Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability

Philosophy of Disability as Critical Diversity Studies

“…Although these apparently distinct conceptions of disability diverge from each other in some important ways, they depend upon roughly the same assumptions about the epistemological and ontological status of impairment and disability, as well as upon the same assumptions about social power, including the assumption according to which power is fundamentally repressive and external to preexisting objects upon which it acts. I disagree with all these assumptions (see Tremain, 2017).…”

“…Is it morally permissible to euthanize severely disabled people? Is it morally permissible to experiment on cognitively disabled people (see Tremain, 2017)? Nevertheless, more and more philosophers-some who write in direct response to the set of questions about disability that Rawls's text motivated in mainstream (analytic) political philosophy and others whose writing on disability stems from feminist and Foucauldian analyses of power, the body, normality, subjectivity, and identity-have contested or defied mainstream philosophical work on disability by articulating and responding to questions such as these: How do accepted philosophical understandings about (say) autonomy, rationality, subjectivity, and individuality fail to account for the circumstances of disabled people's lives?…”

“…Although critical analysis of disability has made noticeable inroads elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, such analysis of disability-as a politically informed variety of CDS-remains severely marginalized within philosophy, a state of affairs that should be attributed to a complex and 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. Indeed, the assumption that disability is appropriately and adequately addressed in the domains of medicine, the life sciences, and related fields has, itself, shaped philosophy departments, influencing hiring practices and decisions as well as course curricula, conference lineups, the composition of professional networks and editorial boards, the contents of edited collections, and so on (see Tremain, 2017; also see Tremain, 2010Tremain, , 2013Tremain, , 2014. In short, the assumption that disability is a philosophically uninteresting human characteristic, on one hand, and the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers and continued marginalization of philosophy of disability are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing, entangled and entwined.…”

“…Roberts and other "disability activists" in the United States, who were spurred on by the successes of the Independent Living Movement, the women's movement, and the Black civil rights movement, as well as by the ideological assumptions of liberal individualism, went on to fight long and hard for legislation that would institutionalize a tripartite conception of disability into U.S. domestic policy. On the terms of this conception, a disability is understood as a functional limitation caused by an impairment or biological deficit, a limitation in function often met with social prejudice and exclusion, which was initially referred to as "handicap," though is now referred to as "disability discrimination" (see Tremain, 2017 for an explanation for this transition). The claims to entitlement that early American disability activists advanced-understood in terms of civil rights and equal opportunitywere ultimately institutionalized in the American With Disabilities Act of 1990, which, to many activists, signaled the emergence of people with disabilities as a bona fide social minority group.…”

“The Atlas of Our Skin and Bone and Blood”: Disability, Ablenationalism, and the War on Drugs

“…Weaving her experiences with her husband's treatment and eventual death due to brain cancer, Erevelles engages with debates regarding the relationship between materiality and sociality. Like other theorists of disability, such as Tremain (2005Tremain ( , 2017 and Helen Meekosha and Russell Shuttleworth (Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009), Erevelles critiques the naturalization of impairment, and extends this critique through an analysis of the expansion of transnational capitalism. Political economy, she argues, shapes the forms of embodied difference that render lived experiences possible.…”