The quote of the week for this week (though it’s only Thursday) aims to further expose ableist language and its political histories, as well as underscore the contested status that the notion of intelligence should hold for philosophers. Indeed, an anti-ableist conceptualization of disability—viz. philosophy of disability—should assume that neither the notion of intelligence nor the language that produces, shapes, and represents it reflects a politically neutral reality; that is, both contribute to a regime of epistemic governmentality whose tools have, historically, been repeatedly deployed for unsavoury political and economic ends.

To take one example, the term idiot has a long and sordid past, with formative eugenic associations to the systematic institutionalization, sterilization, and extermination of tens of thousands of disabled, poor, working-class, Indigenous, and racialized people throughout North America, Australia, and Europe, beginning in the late nineteenth century and extending to the present. Various authors have written about the ways in which practices of institutionalization and sterilization have been instrumentalized to advance eugenic nationalist projects and meet the financial interests of the institutions in question—for example, by exploiting the labour of people incarcerated in them as means to maintain profitable adjacent farms and the upkeep of the institutions themselves (Carlson 2009; McWhorter 2009; Tremain 2013, 2017; Trent 2016).

Predictably, therefore, I got very angry when I opened Facebook the other day and was confronted by the sentence below, which is included in a “meme” that disabled philosopher/bioethicist Joe Stramondo has posted in the app. Additional philosophers and even some disability theorists and researchers endorsed the meme by clicking on “laugh” and “like” emojis. (Yes, horizontal oppression is a thing). The meme—which, like virtually every meme on social media, is inaccessible—depicts three beach-volleyball players in two-piece swimsuits/athletic-wear and reads:

“Trans person likely upended whole life to gain advantage in volleyball competition, reports idiot.”

The explicit ableism of this meme is by no means anomalous on social media but rather one example of many; that is, ableist tropes such as the one that the meme comprises are abundant on Facebook, Twitter/X, and other social media apps where they act primarily as rhetorical devices with which to perfunctorily mock their given targets of disdain and swiftly garner attention and support.

But make no mistake: these memes are far from harmless, enabling ableist, racist, sexist, and classist social, political, philosophical, and institutional environments to persist. For the mockery that motivates these memes: (1) requires that the allegedly natural inferiority of certain people serve as the specter to which the mockery implicitly refers; and (2) entails that the subordinated social position of these people is reinforced and reproduced.

In these discursive and material contexts, that is, the construct of “intelligence” (upon which the mockery depends) is routinely reified and valorized as a quantifiable natural human characteristic that certain people possess, while people deemed to fall below a particular threshold for possession of this characteristic—predominantly disabled, poor, working-class, Indigenous, and racialized people—are ridiculed; treated with disrespect, hostility, and abuse; and regarded as less worthy of social benefits, goods, and resources (McWhorter 2009; Carlson 2009; Simplican 2015; Tremain 2017). Not surprisingly, the commentator/id*ot putatively cited in the aforementioned meme is nameless and objectified.

Readers and listeners of this BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY post who wish to learn more about histories of ableism with respect to terms such as idiot, imbecile, mental defective, and moron (the last of which Stramondo has repeatedly used on Twitter/X) are encouraged to consult the publications listed below, each of which includes a genealogical account of these terms, the sociohistorical contexts in which they emerged, and how they have variously contributed to the production of social policy and current ideas about intelligence—whether of allegedly inherent intellectual superiority and academic achievement or street smarts and hustles (Dolmage 2017; Chapman 2023):

Carlson, Licia. 2009. The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Chapman, Robert. 2023. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.

Dolmage, Jay T. 2017. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

McWhorter, Ladelle. 2009. Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Simplican, Stacy Clifford. 2015. The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tremain, Shelley. 2013. “Educating Jouy.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 28 (2): 801-817.

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

Trent, James. 2016. Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.