disability studies, abolition feminism, and queer comics.
Dr. Whatcott’s book Menace to the Future: A Queer and Disability History of Carceral Eugenics describes how California institutions segregated disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people in the early twentieth century. Dr. Whatcott theorizes that this was a practice of “carceral eugenics,” that is on-going in psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and immigrant detention centers. They have in the past written about representations of institutions, prisons, and eugenics in speculative fiction, focusing on work by Ursula K. LeGuin and Octavia Butler. Dr. Whatcott’s current research examines the history of disability in immigration and border policy in the US.
Dr. Whatcott is a first-generation student graduate of the California State University System (Cal Poly Humboldt, B.A. 2004, M.A. 2011). Dr. Whatcott lectured in the CSU system prior to arriving at San Diego State University.
Whatcott, Jess. “Disability Restriction US Immigration Law: From 1882 to the ‘Final Rule’.” In press at Journal of Law and Social Policy, expected March 2026.
Whatcott, Jess (2025) “’Still A Locked Door’: Mental Health Peer Advocates Remember Those Living in Disability Institutions,” guest blog post, Disability Visibility Project, September 4, 2025.
Whatcott, Jess. (2024). Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Whatcott, Jess and Liat Ben-Moshe. (2021) “Abolishing the Broom Closets in Omelas: Feminist Disability Analysis of Crisis and Precarity.” Feminist Formations. 33:3 (Winter), 1-25.
Whatcott, Jess (2021) “Crip Collectivity Beyond Neoliberal Governance in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 10:1.
Whatcott, Jess (2020). “’We Survived You’: Resisting Eugenicist Imaginaries Through Feminist Speculative Fiction,” in The Future is Unwritten: Representations of Political Resistance and Emancipation in Science Fiction, eds. Judith Grant and Sean Parsons (Maryland: Lexington Books).
- LGBT 333 Introduction to Trans Studies
- LGBT 550 Queering Comics
- WGSS 341A Gender and US History, from Colonization to Abolition
- WGSS 341B Gender and US History, from the Age Imperialism to the Cold War and Beyond
- WGSS 542 Feminist Disability Studies
- WGSS 590 Feminist Thought
- WGSS 608 Body Politics