Discrimination and Disadvantage

Ring In The New Year With BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY!

 

I would like to wish all the wonderful readers and listeners of the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog a Very Happy New Year!

I sincerely hope that the New Year will provide all of you with adequate food, shelter, clothing, love, and friendship, abundant philosophical mentoring and inspiration, as well as renewed determination for resistance and rebellion.

I would also like to thank Thomas Nadelhoffer and Kevin Timpe who, in January 2015, invited me to contribute to Discrimination and Disadvantage, a blog that they planned to initiate.

My experience as a contributor to and coordinator of Discrimination and Disadvantage has been immensely rewarding personally, offering an immediate public outlet for my philosophical views on disability and other apparatuses, motivating my commentary on the profession, and enabling me to remain connected to the philosophical community throughout precarious times.

I believe, furthermore, that my writing at Discrimination and Disadvantage has provided an important professional service, exploring previously unexamined lines of inquiry in philosophy, shining a spotlight on disabled and other marginalized philosophers, and drawing attention to structural inequalities within philosophy that have been obscured and neglected.

Now, on the eve of 2019, I am thrilled to announce that in early January Melinda Hall and I will launch an exciting new blog called BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

 

BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will aim to:

• provide up-to-date information and cutting-edge critical analysis of biopolitical asymmetries and other mechanisms and effects of power in philosophy and beyond, especially with respect to (the apparatus of) disability and racism against the abnormal;
• showcase the insights of members of underrepresented constituencies in philosophy and the work of marginalized areas of specialization in the discipline;
• advertise CFPs and other notices about publications, conferences, workshops, institutes, and other projects pertinent to underrepresented philosophers and subordinated areas of philosophical inquiry;
• offer a venue for disabled and other underrepresented and marginalized philosophers to gain the experience and skills required to both engage in philosophical discussion and contribute to the profession of philosophy more generally.

 

Beginning in January, BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will be the new home of Dialogues on Disability, the acclaimed series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers. I have a fabulous line-up of interviewees for the months ahead.

Melinda and I hope that you will join us at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY to forge an innovative path of philosophical critique, resistance, and insurrection.

 

Until then, Happy New Year!  

Shelley Tremain

 

 

Reviewing the Reviewer

 

My book, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), was published on November 22 of last year. Yet the book has not been reviewed in The Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR). Nor has Jennifer Scuro’s book, Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions Via Disability Studies (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), been reviewed in NDPR, despite the fact that it was published in October of last year. Nor, furthermore, has Melinda Hall’s book, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), published in November of 2016, been reviewed in NDPR.

As one of the most prominent online publishing venues in philosophy, NDPR does not, it seems, feel compelled to solicit reviews of books that are authored by disabled philosophers or that address philosophy of disability. Indeed, NDPR seems to do an inadequate job of publishing timely reviews of books by members of underrepresented groups in philosophy, of soliciting reviews from members of underrepresented groups in philosophy, and of soliciting reviews on books that consider marginalized areas of philosophy.

Although neither my book, nor Jen’s book, nor Melinda’s book has (yet?) been reviewed in NDPR, over the course of the summer I began to see NDPR reviews online of books by male colleagues that were published only a few months ago.

So, I decided to take a quick look at whose books are reviewed in NDPR, who acts as a reviewer for NDPR, which publishers’ books get reviewed in NDPR, and what areas of philosophy the books that are reviewed in NDPR cover.

A quick look at NDPR reviews for the past 2 months suggests that roughly 3 times more books authored by men are reviewed in this prominent online publication than are books authored by women. In addition, roughly 3.5 times more male philosophers act as reviewers of books for NDPR than do women philosophers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, furthermore, a preponderance of the books reviewed in NDPR in the last 2 months were published by either Oxford University Press or Cambridge University Press.

Yesterday, I posted the results of this quick review of NDPR on my Facebook page and in the blog’s Facebook group, indicating that I intend to do a more careful and systematic examination of the NDPR in the coming weeks, an examination that scrutinizes whose books get reviewed in NDPR, who serve as reviewers for NDPR, which areas of the field NDPR reviews tend to cover, and how long it takes for some books to be reviewed in NDPR.

I will report the results of this study on the blog in due course.

 

posted by Shelley

Testimony, Uncorroborated

 

When I was in graduate school, a fellow philosophy graduate student, a classmate, the "star" of the department at the time, sexually assaulted me in the living room of my little three-room ground-floor apartment.

I was sitting in a kelly-green armchair that I had bought for $10 at a secondhand store.

 

Do you believe me?

 

He had come to my place on the pretense of filling me in on some work for classes that I had missed that week. So, it must have been a Friday evening or a Saturday evening.

No one else was there to see what he did. No one else was there to see that he did it.

 

Do you believe me?

 

On separate occasions shortly thereafter, I told two of our male professors what had happened that evening.

I think it happened in the evening. I think it was around 8 o'clock in the evening. But it might have been around 6 o'clock or even 5 o'clock in the afternoon. It gets dark early here in the Winter.

 

Do you believe me?

 

One of the professors snickered when I told him. So I changed the subject.

The other professor looked away when I told him. Then he changed the subject.

 

Do you believe me?

 

posted by Shelley 

Beyond Inclusive Syllabi

 

Nondisabled white women are generally included whenever philosophers wish to identify various underrepresented groups in the profession. Indeed, these women are generally given priority in any list that itemizes groups that are underrepresented in philosophy. I contend however that it may be time to reconsider this discursive and conceptual practice.

As I point out in a 2013 article, nondisabled white women are the most advantaged, or, to put it the other way, the least disadvantaged of any underrepresented group in philosophy. In Canada at present, women make up about 35% of full-time philosophy faculty. Almost all these women faculty are nondisabled (and white). Since disabled women in Canada make up about 20% of the overall population of women and less than 1% of faculty in Canadian philosophy departments, it seems plausible to assert that nondisabled women (not only nondisabled men) are in fact overrepresented in philosophy departments in Canada.

The underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in the United States is grave. In Canada, the situation is even more dire. In the past fifteen years, the low percentage of disabled philosophers employed in Canadian philosophy departments has remained relatively constant.

In the late 1980s, nondisabled, white feminist philosophers within the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA) pressed the leadership of the organization to develop strategies to remedy the pronounced gender inequality in Canadian philosophy departments at the time. Almost immediately, the CPA Equity Committee was formed in 1990 to address this issue. Indeed, the CPA Equity Committee’s initiatives in this regard have been very successful: many nondisabled white women philosophers, especially feminist philosophers, have a noticeable presence in Canadian philosophy.

Nevertheless, the situation for other underrepresented groups, including other groups of women, has remained relatively unchanged since the CPA Equity Committee was formed. Although the Committee is now mandated to consider the situation of various underrepresented groups in Canadian philosophy, the Committee‘s legacy remains relatively the same: almost all the philosophers hired in Canadian philosophy departments are nondisabled (white) women and men.

With a few exceptions, nondisabled feminist philosophers in Canada seem to be largely unconcerned about the dearth of disabled faculty in their departments and in Canadian philosophy more generally. At present, in fact, there is not a single disabled philosopher of disability employed full-time in a philosophy department in Canada. Given the centrality of bioethics to the curricula and infrastructure of some of the larger Canadian philosophy departments, the current state of affairs—the prevalence of a medicalized and individualized conception of disability virtually precludes critical philosophical work on disability—shields these departments from threats to their funding sources, as well as sustains their institutional and disciplinary identities as purveyors of cutting-edge scientific, bioethical, and biomedical philosophical research and knowledge.

Feminist Philosophy and Foucault

 

In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability and various articles, I assert that feminist philosophers should incorporate a denaturalized conception of disability into the field of feminist philosophy, drawing upon the work of Foucault in order to do so. I predict that some, perhaps many, feminist philosophers will resist my conviction that Foucault’s insights suggest ways in which they could contribute to the philosophical denaturalization of disability and, by doing so, extend critical inquiry into the problematization of disability. Feminist philosophers have long disparaged and dismissed Foucault’s work because of its alleged sexism and masculinism. In particular, feminist philosophers (and theorists) have argued that Foucault’s history of sexuality ignored the significance of gender.

The first volume of The History of Sexuality has been the primary target of these criticisms. In the final chapter of this book, Foucault had introduced a reversal of the causal relation between sex and sexuality that the feminist sex-gender distinction institutes.

Whereas the feminist sex-gender distinction posits that “sex” is a self-evident fact of nature and biology from which gender and sexuality follow, Foucault argued that “sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures.” “The notion of ‘sex,’” Foucault claimed, “made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning.” With this innovative reversal of the terms of debate about sex, gender, and sexuality, Foucault posited sexuality as the “real historical formation [that] gave rise to the notion of sex” (1978, 157), that is, as the apparatus of force relations that produces the ideal of “sex” as the foundational property that sexuality seeks to evoke or express.

For Foucault, in other words, “sex” was an effect of force relations that comes to pass as the cause of a naturalized human desire. Sex, though it initially emerged as a mechanism of the apparatus of sexuality, has itself become an apparatus of force relations with which the apparatus of sexuality (among other apparatuses) is mutually constitutive and reinforcing.

Foucault’s intervention into discussions about sex and sexuality presented a challenge to conventional understandings of these terms, a challenge that one might have expected feminists to embrace. Indeed, Foucault’s reversal of the causal relations between sex and sexuality seemed to anticipate Judith Butler’s transformative claims about these categories (see Butler 1999).

Regardless, one might have expected feminists to applaud the way that Foucault historicized and relativized the category of sex. Some feminists argue, however, that a significant and troubling result of this reversal of sex and sexuality is the separation of gender from both these terms. E. L. McCallum explains this feminist objection to the reversal thus: “By refocusing the foundation of the debate around the reversal of the order of sex and sexuality, Foucault seem[ed] to place an inordinately narrow emphasis upon the relation of these two terms at the expense of considering any others—most notably ‘gender’” (1996, 79).

The prominent feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis has argued, for instance, that insofar as Foucault relied upon the conceptual premise that sexuality is a technology of sex, but not gender, “[his] theory, in fact, excludes, though it does not preclude, the consideration of gender” (1987, 3). De Lauretis asserts that Foucault’s critique of the technology of sex “does not take into account its different solicitation of male and female subjects, or the conflicting investments of men and women in the discourses and practices of sexuality” (ix). In Foucault’s history of sexuality, de Lauretis states, sexuality is not understood as gendered, that is, “as having a male form and a female form, but [rather] is taken to be one and the same for all—and consequently male” (14). De Lauretis argues, furthermore, that even when Foucault located sexuality in women’s bodies—as he did by pointing out that women’s bodies have historically been regarded as “thoroughly saturated with sexuality”—he perceived sexuality as an attribute or property of the male (14).

Why We Can’t Promise That a Feminist Space Will Be a Safe Space (guest post)

 

 

Why We Can’t Promise That a Feminist Space Will Be a Safe Space

 

Guest Post

 

by

Tracy Isaacs*

 

 

This post is a modified version of a blog-post that I recently wrote for Fit Is a Feminist Issue (a blog that I co-founded in 2012 with my colleague and friend Samantha Brennan) in the aftermath of a nasty discussion that broke out among feminists on the blog’s Facebook page. Without going into too many details, a meme was posted that upset people who felt it was “unfeminist.” They got angry and raged at the post and the blogger who posted it and subsequently deleted it, with an admission that it was a mistake for her to have posted it, an apology for posting it, and a request that if, in the future, people have concerns about the content of her posts, they kindly be nice about how they raise these concerns. In short, this blogger asked that, in the future, she be given the benefit of the doubt.

The unpleasantness of the comment thread surrounding both the original post and the apology post, to which I, in attempts to defend my co-blogger/friend, contributed in regrettable ways, led me and regular contributors to our blog to reflect upon the extent to which we can cultivate a community that feels comfortable and supportive to all who enter it. One of the sticking points was the request in the apology for people to try to “be nice” when they’re upset about our blog's content.

A common refrain to which the authors at Fit Is a Feminist Issue like to return is that we embrace "big tent feminism,” a feminism that tries to make space for everyone. That's a lofty goal, I know. It sounds wonderful. But can it be done? One of my favourite (and one of the most difficult) questions in feminism is this: "Is an inclusive feminism possible?" I use the question as a thematic frame for most of my teaching in feminist philosophy and women's studies, as a way to push students in my classes to think about inclusivity and intersectionality, not just as theoretical ideas, but in their actual material practices.

It's hard. We struggle. People get defensive. Misunderstandings develop. Hurt feelings. Anger. Difficult conversations. People are called on their privilege and need to look at that. People are afraid to speak for fear of offending, excluding, of saying the wrong thing on a multitude of other levels, of sounding closed when in fact they are open, hurting others' feelings, and having people be upset with them. Sometimes we find ourselves at an impasse. We have to agree to disagree or be stuck. These difficult conversations all occur in the context of feminism, where the majority of students are already there with respect to the broad strokes of it.

Although I do my best to manage the discussion in my classroom, to push it forward or in a different direction if any of the above takes place, to take the emotional temperature in the room and keep an eye on who might be falling silent, I can't promise a totally "safe space" where no one will ever feel shitty, be offended, get hurt, or say the wrong thing.

Because, guess what? Feminists disagree amongst themselves sometimes. We see things differently.

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Lori Gruen

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the forty-second 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 Lori Gruen. Lori is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she also coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. These days, when she isn’t thinking about disabled animals, mass incarceration, and problems of captivity and possibilities of sanctuary, Lori hangs out with her companions, Taz and Zinnia, kayaks, cooks vegan food, worries about climate change, and wishes that she had better luck gardening.

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Lori! You are a leading feminist philosopher who has taken a somewhat circuitous and unconventional path in your career. Please tell us about your background and how it led to your current position in the discipline and profession.

Thanks so much for inviting me to be interviewed for your fantastic series, Shelley. I have found your interviews insightful and inspiring. I really appreciate the important interventions that you have urged to highlight what is overlooked in our profession. Occlusions and exclusions have been very motivating for me and my work, but they have also caused me to question my place in the profession. 

I went through both my undergraduate years and my first stint in graduate school without having the opportunity to take any courses taught by a woman. While I really like to argue (as my friends point out a bit too often) and that kept me going in philosophy for a period of time, I grew frustrated with the abstraction and distance from real problems in the world. I imagine that might have been different if I had at least one class in feminist philosophy. Fortunately, in one of my undergraduate classes, I was introduced to animal ethics and, in graduate school, I became involved in animal activism. 

I organized a protest against experiments on greyhounds at the Medical School at the University of Arizona, where I had a graduate fellowship, and a picture of me being carried away by police appeared on the front page of the campus paper. 

 

[Description of image below: A newspaper clipping about Lori's arrest and removal. In the photo of the clipping, two armed police officers are carrying Lori, one on each side of her, each with a hand under one of her knees and the other hand behind her back. Text under the photo describes the events.]

I got the sense that the faculty of the Philosophy Department weren’t happy about this. Keith Lehrer, who at the time was chair of the department, called me into his office and told me that I should really decide whether I wanted to study philosophy or try to change the world. Having read Marx, I had hoped that doing philosophy could change the world—and still believe it can—but left graduate school and moved to the Washington, D.C. area to try to make a difference.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was just getting started, and I was invited to move into a house with the founders of the organization, Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco, to help mount campaigns to reveal the horrible conditions that billions of animals have to endure in laboratories and factory farms. Those early years in the animal rights movement were pretty exciting.

But, as that organization grew, my interests and their interests increasingly grew apart. I was working on a campaign that brought me in contact with members of the blind community, many of whom use seeing eye dogs, which raised really interesting and challenging questions for me about animal use. There were some uncomfortable discussions around that at PETA and eventually some decisions were made with which I didn’t agree. So, I left to start doing what we now would call more “intersectional” activism—still focused on our relationships with animals, but also on homelessness, racism, and sexism.

After several years, I began missing philosophy and decided to return to graduate school to study feminist philosophy. Alison Jaggar had just moved to University of Colorado at Boulder, so I moved to Colorado to work with her there. I also worked with Dale Jamieson, who originally introduced me to animal ethics. 

I feel very fortunate that I have been employed and able to teach and write about topics that I care about in practical ethics and political philosophy, topics that include animals, of course, but I have also been able to work on ecofeminist philosophy, some philosophy of science and technology, and also philosophy of race and racism. Over the last decade or so, I have helped to develop the field of Animal Studies, that, contrary to my early experience in graduate school, recognizes, even celebrates, the value of activism to scholarship and scholarship to activism. 

ASA Trustees' Statement on Discrimination, Harassment, and Respectful Behavior

 

In response to public outcry from membership of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) (see here) about the appearance of an identified harasser on the program of its upcoming conference, the Trustees and Officers of the ASA have released the statement below:

 

Trustees' Statement on Discrimination, Harassment, and Respectful Behavior

Thursday, August 23, 2018 

 

The Officers and Trustees of the ASA are writing to acknowledge the recent call for us to do better and to do more to provide a supportive, safe, and respectful environment for all of our members.

In July, the ASA announced new policies on Discrimination, Harassment, and Respectful Behavior. Although we understand and appreciate the widespread desire for a more detailed public response from the ASA concerning a recent harassment complaint, the policy requires us to preserve confidentiality. This prevents us from commenting further on either the complaint or on remedies. We take such complaints very seriously and promise to do our very best to ensure a productive environment in which all ASA members can flourish.

We believe that our recently passed Discrimination, Harassment, and Respectful Behavior policies will allow the ASA to address complaints more effectively. We also acknowledge that we need to do more to actively foster an environment that both is and is seen to be supportive of all members. To that end, we invite ASA members to present their concerns to the Board of Trustees. If any members wish to make suggestions for how the policy might be modified or how we might improve the environment for the policy’s application, we encourage you to send comments to the DHRB ad hoc committee (John Gibson, Jonathan Neufeld and Anna Christina Ribeiro) at [email protected]. Members should also feel free to contact any member of the ASA leadership with questions, comments or suggestions. Please send any comments you wish to be discussed at the October 10 Trustees meeting in Toronto by October 3 to insure they can be addressed.

We wish to thank all of the members of the Society who have challenged the ASA to better express and promote what we all affirm to be our deepest values.

You can read/listen to the statement at the ASA site here.

 

posted by Shelley

Ten Questions About What It Would Be Like

 

1. What would it be like if nondisabled philosophers didn’t determine the questions that get asked about disability and how they will be answered, didn’t determine whose answers will count and why?
2. What would it be like if nondisabled feminist philosophers genuinely paid attention to what disabled feminist philosophers say about ableism rather than reconfigure our assertions in order to retain positions of privilege and dominance over us?
3. What would it be like if the pervasive, complex, and complicated apparatuses of disability and ableism were not reduced to the notions of “accessibility” and “accommodation” for the convenience and comfort that policy offers?
4. What would it be like if nondisabled philosophers no longer appealed to elaborate ethical principles in order to justify their casual mistreatment of us?
5. What would it be like if nondisabled philosophers acknowledged that their award-winning scholarship on (say) the Gettier problem, gender bias in science, propositional knowledge, or vagueness does not, in and of itself, make them experts on disability?
6. What would it be like if feminist philosophers were to acknowledge that their almost exclusive focus on sexual harassment has to some extent been self-serving, enabling them to conceal their own ableist and racist offences?
7. What would it be like if nondisabled feminist philosophers stopped using gender, race, and sexuality as a way to shut down discussions of ableism and preclude from consideration how mutually constitutive and reinforcing apparatuses of force relations shape those reactionary discursive practices themselves?
8. What would it be like if nondisabled feminist philosophers took it upon themselves to challenge, without coaxing, the ableism of philosophy, in particular, and of academia and society, more generally?
9. What would it be like if a nondisabled philosopher who consulted me about the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession actually took on board what I said rather than regard it as “beyond the scope of the current project”?
10. What would it be like if every concession to justice didn’t come with some subtle reminder that it is indeed a concession?

 

posted by Shelley

Statement About Sexual Harassment at the 2017 American Society for Aesthetics Conference

 

The post below appeared on the Aesthetics for Birds (AFB) blog today. It is reprinted here with permission:

 

Last November, AFB reported on an accusation of sexual harassment at the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) Annual Meeting. Five days ago, AFB reported that the accused harasser was on the program for the upcoming ASA Annual Meeting, along with the accuser. Since then, a number of differing accounts have emerged regarding how the original accusation was lodged, largely via discussions on social media. In particular, some members of ASA leadership have stated that no official complaint was ever made by the accuser. The accuser has asked us to publish the following statement.

 

It was reported that an incident of sexual harassment occurred at the annual American Society for Aesthetics conference last November by a senior member. I am the accuser. This year, the issue has resurfaced because various ASA members have noticed that the accused person is on this year’s annual conference program, despite others raising red flags on my behalf. I’m currently sitting here and reading comments posted on various threads on social media about this issue – some are supportive, constructive, and some are misinformed. That is why I am coming forward and writing this now.

I feel no need to go into details about the incident itself or to call anyone out. What I am currently troubled by is the misinformed and false statements that are reported. For example, it’s said that my allegations are hearsay, that no official or direct complaint was filed, that ‘the accuser’ has not posted on various social media platforms about the issue, and that I never directly reached out to the officers. What is more, others have no memory or documentation of my complaint. I have had a recent apology from an ASA leader about some of the misunderstandings, for which I am grateful, but, I am still seeing misrepresentations and false characterizations about certain actions that took place.  I personally want to set the record straight. I did, in fact, write a timeline of events, I did confront the accused (with other members), I did make an official complaint to an ASA Trustee, a trusted and respected member of the Society, who then submitted my complaints to ASA leaders on my behalf. Appropriate actions were taken at the time of my reporting this incident and direct communication was made with me. Now, in light of the accused appearing on this year’s conference program and as more concerns are raised, it seems some are telling a different story. This is disappointing because it sends a message that the organization is more important than its members. I am no longer curious why people don’t come forward with such grievances. It’s exhausting. It’s embarrassing. It seems pointless. We must work together and change our mentality of what is acceptable and that we simply should no longer stand for behavior that has long been seen as the status quo. As such, I will work with the leadership to make sure my complaint is official and on the record.

In the midst of all of this, I’ve had countless support and so I end on a positive note to say that I am grateful. I am also hopeful that we can work towards creating a healthy environment within the ASA.

Sincerely,

Shelby Moser

 

The original post at AFB is here.

 

posted by Shelley