[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.
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