As I recently pointed out on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, October 15, 2026, will mark the centennial anniversary of Michel Foucault’s birth, with plans underway to commemorate Foucault in a variety of journal issues, conferences, workshops, edited collections, and monographs. As I noted in the previous post, I will contribute to some of these memorials. In the previous post, I offered an excerpt from a draft of an article produced to this end. That article, “Foucault: The Premier Disabled Philosopher of Disability (My Love Letter to Foucault),” is now complete and will be sent off this week to Daniele Lorenzini, the editor of the collection The Foucauldian Mind in which it will appear.

In order to heighten your anticipation of the Foucault-inspired events of 2026 and of Lorenzini’s edited collection in particular, I want to give you a better glimpse into how, during the centennial year, I hope to raise the profile of Foucault’s influence with respect to critical work on disability. Thus, I have copied below both the abstract to my chapter and the final section of the chapter which I have subtitled, “Upholding Foucault’s History.”

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Abstract

In this chapter, I show why Foucault ought to be recognized as the catalyst of state-of-the-art philosophy of disability. To argue in this way, I highlight several elements of Foucault’s work that have been indispensable to my analyses in (feminist) philosophy of disability, explaining how these features of his work circumvent claims according to which aspects of the work run counter to the interests and aims of disabled people. I conclude the chapter by associating my philosophy of disability with the concerns and inclinations of the Foucauldian mind.

Upholding Foucault’s History

As indicated, numerous theorists and philosophers of disability have been either overtly hostile to Foucault’s work or skeptical about its suitability as a discourse with which to provide an account of disabled people’s lives. Even now, that is, even though I have repeatedly shown how Foucault’s claims can illuminate the situation of disabled people, some disability studies scholars and philosophers remain unconvinced about the usefulness of these claims for analyses of disability. The general charges that these authors have directed at Foucault can be summed up thus: Because Foucault disregarded personal experiences, denied the foundational subject and its agency, and obscured the body, his work is inappropriate for disability theory and philosophy of disability that ought to attend to the lived experiences and knowledges of disabled people, including their experiences and knowledges of their own embodiment (e.g., Hughes and Patterson, 1997; Scully, 2008; Siebers, 2008); furthermore, Foucault’s genealogies offer few resources with which to articulate social critique and instigate the social change that disabled people seek (e.g., Reynolds, 2022; Wasserman and Aas, 2022).

Despite the prevalence of these criticisms of Foucault in theory and philosophy of disability, however, Foucault did not abandon the subject and its experiences; rather, as I have indicated, Foucault was concerned to show that the subject and its experiences cannot be dissociated from the historical and contingent social practices that constitute the subject by and through its experiences. For Foucault, the subject’s intentions and motives are by-products of apparatuses of modern power which themselves are intentional and nonsubjective (Tremain, 2001, 2015b, 2017). Nor did Foucault eliminate the materiality of the body; rather, Foucault was concerned to show that “the body” cannot be dissociated from the historically contingent and culturally specific practices that bring it into being, that is, bring it into being as that kind of thing: as impaired, as racialized, as material, as mechanical, as developmental, as gendered, as sexed, and so on.  Indeed, Foucault’s genealogies and his other historical work have provided a wealth of theoretical resources from which philosophers and theorists of disability (among others) have drawn to challenge the status quo. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault explained his genealogical approach to the contingency of the subject, its materiality, and its psychology in this way:

We believe that feelings are immutable, but every sentiment, particularly the noblest and most disinterested, has a history. We believe in the dull constancy of instinctual life and imagine that it continues to exert its force indiscriminately in the present as it did in the past … We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. (Foucault, 1977b, 153)

I began the preface to Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (2017) with a personal anecdote in which I describe an especially heartbreaking incident of ableism that I encountered early in my career in philosophy. Throughout the book, furthermore, I used first-person pronouns to introduce and explain my claims. I did not, however, articulate autobiographical narratives over the course of the book to advance or justify these claims. Does the absence of personal narrative in my book render its analyses ineffective and incomplete? Should it thus be said that I denied subjectivity and agency as general categories in the book and my own subjectivity and agency in particular? Did I deny my subjective experiences of ableism because they are not elaborated throughout the book?  On the contrary, I want to argue that I emulated what Foucault did in his own work, that is, I produced critical genealogical analyses that my subjective experiences had motivated.

“Each of my works is a part of my own biography,” Foucault (1988, 11) stated in an interview that appears under the title “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” In another interview, Foucault (2000, 244) remarked, “I haven’t written a single book that was not inspired, at least in part, by a direct personal experience.” In yet another interview, Foucault—himself a gay man who was repeatedly psychiatrized; participated in public acts of resistance with disabled people, prisoners, and other marginalized social groups; confronted the rampant homophobia of philosophy in the mid-twentieth century; and died from complications of AIDS at a historical moment when fear and avoidance were the predominant social responses to a positive diagnosis—explained the impetus for his writing in this way:

Whenever I have tried to carry out a piece of theoretical work, it has been on the basis of my own experience, always in relation to processes I saw taking place around me. It is because I thought I could recognize in the things I saw, in the institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others, cracks, silent shocks, malfunctionings…that I understand a particular piece of work, a few fragments of autobiography. (Foucault, 1990, 156)

Foucault lived his last years during a period of time when HIV-positive people and people living with AIDS—spurred on by groups such as Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHA), and later AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Voices of Positive Women, and AIDS Action Now!—as well as psychiatrized people and Mad people—emboldened by deinstitutionalization and the anti-psychiatry movement—sought public policy and legislative recognition as “people with disabilities” in order to qualify for, and have access to, the social services and health-care resources that they required. Given Foucault’s activism and the constant attention that he accorded to subjugated knowledges, he and his work likely promoted these efforts. Should we regard Foucault as an early standpoint theorist? In Foucault’s writings (and in my own), subjective experience is generative of critical authorial practices, anticipating Tina Fernandes Botts’s claims about the crucial nature of this complementarity for responsible scholarship on socially embedded problems (Botts, 2018).

In short, both the dismissal of Foucault’s work and the refusal to genuinely engage with the writing of philosophers of disability who use it impose conceptual, discursive, and political limits on philosophy of disability and reinforce the continued marginalization of oppositional work on disability within the field of philosophy itself, ultimately disadvantaging disabled philosophers themselves. A great deal of Foucault’s work constitutes significant attempts to challenge the self-evidence of assumptions about disability by persuasively exposing the historical and cultural specificity and contingency of normality and its cognates, the abnormal and the pathological. Indeed, Foucault’s problematizations of (ab)normality, deviance, perversion, pathology, sexuality, race, discipline, and madness were trail-blazing and suggest innumerable avenues of investigation along which future (feminist) philosophy of disability can and should proceed. Hence, the enduring and iconoclastic importance of Foucault.