Friends of the blog might be interested in listening to/reading the introduction to a draft chapter that I have written on disability and microaggressions. The chapter is forthcoming in a Routledge collection on microaggressions and philosophy.
Microaggressions and the Apparatus of Disability
by
Shelley Tremain
Introduction
Any given position on microaggressions relies upon certain assumptions about power, including assumptions about what power is, the scope of it, and how it operates. Indeed, presuppositions about power condition any given understanding of the epistemological and ontological status of microaggressions, that is, condition understandings about what microaggressions are, how they can be identified, how inquiry into them should proceed, and the nature of their relation to other more encompassing forms of power. Insofar as philosophical investigations into microaggressions involve these sorts of analyses of power, such inquiries run counter to the theoretical endeavors and dominant self-representations of the tradition of Western European philosophy, a philosophical tradition that continues to function largely under the guise of objectivity, disinterested rationality, and neutrality. Philosophers who aim to challenge the allegedly objective, disinterested, and value-neutral character of (Eurocentric) philosophy take relations of power as the very starting point of inquiry, investigating the ways that power relations have contributed to the constitution of Western European philosophy, that is, have contributed to the constitution of the questions posed within this tradition of philosophy, by whom they have been posed and how, as well as whose responses to the questions posed are seriously entertained and why (see Mills 1997; Harding 2015; Whyte 2016; Dotson 2012; Haslanger 2012; Tremain 2015, 2019).
Critical inquiry with respect to disability has made significant inroads into every discipline of the humanities and social sciences except philosophy, where such inquiry remains severely marginalized, a state of affairs that should be attributed to a complicated set of interrelated factors, including the historical composition and demographics of professional philosophy itself; the narrowing concentration of the prevailing subject matter and techniques of philosophy; the increasingly close association between philosophy and the sciences; and the otherwise limited theoretical, discursive, and political focus of much philosophy. The assumption that disability is most appropriately and adequately addressed in the domains of medicine, the life sciences, and related fields has shaped philosophy departments, influencing hiring practices and decisions, as well as course curricula, conference lineups, involvement in professional networks, membership on editorial boards, the contents of edited collections, and so on (see Tremain, 2017; also see Tremain, 2013, 2014, 2015). Thus, the assumption that disability is a philosophically uninteresting human characteristic and the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers and continued marginalization of philosophy of disability are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing, entangled and entwined.
The aforementioned institutional and structural mechanisms and material effects reproduce and are made possible by the microaggressions and other forms of injustice that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy, marginalizing them within it or excluding them from it entirely. Nevertheless, the distinct mechanisms and techniques that variously produce the exclusion of disabled philosophers (however gendered and racialized) from the profession continue to be largely ignored in discussions about the demographics of the profession, factors such as the segregating conceptual and built environments—including inaccessible conferences, classrooms, lectures, course materials, and workshops—in which the very practice of philosophy takes place, as well as research agendas, arguments, instruments, databases, and influences that revolve around an array of notions that operate to subjugate disabled people, including “normality,” “quality of life,” “well-being,” “natural disadvantage,” “suffering,” "disorder," “death with dignity,” “compensation,” “defect,” “cure,” “pathology,” and “risk.” Insofar as claims according to which disabled people are (for example) “abnormal,” “defective,” “worse off,” “permanently dependent,” and “losers in the natural lottery” continue to be both articulated and taken seriously as candidates for theoretical endorsement within a variety of subfields of philosophy, it is unsurprising that disabled people are not regarded as viable colleagues in the profession, nor considered worthy of the role of “professional philosopher,” as the low representation of disabled philosophers in the profession vividly demonstrates (see Tremain 2017, 2014). To put it directly, much of the very subject matter of philosophy is incompatible with efforts to increase the representation of disabled people in the profession. A philosopher of disability who examines the production of microaggressions in philosophy must take account of this state of affairs.
Although I have done extensive analysis of the grievous underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in the profession and the virtual exclusion of philosophy of disability from the discipline (for example, Tremain 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017), I have not thus far used the term microaggressions to identify and refer to the injustices that disabled philosophers (and disabled philosophers of disability in particular) encounter in philosophy. In this chapter, however, I closely consider the relations between microaggressions, philosophy, and disability, a heretofore unexamined area of inquiry. To date, that is, very little work has been done on microaggressions and disability, especially in philosophy whose practitioners almost universally continue to uncritically assume the dominant individualized and medicalized conception of disability in the terms of which disability is a transhistorical defect, a deleterious natural human trait or characteristic, a prediscursive biological flaw that exists prior to social power and practices. Given the prevalence in philosophy of this individualized and medicalized conception of disability and, furthermore, insofar as philosophers and theorists who write about microaggressions generally understand them to be expressions or manifestations of power relations, few philosophers have examined how philosophical assertions about microaggressions are pertinent to disability nor, alternatively, have they considered how analyses of disability could inform philosophical understandings of microaggressions. By contrast, my argument in this chapter assumes that disability is a naturalized apparatus of power (rather than a “natural” human attribute, characteristic, difference, or trait) and, hence, ought to be recognized as an important area of both investigation and insight for philosophical and other theoretical-analytical work on microaggressions.
Let me thus point out that throughout the chapter I use the term apparatus of disability to refer to a heterogeneous and interconnected ensemble of discourses, institutions, scientific statements, administrative measures, and philosophical propositions that responds to the neoliberal requirement of normalization, normalization that facilitates population management and control (see Tremain 2017). An “apparatus,” in the sense in which Michel Foucault (1980) introduced and which I assume, is a historically specific and dispersed system of power that produces and configures practices toward certain strategic and political ends. In other words, to understand disability as an apparatus is to conceive of it as a historically contingent matrix of power that constitutes and is constituted by and through a complex set of technologies, identities, institutions, and discursive practices that emerge from medical and scientific research, government policies and administrative decisions, academic initiatives, art and literature, popular culture, and so on. Although most philosophers of disability argue that disability is a form of social disadvantage imposed upon certain people who embody or possess allegedly natural and politically neutral “impairments,” I maintain that the supposedly natural impairment from which disability—as a form of social disadvantage—purportedly follows is itself a naturalized mechanism of the apparatus of disability. In short, (the apparatus of) disability is a historically contingent and culturally specific matrix of power all the way down and impairment is its naturalized foundation whose incremental production is camouflaged in order to ensure its identification as natural. As a far-reaching matrix of power, furthermore, the apparatus of disability contributes to, is inseparable from, and reinforces other apparatuses of force relations, such as settler colonialism, white supremacy, gender, and class.
My discussion in the chapter is designed to show that Foucault’s claims about power provide an alternative approach to understanding the epistemological and ontological character of microaggressions than the accepted understanding of them provides, an approach that circumvents criticisms directed at claims about their causation. In particular, this alternative approach to microaggressions is not susceptible to criticisms directed at the contestable psychological phenomena to which most current accounts of microaggressions appeal. For this alternative approach construes microaggressions as intentional and nonsubjective tactics of power. The microaggressions directed at disabled people are thus intentional and nonsubjective tactics produced by and through the apparatus of disability, tactics which enable its reproduction. In order to unfold this alternate argument, I first provide a summary of how microaggressions are currently conceptualized in the relevant literature, offering examples of ableist microaggressions in philosophy that the apparatus of disability generates and by and through which it is reconstituted. Then, I point out some of the central ways that claims about microaggressions have been criticized. In turn, I explain how an alternative approach to microaggressions that construes them as practices (tactics)—rather than, say, the consequences of implicit biases—avoids these criticisms and, in any case, provides a more astute account of how power operates with respect to microaggressions than any other account that has thus far been associated with them.
References
Dotson, Kristie. 2012. “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression.” Frontiers 33 (1): 24–47.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. “The Confession of the Flesh.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977,
edited by Colin Gordon, 194–228. New York: Pantheon Books.
Harding, Sandra. 2015. Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Haslanger, Sally. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mills, Charles W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Tremain, Shelley. 2013. “Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33 (4).
Tremain, Shelley. 2014. “Disabling Philosophy.” The Philosopher’s Magazine 65 (2): 15–17.
Tremain, Shelley. 2015. “This Is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like.” Foucault Studies 19 (1): 7-42.
Tremain, Shelley L. 2017. Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Tremain, Shelley. 2019 (forthcoming). "Denaturalizing Impairment and Disability in Feminist Philosophy of Science." In The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science, edited by Sharon Crasnow and Kristen Intemann. New York: Routledge.
Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2016. Indigeneity and U.S. Settler Colonialism. In Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, 91-101. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
posted by Shelley
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