“The community of philosophers, including feminist philosophers, needs to take responsibility for the ableism of philosophical practice.”
Over the course of the past weekend, a discussion about ableist language took place on my Facebook page. In the original post on which the discussion ensued, I indicated that I have felt increasingly compelled to respond somehow to the ableism that a number of nondisabled philosophers are producing in their work, especially given that some of this work gets a lot of attention from other (non-mainstream) philosophers, is taught to students, and has to some extent set parameters of discussion about diversity in certain venues.
During the past week in particular, as I explained in the Facebook post, I have wrestled with myself about the appropriate mode in which to broach the matter: Should I write a blog post on the subject? Should I put a post about the situation on Facebook? Should I write a journal article about it? Should I try (again) to contact some of the philosophers in question by email?
Several disabled and nondisabled philosophers on my Facebook page took part in the discussion, though I think that, algorithms notwithstanding, many philosophers (and others) on my Facebook page read the discussion as it unfolded. A few nondisabled philosophers encouraged me to write a blog post that provides specific details about ableist language, what it is, its constitutive effects, and so on.
In one comment on the post, Ray Aldred, a disabled philosopher and contributor to Discrimination and Disadvantage, underscored that ableism is ubiquitous in philosophy and that disabled philosophers who aim to resist and undermine it must choose when and where to put their efforts, with the knowledge that most of their attempts to counter ableism and educate other philosophers about how it is reproduced, the forms that it takes, and what can be done to counter it will generally meet resistance of another kind, resistance of an unflinching kind, a resolute, unapologetic, and unaccountable resistance.
Jen Scuro suggested that I take Sara Ahmed’s remarks about “complaint” as a springboard from which to approach the matter, drawing out the burdens that accrue to the complainant in situations in which asymmetrical relations crystallize and have been contested, as well as how distinct institutional and systemic mechanisms reconfigure challenges to accepted practices as complaints, that is, as complaints of a certain kind, namely, as shrill, as idiosyncratic, as illegitimate, negligible.
In another comment on the post, Sally Haslanger offered to contact the philosophers whose work concerned me, to “call in” to these philosophers, to broach the subject with them, pointing out that often the message of allies can be received less defensively than protestations from an aggrieved party.
I considered the comments by Ray, Jen, and Sally, as well as other engaged comments made on the post and additional options suggested in messages sent privately. At the end of the day, however, I felt compelled to write this blog post because I believe that the production of particular instances of ableism in philosophy should be understood as I identify them in the sentence at the top of this post (which, incidentally, ended one of my Facebook comments), namely, as outcomes of the ableism of the wider philosophical community, something for which the community at large should be accountable in some way. For community-wide or, if you prefer, profession-wide, mechanisms that the apparatus of disability has produced and continues to reproduce are constitutive of the violence of ableism and ableist language in philosophy.
Despite the activism and writing about ableist language in philosophy (and ableism in philosophy more generally) that I have done over the course of many years (and that philosophers of disability such as Jen and Melinda Hall do now), two of the philosophers whose work troubles me use very explicit forms of ableist language in very public forums.
How is this (re)production of ableist language possible? Or to put it more directly, how has the philosophical community made possible these very public productions of ableist language?
A partial answer to these questions is surely that the community of philosophers has not objected to the ableist practices of the philosophers in question, but rather has disregarded (or perhaps failed to recognize) their use of ableist language in order to commend other aspects of their work, perhaps thinking that the work is so commendable, that in virtue of this merit, the ableist language employed is somehow nullified or rendered innocuous.
Certainly, the philosophers whose work concerns me in this post can look around the profession and see ableist language implemented virtually everywhere. Indeed, not a week goes by in which I don’t read ableist language at Daily Nous or the Feminist Philosophers blog, in reader comments, in CFPs posted on the latter, and in these blogs' posts themselves, as well as in other philosophical venues on social media, in journal articles, and so on. In effect, the philosophers in question seem merely to have incorporated the community indifference and ableist exceptionism that contribute to the reproduction of the apparatus of disability by and throughout philosophy.
For the persistent indifference to ableism and the inclination to depoliticize disability, both of which run amok in the profession, have effectively given philosophers permission to neglect the research and writing that I and others have done on ableist discursive practices; that is, the philosophical community has condoned the (re)production of ableist language, including in ostensibly transformative discussions regarded as exemplary of the sort of work that philosophers should produce and teach.
For quite some time now, I have been very concerned that the philosophical community has implicitly conveyed the message that use of the term unmute to refer to acts of resistance, practices of liberation, forms of recognition, and so on is philosophically appropriate and politically acceptable.1 Thus, I want to point out that the term mute is ableist, oralist, and derogates Deaf people and other people who are nonverbal. The correlative term unmute is likewise ableist, oralist, and devalues these populations insofar as it too assumes that speaking and hearing are fundamental, natural human “capacities,” that linguistic and auditory practices are the fundamentally necessary and quintessential vehicles of human emancipation, self-realization, flourishing, and so on.2
I am in fact deeply troubled that the ableism of this naturalized conception of speaking and hearing has conditioned a major project in philosophy, is evoked in the moniker of the project, and has been uncritically endorsed in corners of the profession that take themselves to be (among other things) expanding the horizons of the discipline and profession. Needless to say, I am also deeply troubled that this conception implicitly conditions a forthcoming publication that is guaranteed to reach a wide readership.
I should emphasize that I do not hold Myisha Cherry, the author of the project, ultimately responsible for this situation (though I encourage Cherry and other philosophers involved in the project to familiarize themselves with philosophical and other theoretical work on ableist language and ableism more generally). To the contrary, I think rather that, with few exceptions, the philosophical community has enabled and encouraged Cherry to configure and reconfigure a very public project in a way that ought to be recognized as politically compromised and epistemically misleading.
I submit that insofar as every citation of the project and forthcoming book will, in their current configuration, be a microaggression against Deaf and otherwise disabled people, the onus for these microaggressions lies with the philosophy profession at large. Hence, I want to encourage the well-positioned philosophers who have taken part in the project to reflect upon the deleterious effects of what they have helped to create and how these effects will in turn produce unfortunate effects of their own. Perhaps, then, some of these philosophers will urge Cherry to reconsider the current configuration of the project while opportunity remains to do so.
In the heated discussions that comprise what has variously been referred to as the Hypatia affair or the Tuvel affair, some feminist philosophers seemed to show no restraint with respect to their use of ableist language and seemed more than willing to ignore the ways in which other feminist philosophers who advanced convictions like their own appealed to ableist language to do so, demonstrating once again that most nondisabled (feminist) philosophers do not regard disability in political terms, that is, do not understand disability as a politically generated construct as they understand gender, race, sexuality, nationality, and class (among other apparatuses). At one point during the months in which the discussions took place, I was so disheartened by the extent to which some feminist interlocutors involved in them employed disability as a rhetorical device in their assertions that I wrote a blog post that draws attention to the ableist language to which a number of them appealed in a distinct way.
I recently remembered that blog post when I read Robin A. Dembroff’s new article in Aeon and watched as quite a few feminist philosophers and other members of the philosophical community overlooked (or failed to recognize) the use to which Dembroff puts ableist language and ableist metaphor in the article, as well as how these feminist philosophers neglected to point out to Dembroff that these discursive practices have unseemly effects.
Does the value derived from cutting-edge arguments about gender neutralize or render insignificant the detrimental character of appeals to ableist language in which the argumentative claims may be embedded? I sincerely hope that philosophers will decide that it does not. I also sincerely hope that the (feminist) philosophers who vowed to teach Dembroff’s interesting article in their respective feminist philosophy courses will make space in their lectures and seminars on it for a discussion of, among other things, the apparatus of disability and politics of representation, ableism in feminist philosophy, and our dear friend, intersectionality.3
Notes
1. For a recent discussion of the metaphorical use of disability in philosophy, see C Dalrymple-Fraser, “Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews C Dalrymple-Fraser.” Discrimination and Disadvantage blog, October 17, 2018.
2. For an argument about how a narrow theoretical and practical equation of speech to audibility or “phonocentrism” reduces political life, consider Derefe Kimarley Chevannes, “Black Issues in Philosophy: The Philosophical Project of Political Speech.” Blog of the APA, August 21, 2018.
3. For an extended examination of these and other topics pertinent to feminist philosophy of disability, see Shelley L. Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Chapter one includes a discussion of the use of ableist language in philosophy and in particular the use of blindness as metaphor in philosophy. I also discuss the use of ableist language in philosophy in "Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability." Disability Studies Quarterly 33 (4), 2013 and in other places cited in my book and the aforementioned article.
posted by Shelley
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