Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I'd like to welcome you to the thirty-fourth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I'm conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.
My guest today is Megan Dean. Megan is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at Georgetown University. A feminist philosopher, Megan is interested in twentieth-century European philosophy, especially Foucauldian theory and phenomenology, as well as bioethics and philosophy of science. Megan’s research focuses on theories of the body and embodiment, with a particular emphasis currently on eating and food. She lives in Washington, D.C. with two lovely roommates, and enjoys reading and watching sci fi, dancing, and eating vegetarian food.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Megan! You have an eclectic philosophical background. Tell our readers and listeners about the history of your philosophical present and what motivated you to do a Ph.D. in philosophy.
Thanks Shelley! I’m honoured to participate in this series.
I did my undergraduate degree in both the rather analytic Philosophy department at Dalhousie University and the thoroughly interdisciplinary Contemporary Studies Programme at University of King’s College. They’re both in Halifax, Nova Scotia, near where I’m from.
Because I was trying to make sense of Derrida at the same time as I was trying to make sense of Quine, I was sort of forced to straddle the analytic-continental divide, though at the time, I didn’t quite realize that there was a divide or that I was expected to stay on one side of it or the other. I remember asking questions about Heidegger in a class on twentieth-century Anglo-American Philosophy and using Lyotard in an essay for a (mostly) analytic feminist philosophy course. I also recall one professor telling me that what was happening at King’s wasn’t really Philosophy, which I found profoundly confusing given that we read Plato, Descartes, and Wittgenstein at both schools. Luckily, however, most of my professors were supportive of my “transgressions,” even when they weren’t able to help me sort things through because their own educations had kept them on one side or the other.
Near the end of my undergrad degree, I was introduced to feminist Foucauldian work through Cressida Heyes’s essay “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers.” Having struggled with dieting since I was young, Heyes’s work was a real revelation to me. It made me realize that philosophy could help me understand my own, very personal, embodied experiences, including why I was so unhappy with my body and constantly anxious about eating. I had been fascinated by the “big” questions that philosophy grapples with—such as whether there is beauty or goodness or truth out there and, if so, whether we can access them. But it was this more personal feminist work that lead me to pursue graduate education in philosophy. I wanted to do work like that, not just read it.
I was lucky enough to do my M.A. in Philosophy at University of Alberta and work with Dr. Heyes. At the time, the Philosophy Department at U of A was an excellent place to study Foucault and feminist theory. I was welcomed into a community of feminist philosophers, many of whom continue to inspire, support, and encourage me in my work. I enjoy the (often isolated) work of research and writing, and untangling philosophical knots on my own; but, knowing that this sort of vibrant, supportive, and engaged intellectual community is possible in academia cemented my interest in pursuing an academic career.
I’m now writing my dissertation in the Philosophy Department at Georgetown University. I came to Georgetown with the aims of expanding my theoretical repertoire to other theories of embodiment, especially phenomenology and of learning more about bioethics.
Following my M.A., I had worked as a research assistant on a project that used phenomenological theory to interpret queer women’s experiences with health care. The work on this project sparked my interest in using theoretical tools to help us understand health-care experiences and improve health-care practice, as well as my sparked my desire to learn more about the field of bioethics in general.
While at Georgetown, I’ve made use of coursework and a summer school to ground myself in phenomenology and bioethics. I’m now pursuing a dissertation project that engages with Foucauldian, phenomenological, and bioethical theory. So far so good! Luckily, Georgetown is a very pluralist department, and there are several professors here whose own work models the sort of pluralist and interdisciplinary work that I am interested in doing. So, I feel well supported here in that respect.
[Description of photo below: A smiling Megan is standing on a rocky surface at the top of a waterfall that flows between tree-covered mountains. At the centre of the shot, the bottom of the waterfall can be seen in the distance. A patch of cloudy sky can also be seen in the shot.]
As I indicated in your bio, your philosophical interests revolve around aspects of bodies—how we use them, engage with them, and so forth. What do you think are the most interesting questions posed and issues addressed at present in the philosophical study of the body and bodies? What work in the area do you find most exciting? Most challenging?
The questions that I’m most interested in concern the way that we experience our bodies: How does a person come to experience themselves as disabled, as fat, as white, as feminine? How are these experiences produced, reinforced, or altered? Why are some of these experiences taken to be fundamental, natural, or inevitable, and others not taken as such? I’m interested in any thinking that responds to these questions, though my current research focuses specifically on our experiences of ourselves as eaters, especially as healthy or unhealthy, virtuous or unvirtuous eaters.
I’m fascinated by these sorts of questions because it was a profound revelation to me that experiences of our bodies may be contingent and produced, at least in part, through our practices and the systems that structure these practices. I learned about the contingent character of our bodies from feminist theorists such as Sandra Bartky and Susan Bordo, but other thinkers make similar points.
Importantly, I have also learned that understanding experiences in this way doesn’t mean that the experiences aren’t real, nor that we should dismiss them as meaningless or unimportant. Take, for instance, people who are ashamed because their bodies don’t meet normative standards: who feel that their bodies aren’t thin enough, aren’t masculine enough, aren’t able-bodied enough. That shame is real. That pain is real. These affects may be produced through discourses and practices that elevate certain bodies over others, holding people personally responsible for their failure to meet those bodily standards, but the affects are real, nonetheless.
One example that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is taken from Alexis Shotwell’s book Against Purity. Some people experience their bodies as contaminated or impure, which can (among other things) produce a sort of anxious desperation to “cleanse” or “detox” themselves. These affects and experiences are produced, in part, by discourses about ourselves as creatures who could and should be self-contained, non-porous, “pure” individuals, alongside practices like detox dieting and fasting that promise to help us achieve this status.
We may think those discourses are just plain wrong about what human beings are and should aim to be, but that doesn’t mean that the anxiety they produce isn’t real. And it certainly doesn’t mean that knowing “the truth” about our experiences will make them disappear. Once I learned that my self-disgust was produced by patriarchal beauty norms and capitalist forces designed to make me continually spend on beauty products and diets, the self-disgust didn’t just dissolve, which was, truly, very disappointing to me.
That said, understanding experiences in this way does mean that we can relate to them in a different way; we can treat them as something that isn’t necessary and that might be changed. At the very least, understanding experiences in this way enables us to recognize that the problem isn’t just with ourselves and that “fixing” ourselves isn’t the only way to respond to our suffering. I think that’s hopeful. It means that if we can figure out how the experiences are produced, we can work to undermine the ones that we don’t endorse.
That’s one reason why work in this area is so important. Unfortunately, the systems that structure some of our embodied experiences, including capitalism and white supremacy, or, as Ladelle McWhorter discusses in Bodies and Pleasures, sexual normalization, are incredibly well-entrenched. Nonetheless, I think that this way of understanding our experiences is empowering, that is, this understanding of our experiences offers both an empowering way to relate to the experiences and a grounding for useful strategies of resistance to their naturalization.
Another area of work that I’m excited about involves connections between agency and embodiment. In particular, I’m fascinated by the idea that affects, including feelings of comfort and discomfort, are related to and may be integral to agency. For instance, Maureen Sie claims that much of human behaviour is regulated by unconscious automatic processes and that this unconsciously-directed behaviour should not be understood as mere reflex, but as an integral part of human agency. Sie argues that such behaviour is guided by an unconscious perception of social cues about what is acceptable and unacceptable, expected and unexpected in given contexts. Through engagement with different spaces and practices, we learn—or perhaps, “absorb”—the normative expectations for what is appropriate in those contexts. Once we do that, according to Sie, we are able to move smoothly through these contexts without having to deliberate about what to do.
I’m still working through what Sie means; but it seems to me that she is describing a process that resembles a process articulated by Sara Ahmed. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed discusses the ways that affects and expectations shape our actions and, thereby, our bodies, so that they “fit” in spaces that are, by and large, shaped for able-bodied, straight, thin, white, cisgender people. For Sie, I think, our capacity to unconsciously absorb and respond to normative cues is simply a positive aspect of our agency. In what I’ve read, she doesn’t seem to consider that the content of the norms that we absorb and then embody might be problematic. But if she’s right, then, as Ahmed describes, the process is a prime location for replication of oppressive behaviours and norms. In any case, I’m really interested in what it means for our agency to be embodied in this way, and what sorts of responsibility we might have over our unconsciously-directed actions, given this account.
A few years ago, Megan, I was in the audience for a presentation that you gave in which you used Foucault to talk about food and anorexia. Does the presentation that I heard relate to your current work on agency, eating, and healthism?
Yes, it does. One section of my dissertation is an intervention into mainstream bioethical debates about healthy eating policies. In these discussions, eating is sometimes characterized as either a way for individuals to exercise autonomy, where autonomy is understood in quite traditional terms, or a way to produce experiences with cultural, hedonic, or other kinds of value. An example of this sort of discussion can be found in an article by Anne Barnhill and co-authors entitled “The Value of Unhealthy Eating and the Ethics of Healthy Eating Policies.”
Understanding eating in either of these ways is useful insofar as it enables us to criticize the widespread assumption that eating is centrally a means of promoting health, and that governments and institutions are ethically justified in promoting healthy eating whenever possible. These alternate understandings of eating suggest that it may not be ethically justifiable to interfere in an individual’s autonomous eating, even if it is unhealthy, and that highly valuable eating should also be protected, however unhealthy it may be.
A Foucauldian understanding of eating, like the one that Chloë Taylor articulates in her paper “Foucault and the Ethics of Eating,” suggests that these ways of understanding eating are partial, at best. Taylor argues that eating is what Foucault calls a “practice of the self,” an activity wherein a person takes aspects of herself—maybe her thoughts, emotions, or desires—as an object to be worked on, with the aim of making herself into a certain sort of self: a happy self, a morally good self, a good citizen, and so on. To say that eating is a practice of the self is not to say that eating necessarily shapes us in the way that we expect or hope when we take up a particular diet. Detox dieting isn’t going to make you pure, after all. The point, rather, is that eating does have profound effects on the self; and eating in different ways can produce different sorts of selves.
Part of what I’m trying to do in my dissertation is flesh out this account of eating and articulate its implications for healthy eating policies and interventions. I suggest that understanding eating in this sense means that eating can be a way to exercise agency but also is part of what shapes agency; it may be a way to produce valuable experiences but also shapes what can and does have value for the eater. Eating and eater are in a reciprocal relationship. If that’s right, an eating policy may not only prevent someone from exercising their autonomy or preclude them from having a valuable eating experience, but it may also have long-term effects on their agency, and what they can and do value.
The paper that you heard me present is a critique of some research on vegetarianism and eating disorders. This research suggests that for many young women, vegetarianism is either a significant risk factor or a “cover” for eating disorders like anorexia. I argue that these studies assume a view of eating that is very similar to one represented in the bioethical debate that I just mentioned. These studies implicitly characterize eating as something that should be an intentional expression of one’s considered values and goals, or, in other words, an exercise of autonomy. If one’s eating does not meet these criteria, then it is a sign of compromised agency, likely caused by pathology. Some of the studies recommend that practitioners and family members closely surveil and scrutinize vegetarians, as well as demand that vegetarians, especially young women who are vegetarians, give reasons for their dietary choices.
I suggest that the studies promote a narrative that pathologizes and discredits vegetarians and can damage agency in significant ways. By insisting that vegetarians defend their dietary choices, these studies assume that legitimate eating is necessarily reflective of a set of values that already exists. Drawing on a Foucauldian account of eating, I argue that a vegetarian might be in the process of creating new values through her eating. She may not be able to give these values as reasons because they are not yet fully formed; but this does not mean her eating agency is compromised, or pathological.
The way that these studies undermine vegetarian diets is especially disconcerting in the context of feminist analyses of eating disorders. Susan Bordo has argued that eating disorders, disordered eating, and weight-loss dieting are on a continuum. If that’s true, one way to resist the dominance of weight-loss dieting and thereby, also, some eating disorders, is to cultivate other ways of eating. Ethical vegetarianism is probably one of the best-established, secular ways of eating that takes an explicitly moral and political relationship to food. By encouraging skepticism about vegetarianism and undermining people in the process of experimenting with the vegetarian diet, the aforementioned studies undercut the growing legitimacy and validity of this alternate way of eating, and with it, new forms of selves. Or, at least, that’s what I argued when I gave that paper a few years ago! I’ll be updating the argument for my dissertation.
You are the founder and past coordinator of Diversifying Syllabi. Please tell our readers and listeners about this project, its aims, and its purposes.
Diversifying Syllabi is a summer reading group that I started with other grad students from the Graduate Student Coalition for Gender Diversity in Philosophy at Georgetown. It’s now co-sponsored by the Georgetown chapter of Minorities in Philosophy. We’d read articles that suggested that the lack of diversity on intro-level Philosophy syllabi was a barrier to diversity in the profession and realized that if we wanted to diversify our own teaching, we’d first have to diversify our own reading. Many of us in the group have had fairly traditional educations, without much opportunity to read outside the canon. So, we started Diversifying Syllabi to give ourselves the opportunity to read more widely.
Since the summer of 2014, we’ve met every two weeks throughout July and August to discuss texts written by diverse authors and on diverse topics in Philosophy. Our focus is really on how to incorporate these texts in our teaching because, at Georgetown, Philosophy graduate students are employed as teaching assistants for their first three years of study, and from then on, they work as primary instructors. We also created a website to distribute our readings lists and teaching tips—handouts with summaries of the texts that we read and ideas for teaching them—to provide a resource for others in the profession. It’s been a fun way to discover new work, discuss pedagogy with each other, and keep our philosophical community going over the summer months. It’s a fairly small thing to do, given the many ways that diverse students and practitioners are excluded or discouraged from participating in Philosophy; but, it’s something that is useful in its own way, and well within our power as grad students and instructors to do.
You currently coordinate accessibility for events at Georgetown. How did you become involved in this work and why do you do it?
I’m currently a pre-doctoral fellow with the Mellon Sawyer seminar “Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change.” My responsibilities include helping to organize academic events like symposiums and talks. I’ve been to a fair number of conferences and talks, some of whose organizers didn’t make any effort regarding accessibility and others which, like the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy, have made accessibility central to the conference planning. I have appreciated and benefitted from the approach that CSWIP has taken toward accessibility, and it was important to me that the seminar take a similarly proactive approach. I think accessibility in the academy is fundamentally about equality and justice, but it is also very much in the interest of the relevance, quality, and vibrancy of academia to ensure that folks are not deterred from attending and participating in academic events due to inaccessibility.
The organizers of the seminar have been very supportive in this endeavour. We’ve ensured that all our events are physically accessible—not a simple task on the Georgetown campus, unfortunately—and set aside resources for other accommodations, like ASL interpretation and childcare. I have also been working on ways to make the food more accessible by ensuring that we always have vegan options, for instance. We can also accommodate other dietary preferences or needs, by request. I know the “accommodation by request” model is far from ideal. Many folks often don’t decide if they’re attending until shortly before an event. We need to arrange for interpreters or order the catering in advance, so our ability to respond to day of, or even week of, requests is highly limited. I’m always seeking out ways to improve and would very much appreciate any suggestions that readers and listeners might have in that regard.
While I have been politically committed to accessibility for many years now, my recent experiences with chronic pain have given me a more personal perspective on the importance of accessibility in academia.
I’ve had back pain on and off for years; but, I have been dealing with fairly significant pain on a daily basis for over a year. This time last year, I couldn’t sneeze without excruciating pain. My pain is less severe now; but it is still with me daily. It’s made me acutely aware that academia requires long periods of sitting still, often in uncomfortable and unsupportive chairs. I can’t sit for more than forty-five minutes without pain and discomfort, nor can I stand in one spot for long, which seems to be the other traditional academic posture.
Receptions at talks or conferences are particularly challenging for me, since sitting is often seen as rude or anti-social—that is, if places to sit are even available—and standing makes my back seize up. I’ve taken to carrying tennis balls with me everywhere I go so that I can use them to release my back muscles while sitting. I’ve gotten some odd looks from seat-mates on planes for that. I have also had to change my writing habits to accommodate my pain. I used to work only at school, but I now work mostly at home, where I am assured of a comfortable chair, access to a heating pad, and can stretch every hour or so.
The past year has brought the dynamic nature of accessibility into focus for me. To manage my pain, sometimes I need to sit, sometimes I need to put my feet up, other times I need to stand or walk, and occasionally I need to lie on the floor. I once had the privilege of hearing a lecture by Lydia Brown, a disability activist and Georgetown grad, who invited us all to move around, stand up, sit on the floor, or leave the classroom during their lecture if we needed to. Having been disciplined into sitting still and causing as little disruption as possible in the classroom, I could not bring myself to take them up on their offer, but I appreciated having that option open to us. One of my goals is to become comfortable moving around in academic spaces, and to create a space where others might feel comfortable doing the same. It is very hard to shake off one’s disciplinary training, but I am hopeful I can do it!
As a bit of an aside (though one that I think your readers/listeners might be interested in), I only recently started identifying as someone with chronic pain. I always related to my pain as something that would pass with time, rather than something with which I was going to learn to live. Over the past year, the pain has been the worst it has ever been, which I am sure has contributed to my change in self-description.
However, the central factor that led me to change my self-description has been my interactions with the insurance company. Physiotherapy has been crucial to managing my pain, but I have limited coverage for it. I had to write a personal letter to the insurance company in which I described my pain in intimate detail and requested that I be permitted to see a physiotherapist for more than the pre-approved number of visits. Writing that letter made me realize how bad the pain was, how much it had changed my day-to-day life, and how difficult it had made my work. Writing the letter also made me realize that the pain wasn’t going to go away anytime soon, that it was something with which I had to learn to live. Unfortunately, the insurance company rejected my request. Somewhat ironically, I was told by someone helping me appeal that decision that I had been too “business-like” and “rational” in describing my pain, which probably contributed to their denial of my request. They wanted me to sound more pathetic, I guess.
Megan, would you like to make any closing remarks or recommend some books, articles, or other resources on the topics that you’ve discussed in this interview?
Thanks again for inviting me to be a part of this wonderful series, Shelley!
Folks can learn more about Diversifying Syllabi and peruse our reading lists at our website here: http://diversifyingsyllabi.weebly.com/
If any of your readers/listeners are in the D.C. area, they are warmly invited to this semester’s Approaching the Anthropocene events, including a talk by Kyle Powys Whyte on January 31st, and a day-long symposium called “How Should We Eat?” on February 9th. You can find info about these events and all our events here.
Finally, here are titles and embedded links to books and articles that I mentioned throughout the interview: Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; Anne Barnhill et als. “The Value of Unhealthy Eating and the Ethics of Healthy Eating Policies”; Cressida Heyes, “Foucault goes to Weight Watchers,” which is also available in her book Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies; Maureen Sie, “Moral Agency, Conscious Control, and Deliberative Awareness,” and “Self-Knowledge and the Minimal Conditions of Responsibility: A Traffic-Participation View on Human (Moral) Agency”; Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity; and Chloë Taylor, “Foucault and the Ethics of Eating.”
Megan, thank you very much for these valuable recommendations and for your very interesting remarks throughout this interview. I am sure that many disabled graduate students have found them pertinent to their own situations and that faculty have also benefitted from them.
Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Megan Dean’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated.
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Please join me here again on Wednesday, February 21st at 8 a.m. EST, for the thirty-fifth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at [email protected]. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.
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