This week’s contribution to the quote-of-the-week thread (though it’s only Wednesday) considers the extent to which nondisabled philosophers and nondisabled feminist philosophers in particular will give up their position of dominance with respect to what gets said about disability in philosophy, who gets to say it, and how it gets said.

It has been almost a year since the publication of The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. The goals for that project were wide ranging, with both long-term and short-term trajectories, some of which are outlined in my introduction to the collection which was optimistically entitled, “New Movement in Philosophy: Philosophy of Disability.” The introduction is, in addition, designed to provide a context for the subsequent chapters that the book comprises, detailing the current exclusionary demographics of philosophy, providing a broad snapshot of some of the institutional and disciplinary mechanisms and practices that produce the dire situation for disabled philosophers–especially disabled philosophers of disability–and offering indications of how authors whose work appears in the book confront these mechanisms and practices of subjugation and exclusion.

Thus, the second section of the introduction–to which I gave the subtitle “What Philosophy of Disability Isn’t”– begins in this way:

The publication of The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability 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–by introducing a substantial corpus of philosophical work designed both to subvert the adverse arguments about disability that philosophers articulate and to destabilize the hostile sociocultural discourse from which philosophy draws and to which it contributes.

The paragraph, the introductory chapter in which it resides, and The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability in its entirety are meant to catalyze institutional, (infra)structural, material, discursive, and intersubjective change and transformation in philosophy and academia in general, especially (but not exclusively) with respect to disabled philosophers, philosophy of disability, and indeed, disabled philosophers of disability.

Thus, I was considerably disappointed and annoyed, if not angry, when I read Cressida Heyes’s revised and updated entry to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) on “Identity Politics.” For Heyes’s discussion of disability in this purportedly updated version of the entry is limited, outdated, and naturalizes (the apparatus of) disability, as well as objectifies disabled people themselves. In a professional resource designed to serve the interests of philosophers, Heyes’s highly circumscribed discussion of disability in this entry does nothing to advance the interests of disabled philosophers of disability; on the contrary, this SEP entry renders us and our work irrelevant, insignificant, and philosophically uninteresting; indeed, nonexistent.

A year after the publication of The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability–a collection that comprises more than two dozen chapters of philosophy of disability, most of which were written by disabled philosophers–none of the work that the collection comprises is discussed or even cited in Heyes’s SEP entry. Instead, discussion of disability in this entry on identity politics is confined to a couple of sentences supported by references to work by non-philosophers that is more than a decade old. In a SEP entry claimed to highlight and explain the dynamics and vicissitudes of recent social, political, and philosophical interventions and discourses with respect to identity politics, the exclusion of up-to-date work by philosophers of disability–especially disabled philosophers of disability–seems irresponsible and to demand accountability. Furthermore, Heyes’s use of the essentializing and objectifying term the disabled to refer to disabled people in an encyclopedia entry that alleges to be an authoritative discussion and contestation of identity politics seems to be an uninformed and ironic turn of phrase, if not an egregious one.

Like many philosophers, I use SEP to provide me with comprehensive surveys of topics in philosophy in which my own research is not specialized. Doing so is not without its limits and its drawbacks. SEP, as a whole, is ableist and revolves around nondisabled people: their social, economic, and material situations and the concerns, knowledges, and propositions that these situations produce. With some exceptions, the SEP entries devoted to disability are not very good: they variously naturalize disability and largely recognize as legitimate and worthwhile only philosophical work on disability that a few analytic philosophers (most of them nondisabled) have produced. Where the extant feminist philosophy entries in SEP mention disability at all, they do so in ways that either seem largely unfamiliar with and uninformed by the subject matter of philosophy of disability or continue to invoke authors and issues with respect to disability that retain the centrality of nondisabled people (their knowledges, perspectives, etc.) to work in the area. Heyes’s discussion of disability in their SEP entry on identity politics manages to do to all of the aforementioned, continuing the lousy treatment of disability in this esteemed professional resource and enabling it to persist.

(Oh, I probably shouldn’t neglect to mention that the insight about disability and identity that Heyes deems “Perhaps the most important” for philosophers seems to be derived directly from the critique of identity politics that I advance in my 2001 article “On the Government of Disability” which goes uncited in this updated SEP entry and is implicitly attributed to Heyes and other [nondisabled?] authors, though my article was indeed referenced in the initial version of the entry.)