Before I begin, I want to express my sincere gratitude to Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson for the tremendous effort that she has made to organize this symposium. I also want to thank Melinda, Julie, and Catherine for their participation in the symposium, as well as thank everyone else in the room who has come to the session.

I’m a white disabled woman with brown greying hair. I’m wearing large plastic glasses, stud earrings, and three silver necklaces. Behind me, to my right, there’s a clock on the wall and a curtained window. Above me, there’s a ceiling fan.

My presentation today is entitled “Philosophy of Disability: Its Purposes and Places.” I’ve now posted the presentation to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. If you wish to read along with me, you’ll find the presentation at the top of the blog.

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Under different circumstances, I would have travelled to New York from Ontario by train. It would have been the first trip that I’ve taken to a destination outside of Canada since early 2000, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. But only a few months before the world determined the spread of COVID-19 to be a pandemic, I had returned to Canada aboard a transatlantic flight from Johannesburg, South Africa, where I gave a keynote address that situated philosophy of disability and disabled philosophers in relation to the discipline and profession.

During that long return flight, I made a vow to myself that I would no longer engage in air travel because our planet is in peril and, as a white settler in the Global North, I felt (and feel) compelled to be accountable for my contribution to this calamity. Subsequently, I made a more specific commitment both collaboratively and publicly when I signed the Online Accessibility Pledge that Philosophers for Sustainability initiated, a pledge according to which we signatories vowed not to fly to academic conferences such as this one and not to organize conferences to which other academics would be compelled to fly.

Kyle Whyte (2019, 2020) uses the term epistemologies of crisis to refer to settler narratives that ignore histories of colonization in order to characterize certain states of affairs as “unprecedented” and “urgent,” including the settler narratives that characterize the current situation with respect to climate change as unprecedented and urgent.

Naomi Klein (2007) coined the term disaster capitalism to capture elements of neoliberalism that produce, exploit, and aggravate perceived and actual economic, political, environmental, and social disasters and crises–such as Hurricane Katrina and other effects of climate change–in ways that enlarge the reach of unregulated economic markets.

In recent research and publications, I have drawn on Whyte’s writing on climate change and settler presentism and Klein’s writing on climate change and neoliberalism to elaborate my arguments about disability and the allegedly unprecedented normalization of liberal eugenics.

For example, my chapter in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability (2024) combines both Whyte’s insights about epistemologies of crisis and Klein’s remarks about disaster capitalism with Michel Foucault’s approach to inquiry in ways that enable me to articulate my conviction according to which bioethics is an instrument and technology of biopower’s liberal eugenics and, ultimately, an insidious enterprise of colonial power. I substantiate the argument in the chapter by unravelling a sustained critique of the disaster ableism that conditions existing and impending Canadian legislation on assisted suicide and euthanasia–euphemistically referred to as “medical assistance in dying,” or “MAiD”.

Indeed, I introduced the term disaster ableism to refer to the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has been mobilized to camouflage the legacy of eugenic projects in Canada and represent them as innovative and without historical precedent. In the chapter, I thus offer a rebuttal of both the misleading claims that, throughout the pandemic, Canadian bioethicists and philosophers have made about these interventions and the intellectual resources that, even before the pandemic, bioethicists and philosophers provided to Canadian politicians in order to ensure enshrinement of the legislation and normalization of the practice itself.

In some respects, therefore, the remarks that I will make about philosophy of disability in this presentation extend the remarks that I made in Johannesburg shortly before the outset of the pandemic. Nevertheless, my understanding of the scope of philosophy of disability has shifted in the last few years given my scrutiny of the many forms of disaster ableism that the pandemic has generated. Hence, the motivational assumptions that underpin what I now think that philosophers of disability should examine and elaborate have become more complicated than they were in the past and my beliefs about who counts as a philosopher of disability are likely more contentious.

In 2001, I published my article “On the Government of Disability,” which problematized (in Foucault’s sense) the impairment/disability distinction that disabled activists in the United Kingdom instated when they adopted a structuralist nature/culture distinction for the purposes of disability research and politics. At the time that my article was published, this distinction–commonly known as “the social model”–had dominated disability studies and activism internationally for thirty years. On the terms of the British social model or BSM (as I variously refer to the model), impairments are prediscursive, natural, and hence, politically neutral, bodily characteristics of individuals on whom disability–construed as a form of social disadvantage–is imposed (Oliver 1996).

The BSM was lauded by disabled activists internationally because it appeared to both divorce disability from the notion of “natural disadvantage” and redefine disability as an entirely contingent set of social circumstances. Michael Oliver (1996) and other early proponents of the BSM were adamant that their model severed the causal connection between impairment and disability that the medical model of disability deemed inevitable and, moreover, claimed that their model circumvented how, in many respects, the medical model collapsed any distinction whatsoever between so-called natural disadvantage and recognizably social circumstances. In contrast to the “personal tragedy theory of disability” (as Oliver referred to this medicalized conception of disability), the BSM, he argued, has “nothing to do with the body” (36).

This claim, and the masculinist demeanor of many early proponents of the British social model, led to a host of criticisms from (among others) disabled feminists, Black disabled people, and disabled people of colour, as well as disabled authors who used phenomenology. Among the criticisms were charges according to which the BSM obscures the ways that disabled people are racialized and gendered in collusion with the ways that they are disabled; that insofar as the BSM focuses exclusively on social oppression that disabled people confront, it does not account for their lived experiences of impairment; and that the model reinforces a division between the public and the private spheres which is especially oppressive to certain disabled people and effectually (re)privatizes contexts in which many disabled people are subjected to violence, abuse, and neglect.

In the 2001 article, I aimed to point out what proponents of the British social model and critics of it misunderstood. That is, I pointed out that although proponents of the BSM explicitly argue, first, that disablement is not a necessary consequence of impairment, and second, that impairment is not a sufficient condition for disability, an unstated premise of the model is, third, that impairment is a necessary condition for disability, that is, that impairment is the natural, i.e., prediscursive, foundation of disability. For, on the terms of the BSM, only people who have or are presumed to have an “impairment” get to count as “disabled.”

Thus, I showed that the strict division between the categories of impairment and disability, which proponents of the BSM claimed to institute, was in fact a chimera. In short, my argument in the article was designed to show that impairment has been disability all along; that is, I reversed the relation of entailment that both the medical model and the BSM presupposed. Let me note here that readers of Foucault, Judith Butler, and Ladelle McWhorter (among others) should recognize this theoretical move as the shift from a juridical understanding of power as wholly repressive, centralized, and unidirectional to a representation of power relations as chiefly productive, performative, coercive, and diffuse, operating primarily from the ground up.

The impact of the article constituted a defining moment in the genealogy of critical disability theory, interrupting the masculinist dominance of the BSM and the purportedly widespread allegiance to it that its proponents took for granted and had come to demand, including for jobs, for places in edited collections, for publication in journals, for inclusion in conference rosters, and so on.

With few exceptions, however, the article and its significance have been virtually ignored in philosophy, where disability was (and largely remains) regarded as philosophically uninteresting and as adequately and appropriately addressed in the domain of bioethics. Even feminist and other oppositional philosophers have consistently refused to acknowledge the ways in which disabled people are constituted as the present absence of philosophy: that is, we are excluded from philosophical discourse–including from jobs and job postings, conferences, publication, and editorial boards–and, simultaneously, our elimination is at the core of one of philosophy’s subfields, namely, bioethics, constituting the desideratum of this subfield.

Despite the disregard with which my 2001 article has been met in philosophical circles, I have used the methodology and conceptual frame of the article to advance arguments about the biopolitical character of (for example) prenatal testing and genetic counselling discourse, embryonic stem-cell research, feminist critiques of Foucault, and the nursing-home-industrial complex. I have, in addition, used tools of the article to argue that these mechanisms and practices are productive strategies of biopower (as Foucault has referred to it) through which the apparatus of disability and other relatively recent networks of power have coalesced.

Advancing these arguments and employing these devices has involved pointing out to philosophers that they err insofar as they regard the shibboleths of bioethics and liberalism–namely, autonomy and choice–as signifiers of freedom and liberation rather than as governmental strategies of power that enable subjects to act in order to constrain them, that is, put in place the limits of possible conduct from which subjects may “autonomously choose.”

The methodological assumptions and conceptual frame of the 2001 article have served as springboards for my expanding critique of the infrastructure of philosophy in general and bioethics in particular, a critique of bioethics according to which this subfield of philosophy is a technology of government, a mechanism of the apparatus of disability, and a strategy of liberal, neocolonial eugenics.

This critique of bioethics–the increasing complexity of which can be traced through a genealogy of my articles and my monograph Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (2017)–has facilitated my examination of the ways in which the naturalized conception of disability that prevails in philosophy is reproduced; in addition, the critique has enabled me to articulate how this conception of disability provides justification and rationale for the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession of philosophy and the marginalization of critical philosophical work on disability from the discipline.

In this regard, I have sought to cultivate and nurture an approach to philosophical inquiry into disability that I began to conjure in graduate school, calling it “philosophy of disability.” For more than two decades, I have devoted my time and energy–that is, my research, my activism in philosophy, publications, intellectual support, teaching, and so on, including the vital Dialogues on Disability series–to the recognition and development of a new subfield in philosophy that revolves around this approach to disability, an approach that requires identification of the mechanisms of ableism that philosophy persistently produces.

Philosophy of disability, I maintain, is a philosophical approach to the study of disability that must eschew the characterization and treatment of disability that flourish in the subfield of bioethics especially (though not exclusively) and ought to be abolitionist about the lucrative neoliberal eugenic project to which the enormous success of bioethics should be attributed. Philosophy of disability should, furthermore, be regarded as both distinct from and critical of the work on disability that some analytic philosophers who claim to produce philosophy of disability engage, that is, should be understood as radically defiant of the individualizing and naturalizing ontological commitments with respect to disability that these other philosophers make.

Bona fide specialists in this emerging subfield of philosophy do the following: first, they examine both how philosophy puts into circulation misrepresentations of phenomena that disability comprises and how it enhances existing misrepresentations of these phenomena; second, they advance arguments and explanations about how critical and oppositional analyses of disability are marginalized in philosophy, if not entirely excluded from it; third, they advance arguments and explanations about how disabled philosophers–and disabled philosophers of disability in particular–are vastly underrepresented in the profession; and fourth, they articulate up-to-date understandings of disability that construe it as an irreducibly social and political affair.

In other words, philosophy of disability identifies and interrogates how disability has historically been produced, represented, and addressed within the discipline of philosophy and the broader social milieu; it scrutinizes how its own ineluctably critical approach to disability is marginalized in some areas of philosophy and entirely excluded from other areas of the discipline; it documents how disabled philosophers of disability are virtually absent from permanent positions in the profession; and it offers novel discourses about disability that refuse the strategic naturalization and depoliticization of disability by and through the institutional, professional, and disciplinary practices that function as the sedimented scaffolding of philosophy.

Mainstream (nondisabled) philosophy continues to operate under the guise of neutrality, rationality, and objectivity. Nevertheless, the discipline of philosophy–and every other “traditional” discipline that constitutes the modern university–both implicitly and explicitly advances certain ontologies, methodologies, and epistemologies, that is, certain political, social, economic, cultural, and institutional mechanisms condition philosophy and every other discipline of the modern university, even though conventional, established disciplines such as philosophy continue to be represented—and to variously represent themselves—as value neutral, disinterested, detached, and impartial. In short, the purported neutrality, rationality, and objectivity which are alleged to be foundational to philosophy disguise the situated and interested nature of philosophical movements, approaches, and argumentative claims.

During the past several decades and in the last several years especially, philosophers who are institutionally, politically, and socially subordinated have steadily challenged the cisgender and heteronormative whiteness and androcentrism of philosophy, persistently working to forge paths for the discipline that make it available to a wider range of constituencies who import an array of hitherto obscured and subjugated identities, perspectives, histories, and values into philosophical discourse and practice.

For example, a number of feminist philosophy journals and societies have been created; summer schools have proliferated that provide mentoring and other support to racialized, 2SLGBTQ+, and working-class philosophy students; professional philosophy associations increasingly fund projects that promote the interests of underrepresented philosophy faculty; and more and more philosophy conferences prioritize the contributions of members of underrepresented groups in philosophy, while spotlighting marginalized areas of philosophical research.

Notwithstanding the ways that relations of power within the discipline and profession have begun to shift due to these measures, however, philosophy of disability and disabled philosophers continue to be systematically left out of many, if not most, of these initiatives or are haphazardly added to them based on assumptions about “inclusion” and “diversity” that take gender and race (construed as mutually exclusive) to be paradigmatic categories of identity and subjection, effectively depoliticizing disability and obscuring how the distinct ways that disabled philosophers are subjected in philosophy complicate myriad constructions of gender and race.

The enduring and demoralizing inaccessibility of feminist and other philosophy conferences, for example, drastically constrains the efforts of disabled feminist, racialized, and queer philosophers of disability to de-segregate the profession of philosophy and, indeed, reinforces segregationist practices in philosophy.

Like philosophy of gender, philosophy of race, and other oppositional and counter-discourses in philosophy, philosophy of disability relies on the tools of social constructionism and hence an implicit critique of essentialism. Although philosophers of disability may disagree with each other about what disability is, as well as how, and the extent to which, disability is socially constructed, assumptions about the social construction of disability more or less lie at the heart of philosophy of disability; that is, regardless of how much practitioners of this relatively recent subfield of philosophical inquiry otherwise disagree with each other, they concur with each other that disability is not a natural state of affairs that exists apart from historically contingent relations of social power.

Rather, philosophers of disability provide insights that talk back to the dominant conceptualization of disability that is constitutive of bioethics, cognitive science, and mainstream political philosophy and ethics especially, according to which disability is a natural–i.e., prediscursive–deficit, personal misfortune, or pathology that leads to the social, economic, and political disadvantages that disabled people confront.

Indeed, the questions that mainstream philosophers have asked (and continue to ask) about disability rely on a cluster of motivational assumptions that, as I have noted, take for granted the metaphysical status and epistemological character of disability, casting it as a self-evident and hence philosophically uninteresting designation that science and medicine can accurately represent. On the terms of this cluster of assumptions, disability is a transcultural and transhistorical disadvantage, an objective human defect, that is, a non-accidental, biological human property, attribute, or characteristic that ought to be prevented, corrected, eliminated, or cured.

That these assumptions are contestable, that disability might be a historically and culturally specific and contingent social phenomenon, a complex apparatus of power rather than a natural attribute or property that certain people possess, is not considered, let alone seriously entertained. Insofar as practitioners of the Euro-American philosophical tradition have (with few exceptions) cast disability as a natural, negative, and inert state of affairs in this way, they have largely removed disability from the realm of philosophical inquiry, precluding it from serious interrogation and keeping at bay philosophical debate and questioning about its epistemological, ethical, ontological, and political status.

Nevertheless, philosophy of disability–a widening body of critical philosophical work–denaturalizes disability and, in so doing, politicizes domains of phenomena that (nondisabled) philosophers either naturalize and omit from critical consideration or misrepresent in ways that detrimentally affect disabled people, including the phenomena that have characterized the COVID-19 pandemic: namely, the naturalization and depoliticization of risk, the vulnerabilization of disabled people and elders confined in nursing homes and other carceral congregate settings, and the neoliberal privatization of responsibility for transmission of the virus itself.

My efforts to foster philosophy of disability have culminated in the publication of The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability.

The publication of the collection will undermine prevailing elements of philosophy that naturalize and medicalize disability, regardless of whether they congeal and manifest in mainstream philosophy or in underrepresented oppositional philosophies. For the collection introduces a substantial corpus of philosophical work designed to subvert the adverse arguments about disability that philosophers promote and destabilize the hostile sociocultural discourses about disability from which philosophy draws and to which it contributes.

In contradistinction to typical mainstream philosophy, philosophy of disability represents itself as politically motivated in character and socially engaged in content. For like other oppositional and progressive discourses within the university, philosophy of disability has grown out of and remains associated with cultural movement for social justice that endeavors to unsettle current institutional, political, economic, and social arrangements and the power relations that comprise them, reproduce them, and sustain them.

I thus contend that the incorporation of certain treatments of disability–certain analytic treatments of disability, especially certain analytic bioethical treatments of disability–under the rubric of philosophy of disability dilutes the radical potential of this area of philosophical practice. These “applications” of analytic philosophy to disability serve, in a variety of ways, to reinstate conventional relations of power with respect to disability.

As I have pointed out, the motivational assumptions of this new subfield—philosophy of disability—are distinct from the assumptions that motivate mainstream philosophical stances on disability according to which disability is a prediscursive human trait or characteristic, a natural flaw or defect that can be adequately and appropriately addressed in the subfield of bioethics and cognate areas of inquiry. The assumptions that motivate philosophy of disability are, moreover, importantly different from the presuppositions that inspire claims about disability whose terms of reference are framed as mutually exclusive, dispassionately associated with each other through a conjunction—that is, as philosophy and disability—rather than purposively implicated in each other through a preposition—that is, as philosophy of disability.

Within the terms of the former frame–philosophy and disability–disability is positioned as an object upon which philosophy sets its overbearing inquisitorial gaze, a gaze whose primary research interests remain the questions and concerns about disability that (nondisabled, white, heterosexual, and propertied) mainstream Western and Northern philosophers have generated, largely under the rubric of bioethics. Within the terms of the latter frame—philosophy of disability—by contrast, the ways in which philosophers research and write about the phenomena of disability are assumed to significantly contribute to the very constitution and reproduction of disability; to the ways in which causation with respect to disability is understood; to how the causes and effects of disability are represented; as well as to the constitution, consolidation, representation, and reproduction of philosophy itself.

The discursive practices that philosophers use to represent disability, the contexts in which certain forms of representation of disability take place, and the assumptions that underlie the rationale offered for why and how representation takes place as such are fundamental mechanisms of (the apparatuses of) disability and ableism, materializing the contingent phenomena that they comprise, elaborating their parameters, specifying their delineation, and so on. An astute philosophy of disability recognizes that its defining terms of reference are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing, entangled and entwined.

Insofar as a certain strand of philosophers who write about disability have for the most part concentrated on the formulation of responses to a normative agenda that their predominantly nondisabled and white mainstream philosophy interlocutors have essentially determined for them, their philosophical reflections on disability have remained largely wedded to an ableist, racist, speciesist, and cisheterosexist politic.

That is, inasmuch as these philosophers have primarily confined their analyses of disability to (for example) normative concerns with respect to the debate between (outdated conceptions of) justice and care; the most suitable account of distributive justice for what society owes disabled people; the so-called expressivist objection; the distinction between “curative” and “therapeutic” technologies with respect to disability; and mainstream assumptions about the allegedly diminished quality of life of disabled people–all of which matters their interlocutors in mainstream analytic philosophy initiated in the first place–examination of the metaphysical and epistemological status of disability has continued to be neglected in philosophy; naturalization and medicalization of disability have extended in new directions in certain areas of the discipline; the eugenic impetus of bioethics has been consistently legitimized; the historical emergence of disability and its contingency have remained obscured; denial persists about how certain ontological and ethical commitments condition ableist segregation of the profession; and the ways that disability is intertwined with other apparatuses of power–including settler colonialism, nationalism, white supremacy, class, and speciesism–have gone almost entirely unaddressed.

Crucially, The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability has been configured to move philosophical work on disability beyond and outside of the artifactual strictures of research that heretofore predominant philosophical analyses with respect to disability have erected. To be sure, The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability is the first edited collection in the field of philosophy of disability. I am very proud of it and very happy that I produced it. I will, nevertheless, be even prouder and even happier if it is not the last edited collection of philosophy of disability to be produced.

References

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Random House of Canada.

Oliver, Michael. 1996. Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice. London: Macmillan.

Tremain, Shelley. 2001. On the Government of Disability. Social Theory and Practice 27 (4): 617-636.

Tremain, Shelley L. 2017. Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Tremain, Shelley Lynn. 2024. Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics. In The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, edited by Shelley Lynn Tremain, 19-48. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Whyte, Kyle. 2019. “Climate Change: An Unprecedently Old Catastrophe.” BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (blog). January 16. Available at: https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2019/01/16/climate-change-an-unprecedently-old-catastrophe/ (accessed November 9, 2023).

Whyte, Kyle. 2020. Against Crisis Epistemology. In Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Steve Larkin, and Chris Andersen, 52-64. New York and London: Routledge.