Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the ninth-anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m 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, and academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

During the past year, for the ninth year in a row, I conducted landmark interviews with disabled philosophers who are variously situated with respect to disability, race, gender, institutional status, age, culture, nationality, and sexuality, and whose philosophical work covers a wide range of specializations and research interests. This ninth-anniversary installment of the series highlights the insights and lessons that these disabled philosophers offered to the philosophical community in their respective interviews.

I am delighted that T Virgil Murthy, whom I interviewed in May 2023, and John Henry Reilly, whom I interviewed in December 2023, have returned to Dialogues on Disability to assist me with this celebratory anniversary installment of the series, bringing continuity to the series and expanding it in a variety of innovative ways.

[Description of image below: a photo of Virgil, a brown-skinned, mixed-race philosopher, who is smiling and standing against a wall. They are wearing a toque and bow-tie.]

[Description of photo below:  John Henry, who is wearing glasses and has a full beard, sits for his Oral Comprehensive Exams (on Zoom) at a desk on which rests a large monitor. He is surrounded by books on shelves and on the desk. Three pens and a coffee mug sit nearby on the desk.]

The land on which I sit to conduct the Dialogues on Disability interviews is the ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabeg 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. Because I am an uninvited settler, this land acknowledgement is meant to convey my respect for and 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.

SHELLEY: Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, John Henry and Virgil! I am grateful to you for taking the time away from your teaching and research to co-produce this anniversary installment of the Dialogues on Disability series with me.

The past year of Dialogues on Disability began with the interview that I did last May with you, Virgil, in which you talked about the project that you initiated with your late friend Anna Lind and your shared convictions about (among other things) addict oppression and addict activism, as well the radical form that the latter should take. At one place in your interview, you said:

Our project, the Addict Collective, is an endeavor to popularize addict activism and liberation, by which I mean an endeavor to characterize addict oppression, critique narratives of addiction and policy concerning addiction, and generally celebrate addict experience and identity…. Our mainstay is the maxim “Nothing about us without us.” Nonaddicts generally dominate both research and policy about addiction, which is epistemologically counterproductive. Addicts are the best-positioned knowers in this discussion! Our marginalization within the discipline facilitates an environment of defamiliarization….

I connect this defamiliarization to what I call the “Normal Person Plus” abled view of disability, which alternates between downplaying and showcasing various elements of the lives of disabled people on the grounds of what parses as a “spectacle.” … Therefore, one of our major goals is to help create a hermeneutics of addict interiority. I hope that this project will help overcome some of the contributory injustice that occurs when addicts provide testimony…. In both the social construction of the addict category and the political creation of drug distribution and criminalization architecture, the relationship of addict oppression to myriad other axes of oppression is irreducible.

SHELLEY: Virgil, this brief excerpt from your interview provides rich ground for discussion about the apparatus of addiction (to use the term that Andrea Pitts has introduced) and its relation to the apparatus of disability more broadly. In particular, your remarks about addict oppression bear resemblances to what other philosophers of disability have argued about the epistemic injustices that the apparatus of disability enables. How would you flesh out the epistemic injustices to which you refer in the interview?

VIRGIL: Thanks, Shelley. The epistemic injustice that I discuss—addicts’ exclusion from knowledge production about ourselves—generalizes to disability broadly. We are the thing studied, not the studier.

Marginalization makes epistemic power claims. “Expert” status is deployed to justify carceralism and eugenics: if disabled people are not knowers, then abled people should make decisions about us. The clinicians who wrote to Minister Saks protesting government funding for safe supply last year identified themselves as “experienced Canadian addiction-medicine physicians” and emphasized their credentials. MAiD defenders—like Dying with Dignity CEO Helen Long—underline how “carefully and thoughtfully” assessors evaluate requests.

Such purveyors of epistemic power describe (disabled) opposition as “methodologically weak,” supported by “no evidence.” To quote you, Shelley, they represent our arguments as “politically motivated, ideological, and unsound”; by contrast, they represent their own arguments as, in your words, “disinterested (yet compassionate), objective (yet caring), and rigorous (yet flexible and sensitive).”

Now, one might expect the epistemically powerful to deploy forms of knowledge considered to be superior on the dominant hermeneutics: “They have studie;, we have stories.” Indeed, insularism often prevents outsider communities from conducting research. But with both sources that I have cited, the only empirical evidence provided comprises opinions and anecdotal observations. Hence, epistemic status is required to differentiate marginalized dissent from privileged orthodoxy. The presumption that crips are uninformed feeds the justificatory logic of disabled oppression.

In Raymond Aldred’s interview in June of 2023, he makes a striking point about the selective unknowing of the powerful, which is weaponized to justify oppression. I found his remarks on the epistemic claims of colonial power particularly timely given the tepid non-response of the United States to the dire plight of people in Gaza. As Aldred remarked:

[Philosophers] do not exist as discrete entities, divorced from the world around them. They have existed within a larger context among their peers, within institutions, and within a political climate that had certain governmental policies designed to control and dominate Aboriginal Peoples … A lot of philosophers defended colonialism. John Stuart Mill, for example, defended colonialism on the basis that Aboriginal People lacked the basic capacities to be free and self-governing citizens. We often lionize Mill for his defense of freedom, but rarely is it asked, “Freedom for who?” …

Bertrand Russell is another intellectual who we often think was progressive on issues of war, pacifism, and a host of other issues in his time. Yet, in his 1915 article on “The Ethics of War,” he wrote that colonialism was permissible on utilitarian grounds and that conquest was justified if the side with a more advanced civilization could put the land to better use. The implication of this view, as you might guess, is that colonialism in Canada and the United States is justifiable … Many academics and philosophers are largely uninformed about Aboriginal issues and Aboriginal Peoples. How many academics know on whose land their institution sits?

VIRGIL: John Henry, how do you understand Aldred’s contrast between the popular perception of these Anglophone philosophers’ progressive values and the way that they explicitly condone Indigenous oppression? How do lack of awareness with respect to Indigenous history and discomfort with criticism of the “Western canon” conspire to facilitate subjugation of colonized people worldwide (and poor working conditions for Indigenous academics)?

JOHN HENRY: These questions are important, Virgil, and I completely agree with the timeliness regarding Gaza today. Ultimately, incredibly brilliant people like Raymond Aldred need to be the ones who answer questions regarding Indigenous people and Indigenous concerns, otherwise we re-instantiate the same structures of epistemic erasure and oppression that currently exist—for example, cis-gendered white males, such as me, acting as epistemic authorities in regard to Indigenous people and their issues. Now, I do not say this to dodge the questions that you have asked, Virgil; rather, I want to encourage everyone to read Aldred’s interview.

It seems that this contrast between perception and reality stems from willful ignorance and epistemic injustice. If we, as academics and as non-Indigenous people, are committed to anti-colonialism, then we need to become the audience that Aldred (for example) deserves. We need to read, teach, and think more about Indigenous history, values, and peoples. At minimum, we need to be open to the possibility that philosophy—as both an industry and our collective endeavor to “love wisdom”—should grow and develop past the scholarship of those whom we currently lionize. When we confront any form of epistemic injustice, we need to become the audience that a given marginalized group deserves. Then we need to take action. That’s our responsibility, because if we fail to do so, we directly facilitate subjugation.

This discussion of marginalized groups in philosophy, epistemic injustice, and responsibility, reminds me of why Dialogues on Disability means so much to so many philosophers—especially, of course, disabled philosophers—and what the series concretely accomplishes within academic philosophy. Reflecting on the centennial edition of the series from July of last year, I want to say that a central pillar of the series, which explains its endurance and importance, is the way that it consistently uncovers and resists epistemic injustice in philosophy and beyond.

In this regard, it seems vital to think about the radicality of the work that many of the interviewees produce. For example, in August Gorman’s interview of last August, the very notion of responsibility in the philosophy of moral responsibility becomes a question. In one place in the interview, he said:

[P]hilosophers in this literature make all sorts of claims of the form “If an agent cares sufficiently about X, then Y will/ought to follow,” where Y is some sort of impact on that person’s agency involving prioritizing, remembering, being motivated, acting, etc. But general claims like this, more often than not, cannot survive even the slightest bit of scrutiny once we drop the implicit clause that we are only talking about “just us normal, neurotypical agents.” As an ADHDer, I might find something to be really important … but if I cannot get myself to find it interesting as well, then I will have difficulty getting myself motivated by it.

Since the construction of who counts as one of these “normal, neurotypical agents” is a contingent historical matter, and few, if any, of these so-called perfectly “normal” agents even exist, the ableist assumption really threatens the foundation of moral responsibility theorizing, even aside from its negative social and political consequences… If we drop this unjustifiable assumption, what do we have left? … We will need to rebuild, from the ground up, a lot of the ways that we conceptualize moral responsibility.

JOHN HENRY: Gorman’s remarks draw attention to the need for re-evaluation of the foundational premises of mainstream philosophy and of the priorities that many philosophers take for granted. Shelley, how do you think these kinds of foundational re-evaluations of moral responsibility theory should reshape our work, lives, and activism?

SHELLEY: John Henry, your question is timely because Mich Ciurria has guest edited a pathbreaking special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly on feminist approaches to moral responsibility that is scheduled to be released this month. The issue comprises important contributions from an impressive group of marginalized philosophers, including contributions from August, Virgil, and me. Although I have not been privy to his article in the issue, I expect that August will make a significant contribution to the work to reconfigure and transform the individualistic focus of moral responsibility theory, that is, to articulate the ways in which the morally responsible individual is a politically motivated social construction.

In my contribution to the special issue, I argue that the conception of disability that predominates in heretofore moral responsibility theory—a conception according to which disability is a naturally disadvantageous personal attribute, characteristic, or difference of individuals—has detrimental social consequences for disabled people and contributes to the exclusion of disabled philosophers.

While you, John Henry, have rightly pointed out the enduring importance of the Dialogues on Disability series for disabled philosophers, especially for the disabled interviewees themselves, in her interview in September, Nancy Stanlick noted that the series continues to play a crucial role with respect to the discursive practices of the profession at large, that is, the insights and perspectives of interviewees in the series have made a huge contribution to the knowledge about disability and disabled people that is available to all philosophers. As Nancy put it:

Most of the people who contacted me [in response to my interview] said that they appreciated the openness that everyone who contributes to your series has expressed. For example, talking about or writing about a disability is sometimes very difficult, since it is often the case that while nondisabled people try to understand what it is like to have a physical or psychological dis- or different-ability, they often say they simply cannot do so.

Others who have spoken or written to me–who have a disability themselves–have said that they can “identify” with the roadblocks that we sometimes find in our paths.

SHELLEY: Nancy’s remarks in this context indicate the extent to which the Dialogues on Disability series, the BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY blog, and philosophy of disability more generally serve to lessen the persistent gulf that exists between what nondisabled philosophers (and nondisabled society at large) claim to know about disability, ableism, and disabled people, on one side, and what disabled philosophers (and disabled people in general) know, experience, and require, on the other side. This discrepancy is quite recognizable, in the authoritative institutional knowledge that philosophy faculty receive about the requirements of disabled students and what disabled students perceive their own needs to be.

In the interview that I conducted with Corinne Lajoie last October, Corinne returned to the issue of the individualization of responsibility, underscoring how disabled people are routinely left out of dominant understandings of social justice and how it can be produced. For example, they said:

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 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. …

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….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.

SHELLEY: Virgil, what insights about experience and social epistemology did you gain from Corinne’s remarks?

VIRGIL: Corinne is incisive and critical on the understudied topic of access, effectively synthesizing many theorists. I strongly recommend their chapter in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability! Their critique motivates me to consider accommodations from a genealogical perspective.

Essentialism, Corinne suggests, inheres in the legalistic view. They also underscore the widespread notion that accommodations are “special privileges” whose requesters should be regarded skeptically—this skepticism often extending to the very diagnostic constructs that they claim, ADHD, for instance. These ideas seem incompatible. How can an institution reify essentialism about disability while sowing doubt about it?

Foucault, observing the conspicuous failure of prisons to reduce crime, argued that the function of the modern prison is the production of “delinquent” subjects. Perhaps the accommodationist failure to facilitate access is similar: that’s not its function. Instead—like welfare—it produces “societal noncontributors.” It delineates the rights that disabled people cede by requesting help and mobilizes biopolitical power to patrol the “unspoken” boundary that Lajoie describes between good disabled institutional participants and “killjoys.” It reinforces the ill-suitedness of disabled people to this society as fundamental fact.

Corinne is clear that accommodationist standards makes many lives worse. I think that is quite right. We should not regard accommodationist liberalism as the price of the ticket, a necessary concession. Pandering to essentialists always backfires. The notion that abled and disabled people are distinct natural kinds, best governed by separate laws, has not precipitated faster provision of assistive technologies (ATs). It has precipitated MAiD.

In their interview, C. Dalrymple-Fraser discusses improper use of empirics surrounding pedagogical accessibility and connects this impropriety to misinformed arguments in bioethics. They said:

A slide-deck shared online…aimed to summarize research on the “bad” effects of technology in classrooms. The professor who assembled the slides stated that they had shared the slides “not so much to make the argument for an outright ban, but rather to offer faculty who do want to ban…resources to share with their students” and were “focusing on presenting the results of the research [and had not] paid attention to the design.”

In short, this philosophy professor offered cherrypicked evidence for other philosophers and other academics who want to bolster their arguments for laptop bans, without having evaluated the substantive content and possible limitations…many of the studies included in the slides did not account for disabled students in their methods nor their data…I offered that many of the studies lack external validity for existing arguments concerning laptop bans, especially in debates concerning disability…At a minimum, I argued, if we want to use data in a debate where disabled people are key stakeholders, a stronger data set should better account for disability and disabled students.

Ultimately, I believe that the upstream issue with this misuse of data for laptop bans is that professional philosophers are rarely trained in empirical methods…This limitation is not unique to pedagogical research, of course, and applies to philosophical bioethics and other practical philosophies too…I have observed philosophers who were all but heckled by nurses at conferences due to misunderstanding the current sciences, having apparently entered the debates through decades-old literature and not evaluated whether their assumed premises might be out of date…Many undergraduates report to me that they are relying on high-school sciences, which are often insufficiently nuanced or otherwise out of date. Meanwhile, many popular bioethics textbooks offer only limited further support.

VIRGIL: John Henry, what do you make of the way in which empirical research provides a stamp of “seriousness” on philosophical arguments, even if the research or its use is importantly misguided?

JOHN HENRY: Dalrymple-Fraser is right: philosophers—like the general public—often do not have a nuanced understanding of empirical research, nor the skillset to appropriately scrutinize empirical data. Culturally, this lacuna gives anything “scientific” a quasi-mystical authority which is opaque and unquestionable. Consequently, misguided data can be abused to “support” almost anything. But the issue goes beyond the need for more scientific literacy.

Take an example from dyslexia research. Tests have shown that, in the visual field, dyslexics have stronger peripheral vision and weaker focal vision compared to non-dyslexic controls. The results have been replicated several times. Yet a discursive problem arises here: the vast majority of researchers seize on the fact that dyslexics have weaker focal vision. This fact gets reinterpreted as evidence for dyslexic deficits which may contribute to reading difficulties, with little-to-no attention paid to the peripheral strengths. More research on focal weakness ensues.

So, when a dyslexic activist that I know speaks to a researcher, the researcher honestly believes that evidence for dyslexic strengths is “thin.” We are cherry-picking evidence, etc. What is predominantly researched, and the assumptions that contribute to that research, create a body of evidence which does not tell the whole story. This example illustrates how empirical research can create a sense of iron-clad epistemic legitimacy, which is partially correct, but also predicated on a narrow perspective.

This remark brings me to a question that I would like to ask you, Shelley. In my interview in December, I mentioned that I believe Foucault overemphasizes the importance of language, which therefore precludes a full analysis of dyslexia. The issue is that dyslexia does not follow the usual disability/impairment dichotomy that many disability theorists posit. As a reading difficulty, dyslexia is a disability which is socially constructed, since the practical importance and social value placed on literacy is historically contingent. However, it is not clear dyslexia offers an impairment—instead, it offers many strengths (e.g. visual-thought) and weaknesses. Most dyslexic adults seem to perceive their dyslexia as an overall strength, which they cherish, rather than as an impairment.

Arguably, the tradeoffs arise from neurological factors, which are genetically carried, and which make our brains operate differently from neurotypical brains. This account presupposes a “natural” neurobiological difference which is prediscursive and independent of power relations. If, Foucault might argue, I recognized that the power relations that produce dyslexia and its strengths/impairments are merely part of the larger apparatus of disability (rather than exterior to it), then I would understand my dyslexia more cogently. I find Foucault appealing here.

Nevertheless, I do not see how social power relations can produce my ability to think visually (and non-linguistically)—especially since the discourses surrounding my dyslexia have completely ignored visual thought. With that, it seems the argument may be reductionistic: “Non-linguistic” thought must ultimately reduce to discursive formations and power relations, which are made intelligible in and through language. Even though power produces its object (visual thought), power still seemingly reduces visual thought back into that which it is not (linguistic). I fear that I am missing something important. If dyslexic strengths have historically been effaced in public discourse, yet are privately experienced, how do social power relations produce something like visual thought, a strength which replaces “impairment” in a disability/impairment dichotomy? Alternatively, is this a problem Foucauldian theorists should grapple with more seriously?

SHELLEY: John Henry, thanks for sharing your interesting questions. A detailed answer to them that would unpack the various lines of thought that they make up is probably beyond what I can articulate in the space of this anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability. Nevertheless, I want to offer a few remarks that I think might enable you to think more about these questions yourself.

Foucault, of course, made no direct or explicit reference to the distinction between impairment and disability to which you refer. The distinction constitutes (what I refer to as) the British social model of disability, or BSM, that disabled activists in the United Kingdom introduced in the early 1970s. The model has, as you suggest, enjoyed relative dominance in activist and disability studies circles until recently. The BSM is roughly analogous to the sex-gender and nature-culture distinctions.

So, according to the BSM, people have impairments—that is, certain natural, biological, features—and are subjected to disability—a form of social oppression—on this basis. Proponents of the BSM do not argue that impairments are negative characteristics of people but rather claim that they are prediscursive and essentially neutral. Nor would proponents of the BSM say that disability is a socially constructed personal characteristic, as you suggest. In other words, proponents of the BSM would agree with you that dyslexia is a prediscursive feature of certain people and it becomes disabling because of social arrangements.

My Foucauldian response to proponents of the BSM is that the very social constitution of impairment is disabling, is disability. As I put it, impairment has been disability all along. This response assumes that there is no prediscursive reality; everything we experience and perceive, even our bodies, is thoroughly mediated by contingent cultural forces, including language, which is understood in expansive terms by Foucault, as you note in your interview. I have articulated my critique of the BSM in numerous publications, including my monograph Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability and my early article “On the Government of Disability.” I also presented a concise summary of these arguments in a symposium on my work to the Eastern APA in January. The presentation is posted on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

The argument that there is no prediscursive reality, especially in the context of a discussion about dyslexia, made me think of remarks that Mylène Legault made in her interview with me in January of this year. Legault’s dissertation focuses, in her words, “on the plurality of cognitive profiles and aims to de-essentialize philosophical conceptions of cognitive processes through a neurofeminist approach to autism and neurodiversity.” Later in her interview, Legault elaborated the central premise of her argument in this way:

Taking the example of “developmental disorder,” it is only because a prototypical development has been established that we can conceive of profiles that deviate from this prototype; a developmental disorder is not simply a different development, it is a “disorder”. Now, my main premise is rather simple, it is the principle of neurodiversity: in coherence with biodiversity, it would be very surprising if the principle of natural variation had stopped just before human cognition came about!

The problem is that this premise, although increasingly present in social discourse today, is still hard to find in models of human cognition. One of my wishes would be for textbooks to move from human cognition to human cognitions—that is, cognitions plural.

SHELLEY: Virgil, given your passion for Foucault, I surmise that you would align yourself with Legault’s project to de-essentialize philosophical conceptions of cognition. How would you understand the effort to do so in the contexts of, say, madness and addiction?

VIRGIL: Legault’s direct confrontation of evopsych influence on cognition studies is potent, and I find pluralism about cognition very appealing. (If there is a point of departure between her thinking and mine, it’s that I view biodiversity itself as a discursive object.) So I strongly support de-essentialization.

To de-essentialize addiction and Madness, we need (M)addict participation and identitarian pride. Discourses that lack these cannot succeed. For instance: many addiction genealogies, while denaturalizing “addict” as a problematic type of person, regard “addict” as a problematic concept to be “outright reject[ed],” scolding self-described addicts for identitarian buy-in. Sober addicts “aspire to be oppressed”; active use is “enslavement.” The irrationality of harmful drug use is replaced by that of harmful self-identification.

This conceit lurks in some views of Madness as well. Merri Lisa Johnson’s quote, according to which many feminist scholars consider borderline identitarianism “about as useful as hitting yourself on the head with a lamp,” pinpoints what is so frustrating and ironic about such criticism: namely, interpreting borderline (addict) identitarianism as self-harm (self-pity) invokes specific stereotypes of those subjectivities, which the critic would not be doing if they were genuinely antirealist.

Plus, disabled solidarity makes de-essentialization a happier pursuit. I gain strength from knowing critical theorists like Andrea Pitts, Marxist feminists like Waithera Sebatindira, analytic pluralists like Owen Flanagan—addicts whose rejoicing is apparent in their writing. Identity-pride movements also provide hermeneutical value: self-identification enables marginalized people to understand their experiences.

Amelia Hicks describes this first-hand experience in the interview that Shelley conducted with her in February. Amelia said:

One nice thing about receiving an autism diagnosis in my mid-30s is that it has helped me make sense of my strange experiences with school…Most of my memories from school are of people yelling. For most of the day, other kids would run around yelling; then, the teachers would yell at the kids for yelling. I found the noise and lights extremely uncomfortable. I was often bullied, and the bullying got worse whenever I tried to make it stop; teachers and administrators would not help me. As I progressively developed stress-related eating and digestion problems, all of the rules around eating and bathroom-use made schooldays even more stressful…

It took me years to realize that I sometimes simply needed to regurgitate nonsense to do well academically. I remember that when I was about nine, I was asked on a test to define a noun. I found the task very difficult! My answer was not good—I said something like “a noun is a word for something that exists.”  You can imagine my disappointment when I learned that the “correct” answer was “a person, place, thing, or idea,” which is a terrible definition of a noun! Even though I was able to memorize nonsense to get by in school, I never felt that I truly understood anything that I was doing.

VIRGIL: I am struck by Amelia’s “noun” anecdote, which reflects the way that educational institutions often rigidly enforce people’s relationship to language. John Henry, how, in your experience, can neurodivergent community and activism problematize the primacy of linguistic thought and critique the definition of language itself?

JOHN HENRY: Virgil, what you said really resonates with me—community does generate identity pride and solidarity!

To your great question, neurodivergent communities reveal the vast diversity of cognitivestyles. For instance, there is a distinction between “object visualization” in thought (seen in Temple Grandin’s style), and “spatial visualization” (exemplified by Einstein). The mathematician Kalvis Jansons uses somatosensory mental imagery—he “feels” the texture of knotted ropes in his head to solve topological problems. Legend says Beethoven utilized one sub-type of synesthesia (there may be hundreds) to help compose symphonies.

Every neurodivergent person—and perhaps everyone—thinks differently. For this reason, most philosophers of neurodiversity are de-essentialists. Alone, one’s thinking seems straightforward and ordinary. We can only recognize our differences in community. Obviously, this recognition requires communication; but language often only allows neurodivergent people to roughly translate our inner lives—and if language is rendered a translation scheme, that may critique its definition. So community elucidates the breadth of “human cognitions” that Legault eloquently describes. From this, linguistic thought is exposed as merely one among many forms of thought.

We also need community to resist neuro-normative theories of cognition. Amelia Hicks’ and Joanna Lawson’s podcast NeuroDiving beautifully illustrates Autistic activists and philosophers—as a community—doing that. NeuroDiving also reveals the terrifying degree to which bias guides philosophical analysis of Autism when Autistic people are not involved.

In Kate Manne’s interview from March of this year, we see how bias also plays a central role with fatphobia. While Manne’s interview had many highlights, I was especially struck by remarks that she made about the history of fatphobia and its weaponization today. In one place, Manne said:

…it is not that fatness was derogated, and then associated with Blackness; rather, fatness and Blackness were associated with each other, and then, consequently, fatness fell into disrepute.

Today, we see fatphobia continuing to work as a powerful weapon of oppression, to marginalize people who are already marginalized, often multiply so, including non-white, poor, and disabled people. It is not necessarily that people who belong to these social categories are fatter in reality, as I have explained elsewhere; rather, fatness is a powerful marker or proxy for lowly social status. And fatphobia thus allows powerful, often thin, white elites to dress up their racism, classism, and ableism by sneering, as Paul Campos puts it, not at a poor Mexican-American woman using a mobility aid at Walmart, but at a morbidly obese person who is presumed to be unhealthy.

For a slightly subtler example, some such elites will engage in concern trolling about fat bodies, affecting to be terribly worried about the health of people whose health status they in fact know very little about—and care about very little, in most cases. Again, classism, racism, and ableism often gets dressed up in the (in some circles somewhat more acceptable) garb of fatphobia.

JOHN HENRY: While this quote is striking in and of itself, it also connects to Kristin Rodier’s remarks on fatphobia in philosophy, which she described in her March 2023 interview. Many of Rodier’s experiences may testify to Kate Manne’s analysis here. Shelley, in what ways do you see fatphobia functioning within academic philosophy? Is fatphobia subtly assisting classism, racism, misogyny, and/or ableism in philosophical praxis?

SHELLEY: John Henry, thanks for drawing attention to the crossover between Kristin’s interview in the Dialogues on Disability series and Manne’s remarks in her interview. I think that it is significant that so many of the themes, practices, and ideas addressed throughout the series travel across various installments of it. The commonalities between interviews, as well as the disagreements between them, demonstrate the extent to which the interviews of any given year in the series are instructive for the philosophical community in general and are particularly thought provoking for students and other scholars who wish to take up the themes, practices, and ideas that they convey.

In response to your last questions, I want to point out that I regard fatphobia and sizeism as elements of the apparatus of disability, which I understand to be a wide-ranging matrix of force relations. Foucault defined an “apparatus” as ensemble of discourses, institutions, laws, scientific statements, administrative measures, technologies, representations, etc. that responds to an urgent need in a given historical moment. The urgent requirement to which the apparatus of disability responds in this historical context is normalization of populations and individuals. Homogenized populations are more manageable and governable than populations that are heterogeneous and unpredictable. Fatphobia and sizeism thus mark, discipline, and subjugate certain people on the basis of a range of varying perceived factors in order to normalize them. These factors include size, structure, and general appearance; ideas about fitness, movement, and health; and bodily responses to exertion such as perspiration and panting.

Fat philosophers are subjugated within and excluded from philosophy in a host of ways, especially with respect to rationality: fat philosophers are not regarded as rational, are regarded as irrational, as lacking in self-control, and as undisciplined. In their pathbreaking contribution to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, entitled, “Would You Kill the Fat Man Hypothetical?: Fat Stigma in Philosophy,” Kristin and co-author Samantha Brennan provide a comprehensive survey of the ways in which fat oppression conditions the profession of philosophy and the philosophy classroom, as well as trace the threads of this oppression through misogynoir, classism, ableism, white supremacy, and male supremacy. The work on fat oppression that Manne, Rodier, and Brennan produce on fat and fatphobia enlarges the corpus of philosophy of disability.

John Henry and Virgil, I think that my last remarks are a fantastic note on which to end this ninth-anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability. It has been such a pleasure to collaborate with both of you on this edition of the series. I consistently learn from the insightful and transgressive remarks that you make. So, I want to sincerely thank you both for taking the time to put together this long and lively addition to the Dialogues on Disability archive.

I also want to convey my deepest thanks to all my interviewees from the past year who entrusted me with their stories and shared their experiences and knowledges with all of us. Their generosity and courage makes the series possible.

Finally, let me end this anniversary installment with thanks to everyone who has tuned in to Dialogues on Disability during the nine years in which the series has run thus far. Together, we are changing philosophy.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to our remarks, ask questions about the interviews we’ve highlighted, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and 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 funds the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can contribute your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, May 22 at 8 a.m. EST for the one hundred and tenth 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.