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If I were to write the title for Chapman’s book, I would call it Empire of Normality: Capitalism and the Rise of the Pathology Paradigm, because the primary aim of the text seems to be not to articulate a thoroughgoing engagement of capitalism and Neurodiversity, but rather to present a history of the rise of the pathology paradigm within a Marxist Materialist analysis, something which I agree is absolutely necessary in this moment. To this end, Chapman’s work provides an excellent resource for anyone looking to trace the development of what Chapman calls the “Empire of Normality” through the history of western medical engagements with disability and the production of disability through capitalism.
That said, before I begin, I would propose that Chapman’s text, while it is a piece of philosophy of disability, belongs in a novel class of texts that we might tentatively call “Political Philosophy of Disability.” While some might argue that Philosophy of Disability is too young a field to have sub-fields, I would charge that “political philosophy of disability” is merely naming something present throughout Philosophy of Disability since its initiation in the politics of the field of philosophy itself. To this end, I would say that we need more texts in the vein of Chapman’s book, specifically because they make present the essentially political nature of disability.
Further, I would argue that the first eight chapters of this book are a valuable archive of the history of the construction of disability by means of structures of domination established by the western world. I could see these first eight chapters being taught in tandem with other texts like Shelley Tremain’s Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, or other more socially minded texts like Susan Wendell’s The Rejected Body. Indeed, I am considering using chapters from the text in more history-based courses on philosophy of/and disability to provide students with a genealogy of the development of disability throughout the western world.
That being said, it often feels like there are three competing projects in this book. Or, put more damningly, there is one book of eight chapters on the history of capitalism and disability and two papers critiquing Neurodiversity, one of which introduces the crucial concept of “Neurodivergent Marxism.” Where the first paper is concerned, contained within the chapter “The Neurodiversity Movement,” Chapman offers a helpful and necessary critique of Neurodiversity at a time when the movement has spread like wildfire throughout activist, academic, and lay spaces. This critique is worth reading and is something I intend to pair with Judy Singer’s and Nick Walker’s own pieces on Neurodiversity in future courses.
It is the second paper, contained within the chapter “Cognitive Contradictions,” that I find most interesting. In it, Chapman introduces and articulates their understanding of “Neurodivergent Marxism.” Now, to be clear, I welcome Chapman’s “Neurodivergent Marxism.” Indeed, given that our current historical moment is filled with Marxist and Marx-inspired social movements, many of which ignore disability, Chapman’s Neurodivergent Marxism is a concept whose time has come. However, I must make clear that my welcome comes with some caveats, specifically where intersectionality is concerned. Before I get to those, I want to indicate some of the strengths of Neurodivergent Marxism. First, as Chapman notes:
Neurodivergent Marxism, as I understand it – at least at the current historical moment – seeks to turn both neurodivergent disablement and illness into sites of organisation and resistance to the system that necessitates both the production and harm of both neurodivergents and neurotypicals. (Chapman 2023, 145)
This is a valid project, and one that might be viewed as coextensive with various other movements for the liberation of disabled persons. Moreover, this initial framing of Neurodivergent Marxism recognizes the interdependence of neurotypical and neurodiverse people within the struggle against the “Empire of Normality” that Chapman identifies. This reframes neurotypical persons as potential comrades against the “Empire of Normality” as they, too, are subject to its dehumanizing and alienating force. This framing thereby enables the building of coalitions across difference without demanding that we overlook said differences in the establishment of solidarity.
Moreover, insofar as Neurodivergent Marxism “resists the idea that disability is merely an individual problem, a mere mechanical breaking of the body or mind to always be mechanically fixed” (Chapman 2023, 146) by drawing upon extant materialist concepts within Disability Studies and Philosophy of Disability, Neurodivergent Marxism resists the temptation among some Marx-inspired disability advocates and their allies to deny pathology altogether. To this end, one of the strengths of Chapman’s Neurodivergent Marxism is the ways it recognizes the materiality of disability as emerging from a mis-fit between a disabled body and a world organized by capitalism to reduce bodies to their productivity, without assuming that merely overturning the system of capitalism will “solve” disability.
Indeed, Chapman argues that while the “Empire of Normality” might rely on capitalism to enable the production of disabled persons as pathological, the mere elimination of capitalism would not resolve the oppression of disabled persons. This is important as it represents a step beyond “class first” Marxists who tend to reduce all modes of oppression to epiphenomena of class-based oppression and, in doing so, tend to elide or outright ignore the other ways in which identities become sites of oppression. Thus, Chapman positions themself as operating in a space beyond other “class first” Marxists through the incorporation of intersectional perspectives on disability and class, such that Neurodivergent Marxism does not replicate the mistakes of the past.
To this end, Chapman stops short of offering a full-fledged program for how Neurodiverse Marxism will enable the kinds of transformations that it promises, stating: “What this will turn out to look like will only be determined through mass consciousness-raising, critique, and collective imagining. This will be a mass theoretical, scientific, political, and revolutionary project of many years or decades” (Chapman 2023, 160). This is, of course, a fair position for any Marxist to take as the dangers of predicting a singular way in which the revolution will be ushered into being are myriad. However, Chapman does not shy away from outlining some potential ways in which Neurodivergent Marxism might enable the revolution yet to come. First, on work:
In practice, Neurodivergent Marxism requires moving away from diversity consultants teaching companies how to exploit more neurodivergent workers, and towards neurodivergent workers organising as neurodivergents to radically change the structures and expectations of the workplace. (Chapman 2023, 161)
This is something that cuts close to home for me as academia is notoriously hostile to disabled persons and disabled ways of knowing, the production of which is a form of labor. Here, I am focusing on the academy because the academy often offers support structures to neurodiverse persons while in training to become laborers in the capitalist system that Chapman critiques, but fails to make clear to these students that these support structures will be unavailable in the workplace, even the academic workplace. It is one of the contradictions of academia that disability support services are robust at the student level, yet utterly lacking in structure at the faculty, staff, or even the bourgeoise administrator level.
Moreover, there is a particular irony that where labor organizing is present in the academy, attempts to organize around disability as a labor issue are few and far between. Indeed, in my experience, it is only in the wake of a mass disabling event like COVID-19 that organizing around disability, be it Long COVID or the risk of disability from COVID itself, has taken somewhat center-stage in academic labor organizing. Naturally, this might be traced to ableist fears of cognitive impairment or disability, and thus reduction in productivity in the wake of COVID, but it stands as an example of attempts to reorganize the workplace in light of not simply neurodivergence, but disability itself.
That being said, I am concerned with Chapman’s critique of diversity consultants. First, Chapman is non-specific about what they mean by “diversity consultant,” something that we might concern ourselves with given the ways in which Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) are under assault across the western world. While there are very good reasons to be critical of the DEI-Industrial Complex, or the industry that has cropped up around corporate diversity, we need to be precise about what it is we mean when we say, “diversity consultant.” Here, we can be led to assume that Chapman has corporate diversity consultants in mind, however, Chapman’s text is unclear on this point, nor are they clear about the role such consultants play beyond “teaching companies how to exploit more neurodivergent workers.” (Chapman 2023, 161)
In contrast, if we follow Sara Ahmed’s (2012) analysis of diversity in institutional life, we might come to a different kind of conclusion. While Ahmed’s concern is primarily with academic institutions, her analysis might also be applied to corporate spaces and private academic institutions which seek to develop such offices or hire such consultants as a form of image management wherein the primary concern of the institution is with generating or changing the image of the institution as hostile to neurodivergent persons in this context. I raise this point, in alignment with Ahmed, to indicate the ways in which the existence of a diversity (or neurodiversity) consultant implies the failure of the circulation of neurodiversity through an organization.
It Is Important to note this failure because, at their best, neurodiversity consultants are what Ahmed calls “institutional plumbers” who seek to enable the circulation of neurodiversity through an institution such that the institution (or company) becomes more open to neurodiverse individuals. As an analogous example, the rise of accessibility settings in video gaming, and accessibility devices like X-Box’s adaptive controller, could be traced back to the work of disability consultants whose work it was to ensure that disability circulated through the production and design of games. While this work is driven by the corporate capitalist motive of capturing an emerging market, and thus enabling exploitation of consumers, it is an example of the tangled ways in which diversity consulting, writ broadly, is not necessarily merely about exploitation.
Moreover, Chapman’s engagement elides the actual labor of disabled activists, scholars, and persons when engaged in the transformative work of diversity consulting. Again, Ahmed’s description of DEI professionals in institutional settings as diversity workers is apt for capturing the ways in which disabled consultants, everything from academics to sensitivity readers to disabled play testers and product analysts are engaged in forms of labor that, while trapped within an exploitative capitalist system, enable relief from the ways that disability emerges at the intersection of the world and the body that Chapman credits with producing disability. That Chapman would ignore the ways in which these individuals labor and are consequently alienated from this labor in their Marxist analysis indicates a dangerous limitation of their vision.
Further, one of the interesting things that Chapman’s Neurodivergent Marxism does is call for both the abolition of “coercion and harm and the power of the physician class,” while also calling for the “centering of neurodivergent perspectives, the use of social and ecological models of functioning, and a politicised understanding of neurodivergent disablement” within science and scientific practice (Chapman 2023, 163). This is a lofty goal shared by many Disabled Philosophers and Philosophers of Disability as well as by Feminist Philosophers of Science and by Black, Latinx, and Queer Bioethicists, all of whom would benefit from such a radical recentering of scientific practice, which is consistent with the decolonial and internationalist aims of Chapman’s neurodivergent praxis (164).
I call this interesting, because it represents a contradiction in the ways in which Chapman’s text has articulated its thesis. To be blunt: despite Chapman’s insistence that “Unlike some ‘class-first’ Marxists, I think these more intersectional approaches are extremely important” (Chapman 2023, 142), the text barely mentions intersectional approaches to Marxism, and none of the approaches mentioned serves to influence the Marxist analysis that Chapman puts forward. Again, to be blunt, Chapman appears to pay lip service to intersectional traditions in the introduction stating the following:
Scholars in the Black Radical tradition have shown how primary racism and colonialism were to the emergence of capitalism as a global system, feminist scholarship has examined the ways in which capital continuously extracts unpaid emotional and reproductive work from women, disability studies scholars have examined how capitalism disabled us and worsens disability discrimination… All of these accounts update and supplement Marx’s analysis, which had focused primarily on the white, male worker in Europe. (Chapman 2023, 13)
While Chapman does draw upon the research of Sami Schalk, Nick Walker, and Remi Yergeau, and while Chapman does position their Neurodivergent Marxism as building upon the legacy of intersectional Marxism mentioned above, their Marxism remains firmly entrenched in an orthodox vision that seems to inherit whiteness as a “default orientation” towards the world. Here, I am drawing on Ahmed (2012) who argues that institutions, even the institutions of capitalism and medicine that Chapman critiques, become white as a consequence of repeated actions over time. Even disability becomes white insofar as decisions about who counts as disabled, what disability looks like, and how it might be assessed begin with the white body. Put another way, whiteness is the point from which disability unfolds.
Indeed, Chapman’s analysis contributes to this unfolding of disability from whiteness by failing to mention the ways in which capitalism itself is racialized and how that racialization enabled the production of the Black body as an inherently disabled body. For example, Chapman ignores Harriet Washington’s pathbreaking work Medical Apartheid that makes clear how medical technologies that Chapman describes as part of the eugenic and psychological project gave rise to medical diagnosis like drapetomania to pathologize the desire to escape from a system that reduces black bodies to only their potential for labor. Further, Chapman’s analysis also elides the ways that Black bodies were, and still are, constructed by the medical establishment as more capable of physical labor and less susceptible to pain.
I point this out because, despite the considerable amount of space Chapman devoted to articulating the Nazi eugenic program and the pathologization of queerness in relation to the Empire of Normality’s drive to produce workers, Chapman does not engage with a historical American system whose determination to reduce Black bodies to mere laborers echoes in the development of medical technologies, in the carceral system, in the disproportionate failure to even identify disability among Black persons. That is, Chapman’s “Empire of Normality” falls into some of the same traps that they accuse other “class first” Marxists of: the failure to take seriously the import of intersectionality to the development of a Marxist analysis of disability.
Still further, I would charge that Chapman further fails to see the ways in which their analysis, as a work of political philosophy, falls into the same trap that Charles Mills observes in his groundbreaking text The Racial Contract imperils most works of political philosophy: “that we live in a world which has been foundationally shaped for the past five hundred years by the realities of European domination and the gradual consolidation of global white supremacy” (Mills 1999/2024, 28); or, as Ahmed (2012) observes, we live in a world that has been organized by colonialism around whiteness. By failing to do so, by failing to attend to the ways in which the capitalist project is, at least in the American context, simultaneously a racial project to produce docile laborers of color, Chapman reproduces the image of a capitalist project that treats race cursorily and not as essential to the development of capitalism and the Empire of Normality. Lest we forget, the Nazi program was, in part, inspired by the American genocide of Indigenous populations, a fact that seems to have escaped Chapman’s notice.
This is, in part, a problem with Chapman’s citational style. For instance, Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, gets a cursory mention in the introduction in a footnote, and Fanon’s potential contribution to alternative analysis is offered a minor paragraph towards the end of the text. Ironically, Robinson’s very project would push Chapman’s in some valuable ways, specifically in the mode of “racial capitalism,” which Robinson, contra Chapman, argues is the manifestation of the ways in which the old feudal system was itself already a racialized system, the product of a colonial process that preceded the rise of capitalism. Thus, for Robinson, it was not the case that capitalism and racism are deviations from the feudal orders, but evolutions of it to preserve a racialized world. Taken seriously, this would mean that the Empire of Normality and the capitalist production of disabled subjects was also a colonial project to ensure the centrality of whiteness.
Again, this is not to say that Chapman does not mention the intersection of race and capitalism, nor is it to say that Chapman does not recognize these intersections: it is to say that how Chapman recognizes these intersections is cursory. For example, Feminist and Queer Marxist critiques also receive cursory citation, often in the form of a list of names which seem intended to convey authority without integrating the work into Chapman’s own project. Indeed, Nick Walker’s expansion of Neurodiversity in Chapter 10 is one of the few places where queer work is given significant uptake, and then it is on the way to a point that Chapman seems to consider more significant.
My concern with Chapman’s citational policy is best summed up by Ahmed (2014), who describes the ways in which even projects that focus on marginalized subjects like women, people of color, and disabled persons, become subject to citational policies that erase them from the academic record:
We have been here before; so there will always be more. Because in this citational requirement is erasure; the willed forgetting of others that already passed through. Even feminist fields (formed, say, around the study of emotions, bodies, and intimacies) can end up being reorganised around white men. Decisions are made about concepts or values, definitions or distinctions, that do not appear to be gendering and racialized decisions (I talked about how this works in affect studies here). Individuals do not have not to cite not white men deliberately: they inherit decisions that make these exclusions for them, without them, decisions that marks edges, marking out where they do not have to go. Citations are academic bricks; and bricks become walls. (Ahmed, 2014, np)
To be clear, I am not accusing Chapman of willfully disregarding the contributions of scholars of color to Marxist theory: I am pointing out the ways that Chapman has inherited a history of exclusions of Queer, Feminist, and Black Marxists from the canon such that Chapman need not intentionally exclude these thinkers in performing their materialist analysis. Rather, the citational practice of this analysis does the exclusion for them. To this end, as much as Neurodivergent Marxism, like Neuro-Thatcherism, is an extremely valuable tool in our contemporary political environment, and they should be widely cited, I worry that their citation will be another brick in an already startlingly white academic wall forming around Philosophy of Disability.
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*In a show of solidarity with this symposium, Pluto Press will take 30% off the purchase of paperback copies of the book and ebooks until the end of the calendar year. To get this discount on Empire of Normality, use the discount code BIOPHIL30 at plutobooks.com — the Pluto Press website.
BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 