Some of you might be interested in the presentation that I gave in a session on Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability held as part of the 2018 philoSOPHIA conference that took place at University of Richmond last weekend. Devonya Havis, Melinda Hall, and Lauren Guilmette also presented in the session, making very generous remarks about the book and my work in general.
Presentation on Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability
by
Shelley Tremain
Annual Conference of philoSOPHIA,
University of Richmond,
March 24, 2018.
Before I begin, let me say that I’m very pleased to have this opportunity to discuss my book on a panel that comprises feminist philosophers for whom I have the utmost respect and admiration. I feel quite humbled by Melinda Hall’s introductory comments about the book and I’m extremely grateful to Melinda for generously proposing the session. I am also very grateful to Devonya Havis and Lauren Guilmette, who enthusiastically agreed to participate on the panel. Thanks, as always, to Ladelle McWhorter who’s organized a terrific conference with Abhi Ruparelia’s assistance and who, with Abhi, made it possible for me to join you.
In my remarks today, I want to offer a broad outline of the book, provide some indication of what motivated me to write a book about feminist philosophy of disability, and explain why I used Michel Foucault to accomplish this task.
Generally speaking, I had two central aims in the book: first, to explain how the conception of disability that philosophers currently assume naturalizes contingent social power relations and, second, to identify the relation between the claims that philosophers produce about disability and the composition of the profession, that is, to show how philosophical claims that assume a certain conception of disability are inextricably entwined with the exclusion of disabled philosophers from adequate employment in the profession. To make my case for this thesis, I advanced the arguments of the book within two distinct but interrelated spheres of analysis: a reconstructive-conceptual sphere and a metaphilosophical sphere (as I refer to them).
In the reconstructive-conceptual sphere, I critically assess theories and models that variously construe disability as a prediscursive, transhistorical, and transcultural human characteristic, difference, or attribute and, in addition, I put forward an alternative understanding of disability as an apparatus of power, an understanding inspired primarily by Foucault. In the metaphilosophical sphere, I identify some of the mechanisms and tactics that produce both the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession and the marginalization of critical philosophical work on disability in the discipline, drawing upon (among other things) empirical findings about the dire employment situation of disabled philosophers, as well as pointing out the ableist gaps and assumptions that condition discussions about epistemic injustice, diversity, and underrepresentation that have circulated in both feminist and mainstream philosophy journals, on philosophy blogs, and elsewhere. The work that I did in both spheres builds upon and extends claims that I’ve previously published in various journal articles and book chapters (e.g., Tremain, 2001, 2006, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015).
One reviewer of the proposal for the book wrote in their report to LeAnn Fields, my editor at the University of Michigan Press, that insofar as I proposed to develop both these lines of argument, I aimed, unrealistically, to do too much, that I had in effect proposed two separate books. The reviewer thus recommended that I confine the focus of the book in question to the sort of conceptual work on impairment and disability that I introduced in my article, “On the Government of Disability.”
I resisted this recommendation because, at the time, I suspected (and now firmly believe) that the phenomena of the two spheres are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing. The task that I set out for myself, therefore, was to articulate a compelling argument in the book that would demonstrate a causal relation between the conception of disability that predominates in the discipline of philosophy and the demographics of the profession of philosophy; that is, I aimed to articulate an argument that would demonstrate that the medicalizing, deficit conception of disability that prevails in philosophy, according to which disability is a prediscursive and hence philosophically uninteresting fact-of-the-matter, facilitates and sustains the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in fulltime faculty positions, while the continued lack of disabled faculty in the profession simultaneously ensures the persistence of this state of affairs.
Needless to say, the ubiquity of ableism in both the discipline and profession of philosophy, including in feminist philosophy, afforded me a substantial body of discouraging information with which to accomplish the task of elaborating an argument on the relation between prevailing philosophical assumptions about disability and the virtual exclusion of disabled people from the profession of philosophy. Thus, for example, a critique of the ableist conception of disability that circulates in contemporary feminist philosophy provides the impetus for my claims in the fourth chapter of the book. As I demonstrate in the chapter, a pervasive lack of knowledge about critical work on disability has led to misunderstandings of Foucault’s insights about abnormality and hence uninformed charges of sexism against him, as well as dismissals of work by me and other disabled feminist philosophers of disability who draw upon his claims.
In the first chapter, I introduce the argument that the metaphysical and epistemological status of disability remains largely naturalized in philosophy, including in feminist philosophy. My aim in the reconstructive-conceptual sphere therefore was two-fold: first, to undermine the philosophical assumptions that naturalize impairment and disability; and second, to expand upon the antifoundationalist, nominalist conception of disability that I previously advanced. In my view, Foucault’s insights offer the most sophisticated and most politically and philosophically astute tools with which to denaturalize and debiologize disability in these ways, especially his understanding of power as productive rather than merely repressive.
To initiate my argument, I used Foucault’s insights about the problematization of phenomena, that is, how certain phenomena come into being as problems, emerge into discourse and social existence as these sorts of things. This insight enabled me to concern myself throughout the book with the problematization of disability and its naturalized foundation, impairment, that is, with the emergence of disability as a problem of a certain kind, a problem to which certain solutions have been posed. Let me point out here that I do not offer explicitly normative proposals in the book; that is, I was not concerned to advance normative responses to disability. Rather, I was concerned to chart a genealogy of the apparatus of disability and its naturalization in philosophy and in bioethics in particular, to illuminate the political character of the naturalization of disability, and to indicate the role that the naturalization of disability serves in contemporary eugenics, what Foucault referred to as “racism against the abnormal”.
In chapters one through four, especially, therefore, I historicize and relativize the categories of impairment and disability by drawing upon Foucault’s insights about racism against the abnormal, genealogy, and biopower; Ladelle McWhorter’s genealogy of racism and sexual oppression; Jesse Prinz’s claims about historical contingency; Dorothy Roberts’s work to debiologize social categories; David Wong’s arguments in support of relativism; and Ian Hacking’s insights about styles of reasoning and the classification of normality; as well as my own claims about (what I call) the diagnostic style of reasoning. In short, I historicize and relativize the categories of impairment and disability by historicizing and relativizing the category of the normal, arguing that when the category of the normal is historicized and relativized, any category—such as disability—whose identity is established through departure from the normal must itself be recognized as historically contingent and relative.
Although my arguments in these chapters were designed to show the historically contingent and culturally specific character of the categories of impairment and disability, many of these arguments are, nevertheless, pertinent to other social categories.
As I have indicated, in the first chapter of the book, I assert that disability is an apparatus of power rather than a prediscursive human characteristic or a difference or a form of social oppression. Foucault described an “apparatus” as a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, everyday practices, administrative decisions, moral principles, institutions, and so on that responds to an urgent need in a certain historical moment. My claim that disability is an apparatus of power, in Foucault’s sense, relies on his insight that power is immanent in and generative of discursive objects and practices upon which it acts rather than external to them. This presupposition, that is, the presupposition according to which power is immanent in and produces the apparatus of disability, sets my philosophy of disability apart from the work of most other philosophers and theorists of disability. Indeed, the claim that power is productive of the apparatus of disability and its naturalized foundation, impairment, is vital for the argument about bioethics as a technology of government that I make in the fifth chapter of the book.
Through my efforts to historicize and relativize the apparatus of disability, I implicitly offer a response to the concern that some disability theorists have expressed according to which Foucault’s work is unsuitable for disability theory because, among other things, his arguments about the discursive construction of the body effectively eliminate the materiality of the body. In chapter three I point out that, with few exceptions, philosophers of disability and disability theorists who are critical of Foucault’s approach to the constitution of the body invoke the materiality of pain in order to argue that at least some aspects of impairment are essentially bad, are not socially constructed nor artifacts of discourse, but rather are fundamental features of disabled people’s lives that disability theory ought to address.
Although my position on pain is not fully developed in the book, in the first chapter I point out that philosophers tend to appeal to pleasure and pain and other supposedly prediscursive biological phenomena in order to discount relativism; furthermore, in chapter three, I incorporate my thoughts on pain into a general response about the allegedly prediscursive, transhistorical, and transcultural character of human drives, emotions, sensations, and aesthetic experiences. I have tentative plans to more closely consider the historicity and cultural specificity of pain in a project that examines how impairment and disability are constituted in the subfields of cognitive science and experimental philosophy.
Questions about the appropriate method that philosophers of disability should use to study the apparatus of disability run throughout the book, get asked in various ways, and responded to with a variety of approaches. How is disability to be known? How is disability to be investigated? How are its manifestations to be identified and evaluated? Is ableism a form of epistemological ignorance? Does disability discrimination circulate primarily through the production of implicit biases? How much work can the idea of epistemic injustice do for philosophers of disability? Should philosophers of disability continue to align themselves with bioethicists? Should philosophers of disability continue to work to change the way that bioethicists understand disability? All the aforementioned questions, among others, are implicitly and explicitly addressed in the book.
In the last sections of the first chapter, for example, I address some of these epistemological and methodological questions in order to explain why the approach that I take in the book does not follow the formula that other philosophers of disability have used. For example, I argue that although Miranda Fricker’s claims about epistemic injustice may be useful for philosophers of disability, they should not be adopted uncritically. As I point out, for instance, Fricker, in order to substantiate her claims about hermeneutical injustice, relies upon an ableist distinction between epistemic disadvantages that arise from bad luck and epistemic disadvantages that arise from injustice. I also argue that although some philosophers of disability have drawn on the idea of epistemologies of ignorance to explain the systemic refusal to address disability, the idea of an epistemology of ignorance is ableist and elitist. I point out, furthermore, that the substantial body of work on implicit biases that feminist and other philosophers have produced is both methodologically contestable and, time and again, explicitly excludes analysis of disability.
The question of whether philosophers of disability should situate their work within bioethics is introduced in the first chapter and is a central focus of the fifth chapter, in which I argue that bioethics is a technology of government, an academic discipline that provides intellectual resources for racism against the abnormal, as Foucault referred to it. Foucault argued that modern racism is not preoccupied with discrimination or oppression on the basis of skin colour, culture, or religion per se, but rather whether one is normal or abnormal. To say that bioethics is a technology of government, a mechanism of racism against the abnormal is thus to say that bioethics is a fundamental mechanism in the repeated articulation and elaboration of the distinction between the normal and the abnormal. Indeed, bioethics, I argue, is a product of biopower, operating in the service of normalization of the population.
How, then, should philosophers of disability approach bioethicists and their work? In which direction should philosophers of disability, feminist bioethicists, and other critical thinkers in close relation to bioethical theory move once they acknowledge that the subfield of bioethics is a technology of government? Since the claims of disabled philosophers of disability are usually delegitimized as interested, partial, and subjective, my responses to these questions in the fifth chapter put into relief the entwinement of the metaphilosophical sphere of my analysis in the book and the book’s reconstructive-conceptual sphere of analysis.
In the fifth chapter, I offer one suggestion to the question of which direction should be taken with future work in the area. My suggestion uses genealogy as a method to interrogate the biopolitical character of bioethics (see Tremain 2006, 2010). I assert that if analyses of prenatal testing and screening were to shift their emphasis to governmentality, that is, if theoretical analyses of these practices were redirected from their current location in the realm of bioethics and situated within the domain of biopolitics, the starting point of inquiry could shift from argumentative claims that take the impaired fetus as a natural kind to a thick description of the administrative, medical, prenatal, scientific, and discursive constitution of impairment by and through these technologies of normalization. Roberts, for one, has been engaged in work of this kind for quite some time now, especially with respect to the naturalization of race and gender (for example, see Roberts 1998, 2012).
In general, however, I am inclined to think that it is much too early in these biopolitical struggles to recommend normative conclusions and end points to which we should aim. In fact, as I indicated earlier, I avoid doing so in the book for this reason, among others. A great deal of work lies ahead for us in order that we can explain what it means to identify bioethics as a technology of government; in order that we can elaborate what we require to investigate the ways that bioethics operates as a normalizing discourse in the service of neoliberalism; and in order that we can understand the extent to which neoliberal governmentality is productive of philosophy more generally at present. Indeed, I suspect that adequate identification, investigation, and understanding of bioethics as a technology of neoliberal government will require that we considerably revise, if not completely rewrite, ideas according to which philosophy is first and foremost a domain of intellectual inquiry. In the spirit of Foucault, I suggest that additional histories of the present, that is, genealogies of the current techniques, values, strategies, and tactics of bioethics, in particular, and of philosophy, in general, should be regarded as vital tools in the endeavour to show how the subfield of bioethics and increasingly philosophy itself operate as normalizing technologies of neoliberalism.
Let me reiterate that one of my central aims in writing Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability was to explain how the conception of disability that predominates in philosophy, according to which disability is a naturally disadvantageous human characteristic, attribute, or difference, is inextricably implicated in the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession of philosophy and the marginalization of philosophy of disability in the discipline. I would be dismayed if readers and listeners of the book were to neglect the mutually constitutive character of the two spheres of analysis that shape it, focusing exclusively on the work that I do in one sphere or the other. I hope, therefore, that the pressing concerns that I point out with respect to both the demographics of philosophy and the naturalized conception of disability that currently conditions the discipline and profession of philosophy will inform our discussion today.
Thanks very much for your attention and your interest in my book.
References
Roberts, Dorothy E. 2012. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: The New Press.
Roberts, Dorothy. 1998. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage Books.
Tremain, Shelley L. 2017. Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Tremain, Shelley. 2015. This is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like. Foucault Studies 19 June, 7-42.
Tremain, Shelley. 2014. Disabling Philosophy. The Philosophers’ Magazine (TPM) 65 (2): 15-17.
Tremain, Shelley. 2013. Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Disability Studies Quarterly 33 (4). Special issue: Improving Feminist Philosophy and Theory by Taking Account of Disability.
Tremain, Shelley. 2010. Biopower, Styles of Reasoning, and What’s Still Missing from the Stem Cell Debates. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25 (3): 577-609.
Tremain, Shelley. 2006. Reproductive Freedom, Self-regulation, and the Government of Impairment in Utero. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21 (1): 35-53.
Tremain, Shelley. 2001. On the Government of Disability. Social Theory and Practice 27 (4): 617-636.
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