Discrimination and Disadvantage

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Damion Kareem Scott Redux

 

For this forty-fifth installment of the series, I have reposted the fascinating interview that I conducted with Damion Kareem Scott in December 2015. I know that readers and listeners of the series will be delighted to revisit this interview with Damion. The original post of the interview and comments to it are here.

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.

____________________________________________

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the ninth installment of Dialogues on Disability, a series of interviews that I am 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.

My guest today is Damion Kareem Scott. Damion is an adjunct professor in Philosophy and Africana Studies at the City University of New York, a M.A. student in African American Studies at Columbia University, and a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Stony Brook University. Damion is passionate about music and dance, though he doesn’t dance as much as he once did. Damion enjoys traveling and looks for ways to do so on the cheap. He also enjoys interacting with non-human animals, listening to music, and watching films and loves table tennis.

  

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Damion! You have lived in various parts of the world and you speak multiple languages. So, why don’t we start this interview with your personal history? Please tell us about your background and what it is that brought you to Africana Studies and philosophy.

Sure. I was born in the Bronx, New York City, in the early 1970s. Both of my birth parents are Jamaican nationals who became naturalized U.S. citizens. My early years were characterized by a certain amount of trauma, deprivation, and violence, about which I won’t go into detail. In the mid-1970s, after my parents split up, my father moved back to Jamaica and took me with him. At that time, political violence and gang-related homicides were endemic in Jamaica. My family returned to the U.S. in the early 1980s, first migrating to Chapel Hill and, subsequently, to Dallas. I spent my Christmases and summers in Brooklyn and Miami. My exposure to a lot of difference conditioned some of my values.

These various geographies are crucially different in a number of ways. For instance, the American South was, and continues to be, a region rife with explicit and overt Anti-Black/White Supremacist racism. Dallas lacks population density. Due to these sharp differences of culture and demographics, my family and I experienced direct and targeted racial animosity and violence. This direct and overt racism is, of course, fully compatible with the “institutional” and “structural” manifestations of anti-Black, anti-minority racism in the northern U.S. that have become all-too-familiar aspects of much of contemporary North American culture; that is, one form of this racism reinforces the other form.

I became conscious of America’s racist/racialist obsessions as I started to come into my own as a person. In order to develop my self-identity, I had to deal with instances of violence. I was forced to learn how to defend myself and my sisters, both mentally and physically. That I had to think through, and against, issues of violence at a young age led me to develop a sharper, quicker, and more creative perspective, namely, a philosophical perspective. I would come home and ask how I should respond when some white kid called me a “nigger,” or a “Yankee” or a “foreigner with a funny accent.” I learned how to deal with things in a non-violent way. I fought physically only after all rational (albeit youthful) attempts at persuasion had failed.

Sadly, tragically, there were guns. As a teenager, I witnessed America’s culture of guns all around me, including the phenomenon of young people who came to glorify firearms through family traditions handed down to them, traditions that were anathema to my own familial and cultural values. Despite my loving, caring parents and siblings who had joined the ranks of the “diverse” suburban American middle-class, both nonracial and racially-charged instances of crime and violence happened all around us, as well as to us. I have repeatedly been the target of racial profiling by the police. On a number of occasions, police officers have trained their guns on me. Because of these combined circumstances, I started to think broadly about philosophical notions of personal identity and political solidarity, as well as about issues of race, ethnicity, and inclusive humanity. Little did I know that this thinking would develop into committed projects in academic philosophy and Africana Studies.

As I got older, I began to stand out in school academically. I went to a public high school, although it was a new “magnet” school staffed with caring and well-intentioned teachers. Eventually, I became a National Achievement/National Merit Scholar, winning several academic accolades. I matriculated at New York University in the early/mid-1990s, using a college scholarship (and some student loans!) as the ticket back to my my wider family here in New York. I intended to study physics, musical journalism, or dramatic writing; but I took a philosophy class in my first year and got hooked. I had read a few classics of African-American political and liberational thought in high school—The Prince, Soul on Ice, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X—but not really any other kind of philosophy. I enrolled in an Introduction to Ancient Civilization general studies class that had a large component on Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius gave me a lot to think about, a lot to which I could relate. Although I declared as a dramatic writing and philosophy major, I dropped the dramatic writing double major as a junior and became a physics minor and philosophy major. I had become enthralled with analytical metaphysics at the juncture of philosophy of science.

As an undergraduate, I began my continuing engagement with a certain type of “Continental” philosophy, that is, logical reconstructive type of approaches to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and existential phenomenology, as well as Deleuze, Derrida, and post-structuralist interventions in language and ontology. Professor John Richardson at NYU helped me to formulate my thoughts coherently through engagement with historical figures in post-Kantian Continental Philosophy—especially Nietzsche and Heidegger—in relation to my prior, nascent phenomenology and conceptualizations of difference and deviance. Richardson really encouraged and motivated me to pursue an advanced degree in philosophy. Professors Ed Stein, Paul Boghossian, Marya Schechtman, Sigrun Svavarsdottir, Mary Mothersill, and Galen Strawson also made big impressions on me as an undergraduate. Thomas Nagel was a big influence on the shape of my developing philosophical ideas. He was an incredible teacher. From Nagel’s work and classes, I acquired a broad sense of analytical philosophy. His work seemed more far-ranging than most of the analytic philosophy that I had encountered, instilling in me a sense of how very unorthodox and minority positions could be clearly, yet rigorously, articulated, especially in the philosophy of mind.

My fortunate selection for, and attendance at, two Rutgers Summer Institutes for Underrepresented Groups in Philosophy during the 1990s—first as a student mentee and subsequently as a graduate student mentor—also greatly influenced my philosophical development. The institutes enabled me to learn about the specifically academic aspects of the burgeoning field of Africana Philosophy that I now love. I had returned to academia after roughly a decade away from it because of a shift in my lifestyle due to both the onset of degenerative joint disease and economic hardship. Since my return, I have had the pleasure to work with such fine scholars as Professors Ann O’Byrne, Megan Craig, Ed Casey, Peter Carevetta, Marcellus Blount, Stephen Gregory, Harvey Cormier, and Robert-Gooding Williams.

Draft Introduction to Microaggressions and the Apparatus of Disability

 

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.

APA Symposium on Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability

 

The draft program for the upcoming Pacific APA meeting in Vancouver (April 17th-20th, 2019) went online last week. The symposium on Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability is scheduled for Thursday, April 18th, 1-4 p.m. The symposium is co-sponsored by the APA Committee on the Status of Women in Philosophy and the Society for Philosophy and Disability.

To increase the accessibility of the session, we (i.e., the participants in the session) have decided upon the following: We will use CART (communication access real-time translation) throughout the presentations and question-and-answer/discussion portion of the session. (Learn more about CART here.) Our session will also include an intermission. Most of the last hour of the symposium will be devoted to the Q&A/discussion. The symposium will be published in a forthcoming issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly which we hope will go online relatively soon after the conference.

 

The roster and timetable for the symposium are as follows:

Chair's introduction and overview: Melinda Hall (15 minutes) 

Speakers' commentaries: Devonya Havis, Jesse Prinz, Chloë Taylor (25 minutes each)

Intermission (10 minutes)

Author/Respondent's remarks: Shelley Tremain (30 minutes)

Q&A/Discussion: Open to all in attendance (50 minutes)

 

We hope that you will join us in April!

 

posted by Shelley

Not Really Just Words

 

“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?

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Gen Eickers

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the forty-fourth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am 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, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; 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 Gen Eickers. Gen is currently finishing their Ph.D. at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and Freie Universitaet Berlin. Their research concentrates on social interaction and emotional display, developing an account of social interaction in their dissertation that focuses on contextual aspects of it. While Gen has been preoccupied with work on their dissertation in the last couple of months, with little time for anything else, they actually enjoy solitary activities like reading (they are currently catching up on LGBTQ history) and engaging in art in all kinds of ways. In the last three years, they have organized three art events.

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Gen! You grew up in a small town in southern Germany and initially studied to become a high school teacher. Please tell us about your background and how you found your way to a Ph.D. program in philosophy.

Thank you for having me, Shelley!

Yes, I grew up in a small village in southern Germany, which has a population of 2,500. Southern Germany is quite Catholic and ninety-nine percent white. The area in which I grew up is very conservative. In addition to this already conservative environment, in the few last years, right-wing attitudes have come to the surface again, perhaps even increased. In the 2017 election, fifteen percent of voters in the area in which I grew up voted for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the right-wing political party in Germany. Around thirty-eight percent voted for the Christian party, whose values are far from trans-friendly, queer-friendly, immigrant-friendly, or disability-friendly.

These election results put this region above the national averages with respect to the votes that right-wing parties received. What is important to add here, of course, is that in Berlin, my chosen home, around twelve percent of voters voted for the AfD. The difference between fifteen percent and twelve percent may not seem that big when we look at the number in isolation. But it’s significant when we consider that far fewer people in Berlin voted for the Christian party, and far more people voted for the left party. Most importantly, the queer community, the queer scene in Berlin is big, supportive, and good at resistance. No such thing existed in the area in which I grew up. None of this means that twelve percent of voters is not already bad enough though.

My grandparents used to have a farm, and I spent some of my childhood sitting on a tractor with my grandfather. I value these memories. At the same time, though, due to the conservative environment of southern Germany, life felt repressed and depressing there. Feelings, social issues, gender, disability were just not topics to be discussed. Everything that seemed to be remotely odd or that departed from accepted norms was ignored or simply not talked about—but, in an effortless kind of way; I think people just had no language for, nor idea of how to deal with, anything other than what is taken as normal.

When my parents got divorced, people talked badly about them and they lost friends. In high school, I knew only one other person who had divorced parents. When I was in high school, there were rumors that two of our male teachers were gay and that one of my male classmates was gay. Nothing was overt, but the things said about the teachers and the classmate were awful and, now that I have come to realize my own trans gay identity, are painful for me to think back on.

Gender was simply not a thing—it still isn’t there, I think. It was so not on the table ever that I am not sure how to express the non-existence of thoughts or conversations about gender. I think Germans, in general, are not the best when it comes to emotion work or communicating their problems, feelings, and needs, which even manifests in how language is used: where Americans would say “amazing!!!”, my relatives would say “not too bad.”

For historical and cultural reasons, rural areas in Germany, in my experience, revolve a lot around survival, work, everyday lives. That is to say that there has not been any room in these regions to openly talk about or even allow oneself to think about aspects of identity, such as gender, sexuality, disability, and race. Everything that goes beyond work and survival appears to be a luxury. But we need to learn that living one’s identity is not a luxury, but rather a necessity.

The conflict between the idea that thinking about identity is a luxury and the idea that thinking about identity is a necessity manifested, for me, in conflicting feelings and values which, I think, have made it difficult, if not impossible, for me to look for support, to ask for help, to come out as trans, to talk about my mental health. Until recently, I despised my background—perhaps for these very reasons and especially due to social pressure—but I have learned to embrace parts of it. I think my background has also equipped me with tools that people from more privileged backgrounds—such as people from academic families—do not have. For example, I can absolutely imagine myself working low-paying jobs and can imagine life not as a fancy university professor.

When I graduated from high school at eighteen, my plan was to study art in order to become an art teacher. I applied to art school, but I was rejected. That was a bummer, but it hasn’t prevented me from continuing to make art and be engaged in art projects. I have curated three exhibitions so far, and I am currently working on a fourth. Two of the exhibitions were art and science collaborations: Embodiments, which took place in 2016 at the Whiteconcepts Gallery in Berlin, and an exhibition for the Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC) in 2017. Both collaborations have led to interesting conversations between artists and scientists/researchers.

 

[Description of image below:  A group of spectators sits on the floor of the Whiteconcepts Gallery. They are looking up at something out of the view of the shot. Artwork is displayed on the walls of the room, including a large fabric installation on the wall behind the viewers.]

 

[Description of image below: A shirtless person stands in the Whiteconcepts Gallery holding a phone to their chest, their hands cradling and framing the screen of the phone on which a video of a beating heart during an open-heart surgery is displayed. The displayed heart is the estimated size of the heart of the person holding the phone. Other pieces of art can be seen in the background of the shot.]

 

A Gimlet Eye: The Journal of Controversial Ideas and Jonathan Anomaly’s “Defending Eugenics” (guest post)

 

A Gimlet Eye: The Journal of Controversial Ideas

and Jonathan Anomaly’s “Defending Eugenics” 

 

Guest post

 

by

Alison Reiheld*

 

On November 12, a slew of articles hit the internet announcing the formation of Journal of Controversial Ideas, a future journal that will be dedicated to, well, publishing cross-disciplinary controversial ideas and specifically ideas too controversial to be published elsewhere or which, if published elsewhere, would subject the author to threats. That authors might be threatened because of the content of their articles led the editors of the prospective journal (including Peter Singer) to explicitly decide in advance to allow pseudonymous publication.

While philosophers who pay attention to the blogosphere and social media have good reason to worry about the viciousness enabled by anonymity and a total lack of accountability (see Twitter, the metablog, the metametablogs, etc.), anonymity can also protect serious and careful valuable contributions to the profession, as with the “What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy?” blog and countless other instances. Perhaps the editors, if acting in good faith, hope that peer review and editorial oversight will provide accountability and ensure that the abuses of pseudonymity are curtailed while the benefits of it are in full effect.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tom Bartlett warned of a coming backlash to the journal itself and not just to the kind of content that it wishes to print (“Cue the Outcry”).  Why might there be such a backlash? And would it be justified? The tone of “Cue the Outcry” implies that it would not. Whether it would, depends on the new JCI’s editorial procedures, which ideas they find “controversial” enough to merit publication in their journal, whether these ideas include both conservative and liberal ideas, and a whole host of other factors.

My concerns about the journal stem from the kinds of work that authors elsewhere have painted as persecuted. As soon as I heard of the announcement of the journal, I thought in particular of the work of philosopher Jonathan Anomaly, who often says that it is unjust for his talks to be protested, that he receives hate mail in response to his publications, and that the American Academy is badly broken because of the way people respond to his work and the work of others who advance controversial ideas.

I want to propose in this post that some claims are indeed deeply problematic by their nature; thus, it is right and proper to subject them to greater scrutiny than other claims and perhaps to hold them to a higher standard. This discrepancy would make it appear that the former claims are being unjustly discriminated against, when in fact this is not the case. One such claim is that colonialism was morally good and is justified, a claim made in an article published in Third World Quarterly in 2017. Another claim is that we ought to have formal eugenics programs. This latter assertion is one of several interlocking claims advanced by Anomaly.

 

ZOOMING IN ON A CONTROVERSIAL IDEA

 

...our imaginative visions are central to our understanding of the world. They are not a distraction from our serious thinking but a necessary part of it. And—what is perhaps more surprising—many of the visions that now dominate our controversies are ones which look as if they were based on science, but are really fed by fantasy… many of the favourite fairy-tales of our age—the myths that actually shape our thoughts and actions—are ones which owe their force to having appeared in scientific dress. —Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By, xii-xiii

 

In 2018, Monash Bioethics Review published an article by Anomaly called “Defending Eugenics: From Cryptic Choice to Conscious Selection.” The article is part of a thematically unified research program that Anomaly has developed over the years in which he treats procreation/reproduction as a public good, considering group traits and individual traits as relevant to who should have children. This research program includes, but is not limited to, his 2017 article “Race Research and the Ethics of Belief” in Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and his 2014 “Public Goods and Procreation,” also in Monash Bioethics Review. Related articles include Anomaly’s 2018 “Public Goods and Education” forthcoming in a Rowman & Littlefield anthology on Philosophy and Public Policy. Anomaly develops an interlocking set of claims across this research program which, I believe, I have roughly described as he himself would say is correct. The following are my summaries of the claims made in each of these four articles:  

CLAIM (1) FROM “PUBLIC GOODS AND EDUCATION”: While education is a public good, social intervention in public education and intellectual development is often pernicious and government involvement in social factors affecting intelligence is thus often ill-advised, even in the form of public funding for education, vouchers, and especially stipulation of what should be learned.

CLAIM (2) FROM “RACE RESEARCH AND THE ETHICS OF BELIEF”: We rightly worry that any legitimation of claims that certain racial groups are better or worse at certain tasks due to physiology will lead to bias and oppression that can cause harm. But the harm principle is a bad reason not to believe something to be true if there is evidence that it is, and it is an especially bad reason to refrain from looking for any such evidence. “[I]f we allow ourselves to believe a proposition that is contrary to the available evidence, we may end up acting in ways that harm other people as well as ourselves” (Anomaly 2018, 293). Racial groups are genetically real, not just socially constructed, and research into race and shared racial traits should not be inhibited. What’s more, doing such research could help to explain racial prejudice. For instance, Anomaly argues that Ashkenazi Jews simply are, based on scientific evidence, smart and have heritably high IQ scores. Perhaps, Anomaly proposes, the best explanation for how Jewish folks became targeted for their success is that such success is indeed biologically group-based. Acknowledging racial differences as biological and real and heritable, rather than socially constructed, could serve to undermine racial bias, as well as lead to benefits in the treatment of health conditions that occur in some groups more than in others.

CLAIM (3) FROM “PUBLIC GOODS AND PROCREATION”: Economists are wrong when they view children as private goods that parents create for fun, companionship, help in old age, etc. Rather, children are public goods because “they can have far-reaching effects on the genetic composition, cultural trajectory, and general welfare of future people.” (172) Because the benefits of public goods are consumed in common and widely dispersed, and procreation and parenthood are public goods, we are justified in influencing reproductive behavior. While there should be a presumption in favor of procreative liberty, “nearly all of us would prefer—to the extent that it is possible—to create a world in which future people flourish. This will apparently involve preserving (or increasing) the prevalence of traits that can be thought of as public goods.” (179) We should at least use social norms to nudge people to make eugenic reproductive choices. The state could even provide free or reduced cost fetal or parental genetic screening and, with caution, even some restrictive interventions into reproductive choice such as parental licensing and, in some cases, temporary sterilization for the very unfit—”especially if their pathological behavior has a strong genetic component” (184)—which can be reversed in case of a mistaken judgment of lack of fitness. We would be “preventing probabilistic rather than actual harms.” (ibid.) Social efforts to influence reproduction should extend from genetically bad traits, to poor parenting by extremely irresponsible people, to people who might turn out to be poor parents (thus the word probabilistic). We also ought to think of future people as doing probabilistic harm, of “risks that prospective children post to other people.” (ibid.) Anomaly says that this is fairly extreme and that these options should be preserved, but that we should be wary of using coercive state intervention to achieve collective goals. Thus, the “most promising and least intrusive way of preserving the genetic basis of valuable traits may be genetic counseling and—once our understanding of genetics improves—subsidies for those who wish to use embryo selection or, under certain conditions, genetic engineering to enhance their children.” (185) This kind of “voluntary” eugenics should be supported.

CLAIM 4) FROM “DEFENDING EUGENICS…”: Anomaly begins his article by explicitly stating that he wishes to “reclaim the spirit of authors like Francis Galton and Charles Darwin,” and that his defense of eugenics will not commit us to endorsing state-sponsored coercion nor to genetic determinism. He argues, furthermore, that “virtually every trait that influences our personality and our likelihood of living a good life—including intelligence, health, empathy, and impulse control—has a substantial genetic component.” Reacting to the history of Nazis and the Holocaust, and American eugenics, by rejecting the genetic basis of race and other groupings of traits is, he notes, an “understandable over-reaction” to the cruel and racist policies of early and mid-twentieth century eugenicists. One of the problems facing societies is that people who have higher IQs, more education, and higher income have fewer children later in life, especially in developed countries with social supports and opportunities for ambitious and intelligent women. (The trend of successful career women having pets instead of children or adopting children is bad for the gene pool in the long run, and a form of pathological altruism, one example that Anomaly gives of “dysgenic trends in developed countries.”) Anomaly proceeds to defend a series of “plausible” moral principles laid out in the famous case of Buck v. Bell, including preventing the harm that future children of certain people might do to others and society. If we are cautious of state authority and more concerned with individual liberty, we can use these principles as the basis of a “liberal eugenics.” He defends access to contraception (on the grounds that it allows women to choose more carefully who fathers their children), access to genetic education, and genetic counseling through public financing of independent providers in a competitive market, access to genetic engineering as enhancements come on board, and a system of incentives and penalties including parental licensing. He also defends parental licensing on the grounds that traits like impulse control, health, intelligence and empathy have significant genetic components and so unrestricted reproduction entails many “parents who are unwilling or unable to take care of their children” and who “[pass] along an undesirable genetic endowment.” A fair parental licensing scheme would involve criteria that “are effective at screening out only parents who impose significant risks of harm on their children or (through their children) on other people.” If informal sanctions work, they are preferable to coercive laws, but they often fail to work well. While public policies cannot create a genetic utopia, changing reproductive norms can go some way towards making us better at choosing whether to have children and which kinds of children to have. After Anomaly advances this long argument in which he advocates numerous policies and endorses specific views about which traits are desirable, he closes with the following claim: “I concede that I may be wrong about any of the measures I’ve considered. Sometimes the best policy is not to have one."  

What shall we make of these claims? At first glance, it might seem that claim (1) is entirely distinct from claims (2), (3), and (4). After all, taken together, the latter set of claims clearly pertains to genetic traits of groups, judging groups’ merits based on their genetics, and intervening in reproductive choice based on genetic merits. Let us take some basic background from disability studies.

Is Eugenics Too Controversial for Mainstream Bioethics Journals?

 

In my previous post, I asserted that the impetus and rationale for the prospective Journal of Controversial Ideas are the production and publication of eugenic discourse. I also asserted that the biopolitics and governmentality of extant bioethics journals and the subfield of bioethics itself have paved the way for the unfettered production and publication of eugenic discourse in the future journal. 

I suspect that my claims in this regard met with considerable skepticism in some corners of philosophy. Thus, I want to suggest that skeptical readers and listeners consider the following. 

Recently, the Monash Bioethics Review published an article authored by Jonathan Anomaly entitled "Defending Eugenics." The claims that Anomaly makes in the article are as pernicious as the title of the article suggests, targetting disabled people, nondisabled people of colour, nondisabled poor people, nondisabled Indigenous people, and nondisabled Jewish people, among others, promoting the ideas of eugenic selection, procreative beneficence, and so on. 

Anomaly reportedly had a difficult time getting the article published. Nevertheless, the article found a home at the Monash Bioethics Review, on whose editorial board Peter Singer and Julian Savulescu serve, along with other bioethicists who espouse claims that have direct or indirect eugenicist implications. Singer has of course a long affiliation with bioethics at Monash University and Savulescu works at the Uheiro Centre at Oxford University that I mentioned in yesterday's post. I implore skeptics of yesterday's post to put together the pieces of this situation.

The claims that Anomaly makes in the article have not gone unnoticed. I have copied below the text of a letter that The Australian Critical Race & Whiteness Studies Association has initiated in response to the publication of the article. The letter is posted to google docs here where you can add your signature: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejAtoxqUzYPpzofNoabxPIW_bit78cV7FiYPeHmlpLhy8HdQ/viewform?fbclid=IwAR1sL3A-D_g69gLRDiZf9lo2jCBPXk4ch34IQEvX_L9UkHFamd4bAUe-bUc

_______________________________________________________________

 

The Australian Critical Race & Whiteness Studies is asking our members and supporters to sign the letter below to the editors of the Monash Bioethics Review on the publication of an article entitled 'Defending Eugenics'. Signatures may be added at the bottom of the letter.

Jonathan Oakley and Michael Selgelid
Editors in Chief, Monash Bioethics Review
Monash Bioethics Centre
Menzies Building
20 Chancellors Walk
Clayton Campus
Monash University
VIC 3800

Sydney, 14 November 2018

Dear Professors Oakley and Selgelid,

We are writing to you as the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association to express concern about the publication in the Monash Bioethics Review of an article entitled ‘Defending Eugenics’ by Jonathan Anomaly.

In our view, this article normalizes a practice that has been, and continues to be, associated with the discipline and punishment of racialised people since the 19th century when it was first suggested by Francis Galton, a ‘race scientist’ whose ‘spirit’ the author wishes to ‘reclaim’ in the interests of reducing the ‘consequences of people reproducing at random.’

The author attempts to avoid the charge of racism by arguing that the virtues of eugenics should not be tempered by the ends to which these ideas were put by the Nazis during the Holocaust. There are a number of problems with this proposition which we would like to outline:

1. It is impossible to dissociate an idea from the context in which it emerged and the practices which it led to. The very idea of manipulating the population in order to attempt to facilitate a ‘eugenic utopia’ comes to fruition within the context of European colonialism, and the increased power of European states to quantify and manage populations. The main targets were the poor, the disabled and those considered racially ‘inferior’.

2. Anomaly’s discussion of the Holocaust attempts to avoid racism by making the argument that it was ‘dysgenic’ to eliminate the Jews as ‘arguably among the most intelligent and productive people of the twentieth century.’ Such an argument, while attempting to avoid racism, still operates with racially essentialist terms by generalizing about all Jews; it is notable too that Jews of colour are omitted from Anomaly’s claims.

3. Anomaly clearly believes in race differences, arguing that it was only the ‘the racist direction the eugenics movement took in the United States and Germany’ that led scientists to ‘deny that races exist.’ It is our contention that it is impossible to disentangle the belief that the human population can be divided into so-called races from the injustices that continue to be associated with that belief. And in the specific case of the article, it is impossible, to argue that races exist while claiming that one’s proposal to introduce eugenics into policy making is not racist.

4. Eugenic practices of the type discussed by Anomaly in the paper, are still in practice. The author believes that the language of eugenics was merely used to mask the ‘morally abhorrent policies and pseudo-scientific claims’ of the Nazis. However, eugenics principles were applied much more widely than that. In our context here in Australia, the Eugenics Society of Victoria was in operation until 1961 (https://theconversation.com/eugenics-in-australia-the-secre…). The practice of removal of Aboriginal children, which is still ongoing, reaching unprecedented levels today, has its roots in eugenics as its ultimate aim was the control of the Aboriginal population (https://www.theguardian.com/…/australia-fails-to-curb-child…). The practices of forced sterilisation are still in use against Indigenous women in Canada for example (https://www.cbc.ca/…/pol…/sterilization-indigenous-1.4902303). Dorothy Roberts has documented the extent to which the US welfare system has been restructured to inhibit the reproductive freedoms of poor Black women (https://penntoday.upenn.edu/…/revisiting-killing-the-black-…). Therefore, the policy proposals, presented by Anomaly, to improve what he calls the troubling ‘current demographics of Western countries’ are not mere hypotheticals.

5. In fact, Anomaly makes clear what troubles him when he remarks that pronatalist policies put in place by the Swedish state have resulted in higher births among those of Somali origin rather than ‘native-born Swedes.’ He also makes reference to ‘impulse control’ as hereditary, an argument also made by the conservative US publication, The National Review, which argued that Black children had less impulse control than white children, thus justifying their exclusion from school (https://www.nationalreview.com/…/more-distortion-ed-depart…/). Therefore he cannot claim that racism does not motivate his argument.

At a time when so-called ‘race realism’ is booming, despite being thoroughly debunked by the great majority of scientists (https://www.theguardian.com/…/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race…), the scholarly community must take responsibility for the ideas it endorses. There are serious questions to be answered about how an article that proposes that ‘future people would be better off if people with heritable traits that we value had a greater proportion of children’ passed peer review. It is our view that there is absolutely no way of separating the notion of there being ‘more valuable heritable traits’ from the fact that modern western societies have associated value with whiteness, abled-bodiedness and prosperity to the detriment of racialised people, the disabled and the poor.

We seem to have entered a phase in academia and public life where debate for its own sake has trumped any commitment to the principle of protecting those most vulnerable and creating the conditions for a more just society for all. As critical race scholars who are only too painfully aware of the practices to which ideas of race have been put, we suggest that it is never the time for an article that defends eugenics to be published in a reputable international scientific journal.

We hope that you will consider this letter and take the necessary steps to address the processes of peer review that led to this misguided decision.

Yours sincerely on behalf of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association

Alana Lentin
Associate Professor, Western Sydney University and ACRAWSA President (2017-19).

 

 

posted by Shelley

Repression and Controversial Ideas

 

In The History of Sexuality, Volume One, Foucault writes that, for a long time, Western societies (so the story goes) supported a Victorian regime, one that continues to restrain sexuality in the present. Whereas at the turn of the seventeenth century sexuality was (the story goes) treated with candor and sexual practices enjoyed a certain familiarity, the nineteenth century (the story goes) ushered in a confinement of sexuality to the conjugal home and reproductive function. In the terms of this historical narrative, Foucault wrote, “Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection. Nor did it merit a hearing” (4). If sexuality was compelled to make itself visible, it would be designated in terms of abnormality and perversion and hence treated accordingly. Sexuality (or so the story goes) was repressed by power and access to the truth of one’s sexuality required that one free oneself from this repression, even at considerable cost: laws must be transgressed, prohibitions must be lifted, and pleasures reinstated.

Foucault referred to the thesis that underpins the aforementioned historical narrative as the “repressive hypothesis,” explaining that from the eighteenth century onward, there has in fact been a veritable discursive explosion around and apropos sex, a proliferation of discourses about sex in the field of the exercise of power itself rather than repression of sex: “an institutional incitement to speak about [sex], and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (18). The compulsion to speak of sex, to categorize it, analyze it, legitimize it, liberate it, and redeem it was tied to, the product of, and generated in accordance with, force relations.

As Foucault argued, therefore, saying “yes” to sex does not amount to saying “no” to power.  On the contrary, sex (and sexuality) has always been implicated in power. Indeed, from the eighteenth century sex became something to be administered and managed, became an urgent economic and political concern: “it was necessary to analyze the birthrate, the age of marriage, the legitimate and illegitimate births, the precocity and frequency of sexual relations, the ways of making fertile or sterile, the effects of unmarried life or of the prohibitions, [and] the impact of contraceptive practices” (26).

I want to argue that the justifications for the Journal of Controversial Ideas that Peter Singer, Jeff McMahan, and Francesca Minerva have advanced replicate the assumptions of the repressive hypothesis. As with the liberating release of our allegedly repressed sexuality, so too with a journal that enables the unfettered publication of certain controversial views: Our freedom and, ultimately, our truth are in the balance.

Insofar as Singer, McMahan, and Minerva—all of whom hold “controversial” positions in bioethical discourse—have initiated this project, we can reasonably infer that they aim to convince us that the expression and development of their positions and the putative  truths and putative potential truths that they could comprise are threatened, if not already suppressed, by relations of power in philosophy.

These authors want us to believe that they are up against power, not situated otherwise within it, generating it. In particular, the pronouncements of these prominent philosophers are designed to make us believe that only if a venue is provided that distinctly publicizes and protects their views and the views of other academics whose intellectual freedom is similarly threatened with suppression, will we arrive at the truth on “controversial” matters. These authors (and the prospective journal), we are led to believe, will speak back to power rather than circulate and extend it. In other words, although Singer, McMahan, Minerva, and like-minded academics actually enjoy very public (and prestigious) platforms in which to advance their arguments, that is, although their views proliferate in books, articles, lectures, videos, and so on throughout the discipline and profession, the journal that the former philosophers have initiated is crucially needed because controversial views like their own are somehow repressed and stifled or at least threatened, not given the appropriate discursive space in which to be adequately considered and debated.  

As Foucault was concerned to point out, truth can never be freed from power; indeed, there is no truth apart from power, for power is immanent in and productive of the objects that it affects rather than merely repressive of them: it produces candidates for true and false, as well as objects, states of affairs, identities, and so on. Thus, we might ask: About what can we expect the new Journal of Controversial Ideas to produce truth? Insofar as editors to a large extent influence the shape, scope, and contents of the publications that they edit, I think we can reasonably expect the new journal to produce the sort of eugenic discourses on which McMahan and his colleagues at the Uheiro Centre at Oxford collaborate and for which Singer is well known.

Indeed, I want to suggest that the publication of eugenic discourse is the rationale for this journal, notwithstanding any journal mission statement or public pronouncement to the contrary. Furthermore, I want to suggest that the biopolitical character and governmental tenor of both extant bioethics journals and the subfield of bioethics itself are mechanisms of the apparatus of disability that have already enabled the inauguration of future discourse on eugenics in the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

 

posted by Shelley

Feminist Philosophy of Disability and Genealogy: An Intervention (Nov. 9, 2018)

 

[To increase the accessibility of my presentation, I have now posted it to Discrimination and Disadvantage, the philosophy blog that I coordinate. If you'd like to read along with me, type 'Discrimination and Disadvantage' into your browser and follow the link to the blog.] 

 

Feminist Philosophy of Disability

and Genealogy: An Intervention

 

Presented to the Department of Gender and Race Studies,

University of Alabama,

November 9, 2018

 

Introduction

This paper is a feminist intervention into the ways that disability is researched and represented in philosophy at present, a feminist intervention distinctly designed to subvert the dominance of individualized and medicalized approaches to disability in philosophy and the marginalization of critical philosophical work on disability. Nevertheless, some of the claims that I make over the course of the paper are also pertinent to the marginalization in philosophy of other areas of inquiry, including philosophy of race, feminist philosophy more broadly, Indigenous philosophies, and LGBTQIA philosophy. For although the discipline of philosophy largely continues to operate under the guise of neutrality, rationality, and objectivity, the institutionalized structure of the discipline implicitly and explicitly promotes certain ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies as bona fide philosophy, while casting the ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies of other philosophies as mere simulacra of allegedly fundamental ways of knowing and doing philosophy, marginalizing these other philosophies and rendering them more or less expendable.

A certain limited number of subfields of philosophy—that is, metaphysics, ethics, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of language—are widely regarded in the contemporary discipline of philosophy as foundational to it, uniquely distinguishing it from other disciplines of research and teaching and reaffirming its self-ascription as “the queen of the sciences.” Philosophers who continue to hold this conventional view of philosophy maintain that these subfields are the necessary, unchanging, and “core” elements of philosophy, while other subfields of philosophical inquiry—such as philosophy of race and feminist philosophy—are said to be merely applications and contingent derivatives of these foundational subfields. That is, philosophers who understand the structure and practice of philosophy in this conventional way take for granted that the former subfields are ontologically and epistemologically prior to the latter subfields and, indeed, render the latter subfields conceivable in the first place. For philosophers who distinguish in this way between “core” subfields of philosophy and “applied” subfields of philosophy, the questions and concerns that make up the former subfields are generally regarded as timeless, disinterested, and universal in character and, alternatively, the questions and concerns that constitute the latter subfields are generally taken to be accidental, interested, and partial.

Against this conventional and biased understanding of the institutional structure and discursive practices of philosophy, my argument is that the classification of subfields in philosophy, the relations between the classifications of the subfields, and the questions and concerns that these subfields comprise is no mere value-neutral reportage or representation of objective differences, relations, and similarities that await discovery and recognition; rather, classification in philosophy (as elsewhere) is performative insofar as it contributes to the constitution of the very value-laden resemblances, distinctions, associations, and relationships between phenomena and states of affairs that it puts into place. Although many philosophers continue to represent philosophy as a value neutral, detached, disinterested, and impartial enterprise, political, social, economic, cultural, and institutional force relations influence every aspect of the discipline (and profession) of philosophy. Every philosophical question and concern, as well as every subfield that these questions and concerns constitute, is a politically potent artifact of historically contingent and culturally specific discourse. As contingent artifacts of discourse, furthermore, every philosophical question, every philosophical subfield, and every specialization in philosophy has a history, a history that can be traced genealogically (see Tremain 2013, 2017, ix-xi).

My genealogy of feminist philosophy of disability aims to resist and disrupt the conventional—that is, individualized and medicalized—understanding of disability that most philosophers presuppose, drawing upon Michel Foucault’s toolbox of insights to do so. Although mainstream philosophers variously allege that their claims about disability are value neutral and disinterested, a feminist philosophy of disability that draws on Foucault scrutinizes the political character of these claims, as well as both its own claims with respect to disability and the presuppositions on which they rely, arguing (with Foucault) that discursive practices are the products of historically contingent and situated force relations. My argument, in what follows, is designed in part to show that Foucault’s body of work offers the most sophisticated and politically astute tools with which to articulate a feminist philosophy of disability that takes account of its own historical and cultural specificity and contingency.

 

Genealogy, Problematization, and Disability

Introduced by Friedrich Nietzsche in A Genealogy of Morals ([1887] 1999) and adapted by Foucault in works such as Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality, Volume One (1978), genealogy is a historicized approach to philosophical inquiry, distinct from the ahistorical conceptual analysis, deductive reasoning, and logical argumentation that characterizes mainstream analytic philosophy. Foucault adopted genealogy to critically inquire into the history of necessity on a given topic and the historical emergence of the necessary conditions for states of affairs, underscoring the importance to such an approach of contingency and of questioning what has been taken for granted as self-evident. Foucault’s genealogies—which he variously referred to as “histories of the present” and “historical ontologies of ourselves”—are concerned with questions about the conditions of possibility for who we are now, that is, questions about how our current ways of thinking and acting came into being.

Foucault’s genealogies were inquiries into the “problematization” in the present of certain phenomena—such as abnormality, perversion, sexuality, and madness—inquiries that attempted to uncover how “solutions” to certain problems have been constructed, in addition to how these different solutions resulted from the problematization of these state of affairs in the first place (Foucault 2003, 20–24). Foucault’s genealogical studies of the problematization of abnormality, perversion, sexuality, and madness (among other things) are not positivistic appeals to a form of science that more accurately represents these phenomena, nor are these studies intended to provide normative responses or solutions to these phenomena. Rather, Foucault’s genealogical studies were designed to show how certain phenomena and states of affairs became thinkable, that is, emerged as problems to which solutions came to be sought. Foucault’s historical method of critical inquiry requires that we ask about the values, purposes, and aims of our current practices, the circumstances of their emergence, and the historically contingent forms of power that contribute to their constitution (also see Hall 2015, 2016).

My feminist philosophical work on disability—which, in some respects, extends Foucault’s own genealogical examinations of the problematization of abnormality, madness, perversion, and other phenomena commonly associated with disability—is thus most aptly characterized as a feminist genealogical inquiry into the problematization of disability in philosophy (for example, Tremain 2006, 2010, 2015, 2017). Just as Foucault’s genealogical studies of the problematization of abnormality, perversion, sexuality, and madness were not intended to provide normative responses or solutions to these phenomena, my inquiry into the problematization of disability does not offer an explicitly normative feminist proposal or response to the phenomena of disability. Instead, my feminist philosophical inquiry into the problematization of disability is designed in large part to indicate how a certain historically and culturally specific regime of power—namely, biopower— has produced certain acts, practices, subjectivities, bodies, relations, and so on as a problem for the present, as well as to indicate the role that philosophy has played and continues to play in the elaboration of this problem. In other words, my aim is to articulate an analytically robust and empirically grounded feminist philosophy of disability that interrogates the historical conditions of possibility for its own articulation.

Despite the apparent variety of questions that mainstream philosophers throughout the discipline have asked about disability, the cluster of assumptions that underpins their inquiries takes for granted the metaphysical status and epistemological character of the category of disability, casting disability as a self-evident designation that science and medicine can accurately represent. On the terms of these assumptions, disability is a prediscursive, transcultural, and transhistorical disadvantage, an objective human defect, that is, a nonaccidental, biological human property, attribute, or characteristic that ought to be prevented, corrected, eliminated, or cured. That the individualizing and medicalizing assumptions that have conditioned work on disability in mainstream philosophy are contestable, that disability might be a historically and culturally specific and contingent social phenomenon, a complex apparatus of power, rather than a deleterious natural attribute or property that certain people possess, has not been considered, let alone seriously entertained.

Philosophers who argue that the social inequalities that accrue to disabled people are necessary consequences of a self-evident physiological, or natural, human characteristic make certain assumptions about the relation between biology and society, that is, about the relation between nature and nurture, that my feminist philosophy of disability is designed to undermine. Dorothy E. Roberts (2016) has distinguished heuristically between two approaches to the question of the relation between biology and society, approaches that she refers to as “the old biosocial science” and “the new biosocial science.” As Roberts explains it, the old biosocial science posits that biological differences produce social inequality, whereas the new biosocial science posits that social inequality produces biological differences. The biological determinism of the old biosocial science, she notes, is achieved in several ways: first, the old biosocial science approach separates nature from nurture in order to locate the origins of social inequalities in inherent traits rather than imposed societal structures; second, the old biosocial science postulates that social inequalities are reproduced in the bodies, especially the wombs, of socially disadvantaged people rather than reinvented through unjust ideologies and institutions; third, the old biosocial science identifies problems that stem from social inequality as derived from the threats that oppressed people’s biology itself poses to society rather than from structural barriers and state violence imposed upon oppressed people; and fourth, the old biosocial science endeavors to intervene and fix perceived biological deficits in the bodies of oppressed people rather than end the structural violence that dehumanizes them and maintains an unjust social order.

Roberts points out that, by contrast, the new biosocial science posits that every single biological element, every single biological process in the human body, every human cell, and everything that happens to a human cell is affected by society. All of life, Roberts remarks, is at once biological and social. There is, in short, no natural body. Genes do not determine anything. Moreover, our brains are plastic, with the ability to be modified by social experience. As Roberts points out, biology is not a separate entity that interacts with the environment; rather, biology is constituted by these interactions (2016; see also Roberts 1998, 2012; Prinz 2012; Gilman and Thomas 2016). With Roberts, various authors have argued furthermore that critical analyses of biosocial science must consider how claims about the social construction of biological phenomena are produced, in what contexts they are mobilized, and for what political purposes (for example, Pitts-Taylor 2010). In my work to articulate a feminist philosophy of disability, I aim to critically and genealogically denaturalize and de-biologize the phenomena of disability in these ways, among others.

Feminist Philosophy of Disability at The University of Alabama (Nov. 8-9, 2018)

 

Next week (Nov. 8-9), I will visit The Department of Gender and Race Studies at The University of Alabama, as part of the Department's Politics and Democracy Lecture Series.

On Friday, November 9th, 3:00-5:00, in the Gorgas Library, Rm. 205, I will give a presentation entitled "Feminist Philosophy of Disability and Genealogy: An Intervention." The poster for the presentation is copied below.  There are other events (excursions, informal seminar, meals, etc.) associated with my visit. If you are in the vicinity and would like to get involved in any of these events, please contact the Chair of the Department of Gender and Race Studies, Utz McKnight ([email protected]), for details. 

[Description of poster below: The names of the department and lecture series appear across the top of the poster. Below this information, the title of my talk, my name, and the date and location for the talk appear to the right of a snapshot of the cover of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. A bio for me appears below these details. The bio reads: "Shelley L. Tremain holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, has taught in Canada, the U.S., and Australia, and publishes on a range of topics, including (feminist) philosophy of disability, Foucault, ableism in feminist philosophy, and bioethics. Tremain is the author of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017), the manuscript for which was awarded the 2016 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities, and the editor of Foucault and the Government of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2005; 2015). She was also the 2016 recipient of the Tanis Doe Award for Disability Study and Culture in Canada. Tremain coordinates the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog, where she posts Dialogues on Disability, the acclaimed series of interviews that she is conducting with disabled philosophers." Below the bio, the poster indicates that the presentation is sponsored by The Department of Gender and Race Studies, University Programs at U of A, and the A&S Dean's Office, as well as that the presentation is open to University of Alabama faculty and students, as well as the general public.]

 

posted by Shelley