Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Humanities: Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture

Reader 1

Andrew Aisenberg

Reader 2

Gabriela Morales

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2026 Violet M Neal

Abstract

This thesis argues that contemporary U.S. healthcare functions as a carceral formation in which “care” routinely becomes custody. Utilizing crip theory, disability justice, and Foucauldian genealogy, it traces how hospitals and public health institutions continue to produce disability as a category of deviance rather than responding to pre‑existing bodily conditions. Through historical case studies of the Kalihi Hospital and Receiving Station in Hawai‘i, the American Plan’s social hygiene campaign beginning in WWI, the HIV/AIDS crisis and its criminalization of illness, and present‑day practices within the U.S. Medical‑Industrial Complex, the project shows how surveillance, quarantine, and criminal law intertwine to mark certain bodies—those racialized, disabled, low-income, queer, and gender‑nonconforming—as dangerous and therefore legitimately subject to confinement. Disability emerges here as a state‑produced category of danger, organized around explicit norms of capacity, productivity, and respectability. The thesis concludes by examining how institutional memory serves as a technology that stabilizes hospitals’ moral authority, obscuring this history of carceral care. In response, it draws on abolition medicine and healing justice to argue that genuine care requires refusing the institutional logics which tie support to punishment and autonomy to normativity, and instead dares to imagine crip futures grounded in interdependence rather than control.

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