Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the fortieth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, 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 Julie Maybee. Julie is Professor of Philosophy at Lehman College, CUNY, an adjunct professor in the Masters of Disability Studies program at CUNY’s School of Professional Studies, and Director of the Disability Studies Minor at Lehman. Her specialties include nineteenth-century Continental philosophy (especially Hegel), Africana philosophy, race and philosophy, and disability.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Julie! Julie, you began your university education as a journalism student. Please tell us about your background and the motivation to pursue an education and career in philosophy.
First, I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to participate in this interview series, Shelley, which I have very much enjoyed reading and am now thrilled to be part of.
I took my first philosophy course as an elective in my freshman year in the School of Journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, loved it, and made philosophy my minor. In third year, I realized that I did not want to be a journalist. I thought about changing my major, but would have been required to take a lot of extra courses because the distribution requirements were so different in the School of Arts and Humanities. An advisor told me, however, that if I finished the journalism degree and wanted to do a second degree, the distribution requirements for the second degree would be waived. I also hammered out a deal with the chair of the Philosophy Department that would allow me to finish the philosophy major in only one additional year, if I loaded up a bit on credits.
While negotiating the fifth year with the Philosophy Department, I told a senior philosophy professor—who I thought had never really noticed me, even though I had done well in his courses—that I was thinking about doing another year to major in philosophy and he told me that I should apply to the Ph.D. program in philosophy at his alma mater, Cornell. It’s amazing what a difference one little comment can make. His brief comment helped me believe I was good enough to go to grad school. So, I applied to Cornell and went there to do my Ph.D. Pursuing a career as a philosophy professor essentially lets me continue to be a student for the rest of my life, as my father likes to tease me, which I think is a real privilege.
Please describe your recent and current research projects and teaching activity.
I have actually been on sabbatical this year, which has been lovely. Ordinarily, I teach a range of interdisciplinary and cross-listed courses: on Africana philosophy, race and ethnicity, philosophy of disability, and disability studies. As you know, I recently published an article on embodiment and disability in the special issue of Journal of Social Philosophy that you guest edited. I also recently completed a forthcoming article on African philosophy, disability, and the social conception of the self—or the idea that identities are defined, not by individuals on their own, but rather by societies and social contexts—and another forthcoming article on disability, oppression, and homelessness.
I’m currently working on a book manuscript that expands on the argument offered in the Journal of Social Philosophy article, as well as working on another book manuscript that examines the contribution that Hegel’s argument in the early parts of the Phenomenology can make to debates in Africana philosophy about whether the self is socially defined—self-consciousness or spirit is, Hegel said, echoing a traditional African proverb, “[the] I that is we, and the we that is I”. In this latter project, I also apply to the Phenomenology the strategy for diagraming the logic of Hegel’s argument that I developed in my book Picturing Hegel.
In your contribution to the special issue of Journal of Social Philosophy, you developed a way to undermine a criticism that is often directed at my arguments about the social constitution of impairment, namely, that the position denies the material reality of the impaired body. You argue (and I agree) that this criticism relies on a Westerncentric conception of the body that ignores how the body is understood in some African traditions. Please elaborate your argument.
We often assume that the Western understanding of the world—including of the body—is the only way to understand the world. But there are different ways of cutting up or defining the world. The fact that there are different ways calls into question our own taken-for-granted ways of cutting up and defining the world. Like you, Shelley, I do not deny that there is a material reality to the world. I am claiming only that what that reality is like—how it is defined or identified, what kinds of things we say there are in it and, indeed, whether there are any “things” in it at all, given the meaning of our term “thing”—is determined by social contexts, by socially-shared languages and learning. As African philosopher Ifeanyi A. Menkiti, as well as philosopher of science Norwood Russell Hanson suggested, languages do not produce what we perceive or think about, but they do form and organize what we perceive as the facts, or what we regard “as so.”
Today’s concept of impairment is a highly abstract concept according to which an impairment is one of many (biological) conditions located in an individual’s body. Traditional cultures do not seem to have this abstract concept of impairment. The Maasai term that is often translated into English as “disabled”—where disabled here is a synonym for the word impaired—for instance, refers to a lizard that walks in an awkward way, and so is only a description of physical movement and does not include what we would think of as intellectual or psychological impairments. Even in Western societies, the concept of impairment has not been transhistorical. I think there is good evidence showing that, up until the early 1800’s in Europe, people did not have today’s, Western concept of impairment. Actually, it’s not clear to me what the point of our highly abstract concept of impairment is, outside of the social arrangements in many Western societies that, since the nineteenth century, have disadvantaged and excluded people “with impairments.” After all, neither the term impairment nor even terms such as cerebral palsy or autism, which we use to capture smaller categories of impairment, tell us much about what people can or cannot do.
Some traditional societies also do not regard the body as individual. The Suyá Indians of Brazil, who call themselves the Mekin Seji, for instance, believe that the body and body-parts are socially shared through the sharing of bodily substances—milk, blood, urine, sweat, spit, vaginal secretions, semen and so on. When Dombá, a Suyá/Mekin Seji man who anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes wrote about, received a kidney transplant and found that eating red peppers offended his new kidney, no one in his socially-shared, bodily-substance group was allowed to eat red peppers. Since substance-group members share bodies and body-parts, Dombá and other members of his substance-group believed that the consumption of red peppers by the other members would offend Dombá’s new kidney as well. The Suyá/Mekin Seji also do not seem to experience their bodies as individual.
Even the discipline of biology is just one way of cutting up and defining the world.
Philosopher of science Jesse Prinz has pointed out, for instance, that biology tells us that bad moral behavior can’t make one sick. But African philosopher Godwin S. Sogolo has argued that in traditional African cultures that do not make a sharp distinction between the natural and supernatural/spiritual, people believe that bad moral behavior can indeed make one sick. Moral violations or poor social relations with other people or with spirits can make someone ill by reducing the body’s ability to heal itself. As Sogolo notes, these views are not that different from the claim in Western societies that stress can make people ill, though traditional African societies focus on strained social relations rather than, say, overwork, as the source of stress.
Feminist scholar and sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí has suggested, furthermore, that traditional Yoruba culture did not have a concept of (biological) sex. Although the Yoruba obviously recognized that people had different roles in reproduction (obinrin, the ones who have babies and okùnrin, the ones who do not have babies), because children had no role in reproduction, children were neither obinrin nor okùnrin. Critics might say that this example shows only that the Yoruba did not recognize the fact that boys and girls do indeed have a biological sex. But this reply presupposes the central assumption of biology, namely the idea that, as Ladelle McWhorter has pointed out, living things should be classified in terms of function and development. Since most girls develop into women and most boys into men, biology regards girls as little women, and boys as little men. But even on our own terms there are ways in which girls are different from women, and boys different from men—one of those differences is that neither girls nor boys have any role in reproduction. So why not then say, as the Yoruba did, that no children are women or men? In other words, to say that there are biological sexes, impairments, or even individual bodies is just one way of cutting up and defining the world.
Julie, you had worked in philosophy of race and ethnicity for several years before you came to recognize the ways in which disability is as socially constructed as race and ethnicity. Describe the circumstances of this realization.
I am embarrassed to say that I had never thought about disability as a socially constructed category until it happened to my family. I had been working on issues in the study of race and ethnicity for twenty years when, in 2002, my daughter, Leyna, who was twelve at the time, had a brain aneurysm. While accompanying Leyna to cognitive rehab one day, I complained to the director that their program was culturally biased. The director, who knew that I am an academic, told me that there was a then-recent issue of American Psychologist, the official journal of the American Psychological Association (APA), that I should look up.
[Description of coloured photo below: A selfie of a smiling Julie who has short hair, is wearing glasses, and looking directly into the lens. A smiling Leyna who also has short hair and wearing glasses, is behind Julie, her chin resting on Julie’s right shoulder, their heads touching each other's. Light is pouring in from a window behind them.]
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