Two weeks from today, that is, January 14, I leave for the Eastern APA in New York. I will present in an APA symposium on my work in philosophy of disability on Tuesday, January 16, and then travel to Syracuse on Thursday, January 18, to present at the Central New York Humanities Corridor on Friday, January 19. You will find the announcement for the latter event here: https://calendar.syracuse.edu/events/2024-jan-19/shelley-tremain-bioethics-de-mystified/

But on the Friday before these exciting events take place, I will present to the Genealogy Workshop that Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Daniele Lorenzini have organized. The workshop, which will take place online and to which attendance is limited, is intended to provide a venue in which contributors to Genealogy: A Genealogy (ed. Erlenbusch-Anderson and Lorenzini) may receive feedback on their draft chapters of the book. The Erlenbusch-Anderson/Lorenzini collection, which promises to be incredible, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in late 2024.

My chapter in Genealogy: A Genealogy (as this BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY post suggests) is entitled “Disabling Bioethics: An Abolitionist Genealogy” and draws upon work that I have done on Foucault and genealogy (for e.g., here, here, and here), as well as my ongoing efforts (for e.g., here, here, here, and here) to elaborate the eugenic impetus and carceral motivational assumptions of the field of bioethics (including feminist bioethics and disability bioethics). These productive forces, I argue, are best exemplified (both deriving from and culminating in) by the formative role that bioethicists have played and continue to play in the introduction and expansion of legislation to promote MAiD, in Canada especially, though not exclusively.

The chapter in the Erlenbusch-Anderson/Lorenzini collection will be incorporated into Disabling Philosophy, the monograph that I am currently writing (publication details available soon). An abstract for my forthcoming chapter in Genealogy: A Genealogy is copied below.

Disabling Bioethics: An Abolitionist Genealogy

Abstract

In this chapter, I will trace a genealogy of bioethics to identify this subfield of philosophy as a technology of government and mechanism of neoliberal eugenics. Bioethics, I maintain, emerged as a technology of government to resolve the problem that the production of disability poses for the neoliberal management of societies. Although bioethics emerged as a technology of government to provide intellectual resources for the resolution of the problem of disability, it is however simultaneously implicated in the constitution of disability (and its naturalized foundation, impairment) as a natural deficit and disadvantage. Indeed, the subdiscipline of bioethics, which relies on an epistemology of domination, is an institutionalized vehicle for the biopolitics of our time, that is, the intellectual resources that bioethics provides facilitate the “strengthening” (read: fitness) of a certain population and the elimination of others.

Bioethicists reject this critique of bioethics, dutifully fostering the mystique of the bioethics project. For example, bioethicists will not acknowledge that the expansion of their profession coincides with and enables the steadily expanding production and rationalization of biopolitical normalization and its social harms; instead, bioethicists explain the genealogy of their profession and its steady expansion in terms of discrete events–such as the decades-long involvement of medical ethicists in the Tuskegee Study–casting this expanding governmentality as the necessary antidote to disruptions in the history of an otherwise noble endeavor which strives to ensure that the methodologies and practices of biomedicine and biomedical science uphold the highest ethical standards (for example, The Hastings Center Timeline Committee, n.d.). Thus this chapter will offer an alternative genealogy of bioethics that incorporates a philosophy and politics of abolitionism. The crux of my argument in the chapter will be that in order for philosophy to advance justice for disabled people, bioethics–as a mechanism and technology of the apparatus of disability–must be abolished.