Yesterday, I posted on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY about my computer problems in advance of the Eastern APA, requesting assistance from tech savvy philosophers who would be in New York for the meeting there this week. As I said in the post, computer mishaps have long been among my worst nightmares: writing for a broad audience is what sustains me philosophically, politically, financially. My nightmares and general worries in this regard are of course fueled by the continued exclusion of disabled philosophers and philosophy of disability from the profession and discipline and the public acceptance and institutionalization of poverty and marginalization for disabled people in Canadian society (and elsewhere) more broadly.

As I point out in “New Movement in Philosophy: Philosophy of Disability,” my introduction to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, despite the lip-service that most nondisabled feminist and other philosophers pay to “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “intersectionality,” they (continue to) fail to substantiate these slogans with respect to disabled feminist philosophers and disabled people in general. That nondisabled feminist philosophers continue to implicitly and explicitly support disabled cismale philosophers who hold compromised understandings of the ways in which gender and disability (as well as race, class, and sexuality) are co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing is only the tip of the iceberg. For here too, though not only here, disabled feminist philosophers and their work are discursively and materially obscured, rendered adrift and outcast.

That another generation of disabled and queer feminist philosophers now articulate the exclusion and refusal that they experience is not always a comfort and reinforcement to me. On the contrary, although the distress and indeed anger that emerging disabled feminist, queer, and racialized philosophers articulate–as BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY blogger Mich Ciurria recently did on X/Twitter and Facebook–puts into circulation (once again) the frustration and hopelessness with which I have long grappled and with which most disabled feminist, queer, and racialized philosophers steadily grapple, I realize that these words will be largely ignored and pacified, that reaction to them will be largely redirected to disabled cismen in philosophy whose perspectives and actions are less threatening and less contentious.

While I again confronted the material reality of these refusals and exclusions yesterday, I received two long automated voicemails from Amtrak informing me that my connecting train trips to New York had been cancelled. I will not be presenting in New York after all. Nevertheless, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, who is an exceptional ally to me and other disabled feminist philosophers, is determined to proceed with a session on my work in philosophy of disability and thus is determined to provide me with Zoom access to this session of the Eastern APA.

If no one in the APA leadership and Eastern program committee definitively objects, the symposium on my work in philosophy of disability will take place, as scheduled, in New York and on Zoom Tuesday, January 16, at 2 o’clock pm ET; that is, Melinda Hall, Julie Maybee, and Catherine Clune-Taylor will be in New York for the symposium and I will Zoom in from home. As is my usual practice when I present to a large conference, I will post my remarks to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY so that readers and listeners at the conference itself and of the wider international community can read/listen to the remarks in real time.

If all goes as Verena has planned, I will travel to Syracuse later this week to present to the Central New York Humanities Corridor.