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Michelle Velasquez-Potts

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Michelle Velasquez-Potts

Assistant Professor

Michelle Velasquez-Potts received a Ph.D. in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Santa Clara University. Her research areas include feminist and queer theory, science and technology studies, carceral studies, and disability studies. She has also taught courses exploring LGBTQ issues, visual culture, protest and activism, and Latinx studies. Outside of academia, she has collaborated on resources about carceral abolition. Disability justice and abolitionist praxis guide her work inside and outside the classroom.

Her monograph, Suspended Animation: The Rise of Force-Feeding in Carceral Times (under contract with the University of North Carolina Press) examines how state power makes specific use of the feeding tube and the practice of force-feeding to control both bodily life and death among incarcerated people.