Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the one hundred and third installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 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 exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

The land on which on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is Corinne Lajoie. Corinne is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University, where they are also the Crawford Graduate Fellow in Ethical Inquiry at the Rock Ethics Institute. They recently published an articler on access and belonging in The Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2021). Their chapter on access and Merleau-Ponty is forthcoming in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability (December 2023). Corinne enjoys reading fiction, biking around Philadelphia, where they recently moved, and boxing.

[Description of photo below: selfie of a smiling Corinne whose hair is swept back behind their ears and who is wearing a shirt with buttons. They are in a room with white walls, a couch with pillows, and other furniture.]

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Corinne! You are still a graduate student; nevertheless, your work on phenomenology and disability is already getting considerable attention. Please provide us with the details about your background that have led you to this point.

Thank you, Shelley! I am a big fan of the series, so it’s a pleasure to be interviewed by you.

I never thought that I would end up studying philosophy, because my first love was always literature. I studied creative writing at CEGEP, which, in Quebec, is the equivalent of college, and, with some friends, I founded a small independent press that published poetry. The project was short lived, but we published some books that I remain proud of today. I loved being involved in a creative venture with friends. As an undergraduate student, I continued this trajectory and studied comparative literature. I took philosophy classes because my training in comparative literature was interdisciplinary and required that I take classes in other departments.

It’s kind of a cliché to say, but I really did fall in love with philosophy. Discovering phenomenology was especially transformative. I still remember reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception for the first time, not understanding a whole lot of it, but nevertheless finding it captivating that someone was writing about embodiment, spatiality, and temporality in this way.

My department was a very traditional department, with strengths in the history of philosophy, and offered no courses in feminist philosophy, let alone philosophy of race, decolonial philosophy, trans philosophy, or philosophy of disability. This traditional approach imprinted on me a rather narrow conception of what philosophy could be; I was grateful to later discover the work of feminist phenomenologists and phenomenologists of race, from Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir to Sara Ahmed, Gail Weiss, and Alia Al-Saji.

Around the same time, I also discovered Ami Harbin’s work on disorientations and moral life. Ami’s work truly shaped the kind of philosopher that I am today. I realized that I, too, wanted to write about “disoriented” or “disorienting” experiences that have largely been overlooked in the history of philosophy, many of which include the lived experience of disability, experiences of chronic illness, of being racialized as non-white, of queerness and transness, as well as other experiences that significantly impact human lives in undertheorized ways. Encountering the work of the scholars that I have mentioned made me realize that other people out there were interested in the same things in which I was interested. I could pursue a career in philosophy without foregoing my desire to produce socially engaged work that does not abstract away from considerations of power, privilege, and oppression.

After completing my master’s degree in philosophy, I worked for a year as the research coordinator of a health-ethics research team at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute. This position gave me the opportunity to develop skills in qualitative data collection and analysis and to lead a research project on the concept of vulnerability in mental-health research. It was a formative experience. So, I’m very glad that I didn’t go straight into a Ph.D. after my M.A. The experience also informed my approach to philosophy. In my work, I now draw on empirical research to stake claims about normative questions and use–as my starting point for philosophical inquiry–concrete facts about the reality of socially unjust worlds.

Empirical research–by which I primarily mean qualitative research–is often overlooked within philosophy. Yet it contains invaluable information about how differently positioned human beings—oftentimes people who will not go on to write philosophical books or articles—experience and view the world. Of course, philosophers should not take these findings entirely at face value. They should (for instance) consider what norms and values are built into the frame of empirical investigations and evaluate their methodological assumptions. But philosophers also have much to gain from engagement with social science research, especially if they are concerned with lived experiences and perspectives that have been historically stigmatized, marginalized, or ignored in philosophy.

This summary pretty much takes us to where I am today. I started my Ph.D. at Penn State in 2019 and will defend my dissertation next spring.

Although your M.A. thesis was about Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology more generally, your writing has recently become concerned with social, political, and ethical questions. How would you characterize this shift in the axis of your research?

My M.A. thesis, as you mention, was situated in the phenomenological tradition. I analyzed discussions of perceptual normativity in the work of Frantz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty to develop an original account of norms as embodied orientations toward sense (or meaning). This account of embodied norms led me to consider experiences that disrupt or disorient established ways of experiencing the world. Undergoing these disorientations compels us to embrace new ways of relating to ourselves, to others, and to the world. I have written about how love can have this effect, but this category also includes a vast set of experiences such as gender-transition, becoming disabled, ending an abusive relationship, becoming a parent, or coming out as queer.

In a 2019 Hypatia article, I employed tools from phenomenology to examine experiences of illness as disorienting. Then, I co-directed–with Emily R. Douglas, whom you interviewed in January 2020–a special 2020 issue of Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology on the theme “Critically Sick: New Phenomenologies of Illness, Madness, and Disability.” We solicited contributions that explored how (or even whether) phenomenology can be employed to analyze experiences of illness, disability, and sickness through an intersectional lens, in dialogue with the fields of disability and Mad studies.

Despite everything phenomenology has to offer, I came to the realization that there are some questions which phenomenology alone cannot help us answer. For this reason, my approach to philosophy is more pluralist now than it has been in the past. I engage directly with debates in social and political philosophy, feminist ethics, philosophy of disability, and bioethics. There is also a more personal explanation to this shift in my research. As an undergraduate student, I had this image in my head of what doing philosophy should look like. Of course, I didn’t invent this image. It’s the product of sexist, racist, and ableist norms of performance in academic philosophy that tell us that only certain forms of reasoning, writing, and debate are philosophically valuable.

When I started my M.A., I was convinced that I had to prove that I could write about “difficult” (i.e., traditional) philosophical texts to be taken seriously as a scholar. I was genuinely fascinated by Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s work; yet I also felt as if I needed to engage with the work of these authors to demonstrate that I was able to do some philosophical “heavy-lifting.” Over the years, I have worked on letting go of this image and embracing the kind of philosophy that I genuinely want to do. In recent years, I feel as though I have come into my own as a philosopher. A large part of the excitement that I feel about new directions in my research comes from giving myself room to grow in unexpected directions.

Please explain your critique of “accommodationist,” or “legalistic,” approaches to disability and higher education.

In my dissertation, “Beyond Accommodation: Disability Access as a Collective Responsibility,” I argue that our dominant framework for thinking about access as a society is flawed. Accessibility is increasingly framed as synonymous with modern democratic ideals of equity, diversity, and inclusion; furthermore, public and private entities in the United States are legally mandated to provide “reasonable accommodations” for disabled people, a provision tasked with overturning the historical exclusion of them from all dimensions of public life. This approach, while promising at first view, generates intractable issues. The system for accommodations imposes unfair burdens on disabled people and, in fact, exacerbates the inequalities that it is tasked to relieve. To be sure, there are many more things wrong with this system than I can mention in a single interview, but here are some of the problems that I identify in the dissertation.

To begin, legal accommodations single out the needs of disabled people, while leaving the ableist status quo intact. The system for accommodations frames disability as a personal limitation that generates problems of fit, rather than framing it as a social reality experienced within intersubjective worlds that assume nondisabled people to be the norm. This framing of disability runs counter to claims by disability scholars and activists that social arrangements and relations are foundational to the forms of exclusion and limitation that disabled people experience and to the lived experience of disability itself. Another major problem is that accommodation bureaucracies rely on overbroad medical documentation requests that intrude on disabled people’s privacy and cast medical professionals as gatekeepers of disability rights.

As the scholar Danielle Mireles has argued, the requirement for medical documentation is perceived as “race-neutral” and “objective” criteria for assessing the legitimacy of student needs. But of course, at least in the United States, access to healthcare is highly segregated along racial lines, resulting in massive racial disparities in access to care, diagnosis, and treatment. Systemic discrimination and medical costs function as a significant barrier to the acquisition of the diagnoses and documentation required to secure legal accommodations. By positioning Western biomedical knowledge as the arbiter of truth about disability, legalistic approaches both exacerbate the social inequalities that they are tasked to relieve and reinforce medicalized views of disability in society.

In addition to these problems, there is still so much stigma that surrounds academic accommodations in higher education. More than thirty years after the adoption of the Americans with Disabilities Act, accommodations are still viewed as “special privileges” and people who request them are often treated with suspicion. Studies show that disabled people are reluctant to seek legal accommodations or choose to delay this process indefinitely because they fear negative repercussions.

Disabled students—and especially students with nonvisible, mental health-related or learning disabilities—hesitate to apply for accommodations for reasons that include (for instance) not understanding the labyrinthic process to secure accommodations, hesitating to identify as disabled in an academic context, and feeling that they lack the self-advocacy skills required to interact with faculty members around accommodations. These concerns are compounded for Black and Brown disabled students who must consider the financial, temporal, and emotional costs of applying for accommodation, in addition to the possibility that obtaining accommodations will bolster negative racial stereotypes about their academic worth and competence.

Although improvements to the system for accommodations would benefit (some) disabled people, accommodations are just this: temporary, individual arrangements that leave the ableist organization of society intact. Currently, accessibility is framed as a matter of legal compliance. This framing means that the golden standard for access in society is minimal compliance with the law, despite the fact that this low bar frequently entails the allocation of access provisions that are experienced by disabled people as restricted, defective, or unreliable. Nondisabled people and institutions seem to give thought to accessibility only when they are legally required to do so, and many do so only retroactively, after failures of compliance have been identified by disabled people.

Because access is framed as an individual problem–rather than, say, as a collective responsibility–the responsibility for access falls on the laps of disabled people, who are left carrying the weight of access alone. The individualization of the responsibility for access results in costs and burdens for disabled people that require cognitive, physical, emotional, and rhetorical work which has negative effects on disabled people’s wellbeing and relationships.

Ultimately, I argue in my work that a narrow focus on legal compliance cannot yield meaningful access for disabled people. To achieve this, we must instead move beyond a focus on accommodations and recognize access as a collective responsibility for both disabled and nondisabled people.

My work challenges the assumption that access is a legal issue with which philosophers need not concern themselves. Although every aspect of our lives is tied to accessibility, the notion of access is largely absent from the philosophical literature. In contrast, I view access as a key social, ethical, and political concept and question for our times. If, as I argue, dominant frameworks for thinking about access are riddled with problems, then we must come together to devise solutions for these problems and develop better models of access. 

As you have noted, Corinne, in 2019, you published “Being at Home: A Feminist Phenomenology of Disorientation in Illness” in Hypatia. At the time, you identified as a woman and as someone with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). You no longer identify in this way. How has your identification in these regards shifted? Have these shifts in identification conditioned shifts in your research and teaching?

Though I am still committed to the view of belonging that I propose in this article, many things have changed in my personal life since I published it. As you mention, I no longer identify as a cisgender woman. I now identify as a nonbinary person. In professional settings and with people who do not know me personally, I use the pronouns they, them, and theirs.

I was diagnosed with BPD as a teenager, fifteen years ago. My identification as a woman at the time played a role in how I approached my own diagnosis and the scholarly literature on borderline personality disorder because BDP is overwhelmingly associated both in clinical settings and in popular culture as the “crazy bitch” diagnosis. Nearly 3 out of 4 people who are diagnosed with BPD are cisgender women (or people who are misgendered as such). Portrayals—whether explicit or implicit—of BPD in TV shows and movies rely on sexist tropes that frame impulsivity, intense emotions, mood swings, irritability, and anger as characteristically feminine traits.

The psychotherapist and writer Jonathan Foiles sums up portrayals of women with BPD as follows: “If they are women we don’t like, they are crazy, manipulative “bitches”; if [BPD traits] are portrayed in a positive light, they are manic pixie dream girls.” People living with BDP routinely face epistemic injustices in society and in health-care settings. We have little to no control over our own narrative and we are treated as though we are deceptive, manipulative, and unreliable.

Given the male-dominated and sexist history of the psychiatric profession and the fact that women are disproportionately diagnosed with this highly stigmatized disorder, feminist scholars and activists have criticized the existence of BPD as a diagnostic category and called for its abolition. Though I can understand the motivations for this view, it is not a view that I hold. For one, calls to abolish this diagnosis invalidate the perspectives of those people who have found it helpful for understanding their experiences of mental illness and disability. As feminist disability studies scholar Merri Lisa Johnson writes, “sharp dismissals [of BPD as a psychiatric category] can feel like sharp dismissals of people who identify with it.”

Our primary goal, as feminists, should be to destigmatize BPD and take people living with BPD seriously. Johnson advocates for a “neuroqueer feminist and critically mad approach to BPD” that recognizes it as a form of emotional difference or nonnormativity. On a personal level, I neither strictly identify with, nor reject, my BPD diagnosis. I received it as a young teenager, so it sometimes feels far away. I have received different diagnoses in recent years, including diagnoses of dysthymia and pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). On some days, these diagnoses feel helpful and allow me to access resources that I need. On other days, they don’t feel helpful.

I have not written about BDP or mental illness for a few years. However, I am beginning a collaboration with T. Virgil Murthy, who is the founder of the Addict Collective blog and who was interviewed for the Dialogues on Disability series in May. Virgil and I have been discussing parallels between perceptions of addicts and BPD patients. It turns out that there are many! We are exploring themes of identity reclamation, narrative control, BPD and addict representation, and ascriptions of responsibility. I am excited to see where this project will go.

What else are you currently working on?

In addition to the project with Virgil, my second and newest project is in the ethics of trust. I am currently preparing a chapter for the collected volume The Moral Psychology of Fear (Rowman and Littlefield), in which I argue that trust and fear are not necessarily at odds with each other. Fear can be a vector for trust, in both morally desirable and undesirable ways. To make this argument, I consider the case of mutual aid efforts in disability communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that these efforts illustrate how fearing with others can generate forms of social trust rooted in political solidarity.

I also have a book chapter accepted for publication in the volume Disability Justice in Emergency Conditions, edited by Joel Michael Reynolds and Mercer Gary, in which I argue that discriminatory triage policies adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic undermined disabled people’s already precarious trust in health-care institutions. Because conditions of injustice heighten the stakes of trust for members of socially marginalized groups, the popular claim that we need more trust in public institutions is misleading. I argue that we need trustworthy institutions rather than generalized trust. Rather than deplore group and individual attitudes of distrust, this project shifts our attention to the responsibility of institutions to demonstrate that they are trustworthy.

My intuition is that this shift will require that institutions take responsibility for both discrete violations of trust and their structural positioning within systems of injustice that produce harm. I will explore this question in relation to recent debates concerning responsibility for structural injustice. This project is still in its early stages, so I am excited to see where it will go.

Corinne, how would you like to end this interview? Would like to say anything more about what we have discussed in this interview or say something that we haven’t touched upon? Would you like to recommend any articles or book or other materials to our readers and listeners?

I love recommending things to read! There is so much excellent work being produced on access. In addition to my APA paper, I would refer readers to the work of scholars such as Margaret Price and the Disabled Academics Study, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Desiree Valentine, Jay Dolmage, Mia Mingus, Tanya Titchkosky, Danielle Mireles, and Annika Konrad. Beyond questions of access, my friend and colleague Mercer Gary recently published a fantastic essay in Philosophy Compass on the state of the field of care ethics. The essay offers an overview of the history of care ethics, but it also identifies how a pluralist feminist theory of care can address common philosophical critiques that are levied against care ethics.

I also want to recommend that readers and listeners check out The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, which you edited and to which I contributed a chapter. I am very proud to be part of such a ground-breaking collection of essays. I especially hope that this inexpensive guide will be used as a teaching resource in courses in ethics, bioethics, metaphysics, social and political philosophy, epistemology, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of technology, as well as in courses on disability.

Lastly, I read a lot of fiction in my free time, so I need to shout out some novels too. I recently devoured Meg Howrey’s novel They’re Going to Love You. It’s a story set in the world of professional ballet that shifts between two timelines: the first timeline unfolds in the present, as a woman faces her estranged father’s impending death; the second unfolds during the AIDS crisis in New York. It’s a beautiful portrayal of familial relationships, grief, and the kind of platonic admiration a child can have for an adult figure in their life. I would also recommend Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, which is a much lighter read that feels like a roller-coaster ride. I recommend not reading the synopsis of the book and just diving into it without knowing what’s ahead.

Thanks very much for these excellent recommendations, Corinne, and for your thoughtful remarks throughout this interview. It is my hope that members of the philosophical community will pay close attention to your work on access. Good luck on your project with Virgil!

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Corinne Lajoie’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, November 15th, 2023, for the 104th installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.