[The text below comprises the keynote address that I gave (via Zoom) to the Dimensions of Difference Conference at Beacon College yesterday. The conference was organized by Professor Zachary Isrow who teaches in the Humanities and Philosophy Department at Beacon College.]

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Philosophy of Disability: The Difference that It Makes

The presentation that I will give today provides an overview of philosophy of disability and how critical philosophical work on disability should be situated in the discipline of philosophy and academia more generally. I want to caution you that I do refer to the act of suicide in the context of discussing disabled students and inaccessibility.

Section 1: Situating Myself as a Disabled Philosopher in Philosophy

I will begin my presentation by locating myself in relation to the discipline and profession of academic philosophy and academia more generally.

I am Canadian and a philosopher by training. I did my graduate degrees in philosophy and wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on disability and social justice in a philosophy department in Canada. Since graduation, I have done community organizing around disability and accessibility, have conducted research on disability and public policy at a human rights institute in Canada, and have continued to produce philosophical work on disability.

Indeed, in academic contexts, I have strived to amplify the disciplinary profile of critical philosophical work on disability by introducing and promoting the growth of a new subfield of philosophy, namely, philosophy of disability, and an extension of this subfield, namely, feminist philosophy of disability. Despite these efforts, and because disabled philosophers and critical philosophical work on disability are systematically and structurally excluded from philosophy, I have nevertheless been only marginally, or precariously, employed for most of my career. This presentation is designed in part to explain the structural, institutional, conceptual, and professional components of academic philosophy that combine to create this treacherous situation for me and so many other disabled philosophers.

Through research, service, and professional activism, I have sought to elevate the status of disabled philosophers, including with my publications and presentations at conferences, on social media, and on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, the philosophy group blog that I coordinate and co-founded with Melinda Hall, another disabled feminist philosopher of disability. The centrepiece of the blog is Dialogues on Disability, the critically acclaimed series of interviews that I conduct with disabled philosophers and post to the blog on the third Wednesday of each month.

Later this month, I will post the tenth-anniversary installment of the series which I began in April 2015. Given that the upcoming installment will mark the tenth anniversary of the series, I will be the interviewee and my interviewers will be Robert Chapman, who addressed this conference yesterday, and Mich Ciurria, another disabled philosopher. Both Robert and Mich are past interviewees of the series. To find their interviews, go to the BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSPHY blog and click on the Dialogues on Disability tab at the top of the screen, which will take you to the series archive of more than 120 interviews.

In more than 120 interviews with me, that is, disabled philosophers, both students and faculty‒at all career stages and from a range of social positions with respect to race, gender, nationality, and sexuality‒have publicly documented the structural injustices, inaccessibility, and exclusion that they confront in philosophy and the university more broadly. They have also succinctly articulated the strategies of resistance with which they counter these forms of exclusion, brilliantly introducing the philosophical community to their pathbreaking critical analyses of disability. In short, the interviews constitute an invaluable resource for faculty and students who want to learn about the current situation with respect to disability and disabled people vis-à-vis philosophy.

My monograph, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, (Tremain 2017), is an outcome and extension of my research, service, and activist endeavours in philosophy. In the book, I argue that the conception of disability that predominates in philosophy, a conception according to which disability is a natural disadvantage or personal flaw, is inextricably entwined with and causally related to the underrepresentation (that is, lack) of disabled philosophers in philosophy. Another outcome and extension of my anti-ableist endeavours in philosophy is the publication, in December 2023, of The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. This collection, which I edited and anthologized, includes more than two dozen innovative chapters of philosophy of disability, most of which were written by disabled philosophers, including me and Robert.

The impetus to write and edit these and other philosophy books and articles on disability has derived from a combination of the following: the dismal career opportunities and prospects available to disabled philosophers; the marginalization of critical philosophical work on disability; the indifference of nondisabled philosophers to the pernicious ways that disabled people are represented in philosophical discourse; and the inertia of philosophers and philosophy associations about the distinct forms of structural oppression, institutionalized bias, hostility, and exclusion that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy.

In my presentation today, I will provide an account of the marginalization of critical work on disability in the discipline of philosophy; indicate how disabled people are constituted in philosophical discourse as a problem to be rectified and, ideally, eliminated; and explain some of the other elements that produce the dire exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession of philosophy. I will also indicate why I draw upon the work of disabled French philosopher Michel Foucault to investigate these egregious states of affairs.

Let me first point out, especially for the non-philosophers in attendance at this conference, that philosophy is the most conservative and homogeneous discipline across the humanities and social sciences with respect to area of inquiry and specialization. Of all the disciplines in the humanities, furthermore, philosophy is the most resistant to change, transformation, and decolonization. Indeed, although mainstream philosophy prides itself on its appeals to the putative ideals of neutrality, universality, and objectivity, the institutionalized structure of the discipline implicitly and explicitly promotes certain ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies as bona fide philosophy, while other ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies are cast as off-shoots of the former allegedly fundamental ways of knowing and doing philosophy and hence are regarded as more or less expendable.

The homogeneity of the topics and questions studied in philosophy is co-constitutive with and reinforces the homogeneity ofthe demographics of philosophy, that is, philosophy is also the most demographically homogeneous discipline in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, the profession of philosophy is populated primarily by nondisabled white people, the majority of whom are men.

Disabled philosophers make up a fraction of full-time philosophy faculty in Canada (less than 5%) and only marginally more than that in the United States, although, by most credible estimates, disabled people constitute an estimated 25-30% of the general population of North America. In Canada, furthermore, there are only a handful of Black philosophers.

In addition to our lack of access to the wages, medical and dental insurance, travel funds, research grants, and other benefits that full-time employment in philosophy provides, disabled philosophers are largely excluded from publication in the leading philosophy journals; from philosophy conferences and workshops; formal and informal professional networks; philosophy websites, blogs, and podcasts; funded research projects; leadership positions in professional philosophy associations; prizes, awards, and fellowships; endowed research chairs; advisory boards; editorial boards; and so on, and so forth.

During the past several decades, and in the last several years especially, marginalized philosophers have steadily challenged the white heteronormative androcentrism of philosophy, persistently working to forge a new agenda for the discipline. For example, several feminist philosophy journals and societies have been created; summer schools and institutes have proliferated that provide mentoring and other support to Black undergraduate philosophy students, 2SLGBTQI philosophy undergraduates, first-generation philosophy undergraduates, and working-class undergraduate philosophy students; professional philosophy associations increasingly fund projects that advance the interests of marginalized philosophy faculty; and more and more philosophy conferences prioritize the contributions of underrepresented groups in philosophy and spotlight underrepresented areas of philosophical research and teaching.

Nevertheless, disabled philosophers and philosophy of disability continue to be systematically left out of many (if not most) of these endeavours or they are added haphazardly to superficial diversity and inclusion initiatives that merely pay lip service to these values, while preserving the oppressive infrastructural arrangements that necessitated the initiatives in the first place. When, on the rare occasion that disability is included in such initiatives, it is portrayed as an unproblematic identity category rather than an apparatus of power, which is co-constitutive with other apparatuses of power such as race, gender, class, and nation. In my work, I have tried to document this terrible situation and its structural supports and material effects, if not provoke change to ameliorate the situation.

Section 2: Disability and the Architecture of Philosophy

Now that I have provided a context within which to consider the exclusion of disabled philosophers and critical philosophical work on disability, I want to zero in on two elements of the infrastructure of philosophy that make this exclusion possible, namely, the PhilPapers and PhilJobs databases, which are two parts of a very influential consortium of research and information that has come to shape the profession in a variety of ways.

Within the tradition of Western philosophy, the subfields of metaphysics, value theory, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of language continue to be regarded as foundational to philosophical inquiry, allegedly distinguishing philosophy from other disciplines of research and teaching. Philosophers who hold this traditional, conventional view of the discipline maintain that these subfields, and only these subfields, are the necessary, unchanging, and so-called core elements of philosophy. Philosophers who conceive of philosophy in this way assume, furthermore, that other, more recent, areas of philosophical inquiry—such as philosophy of race and feminist philosophy—are merely applications or contingent derivatives of these so-called foundational subfields.

It is this conventional representation of philosophy that provides the scaffolding for PhilPapers (n.d.), which, as I indicated, is a highly influential database that comprises philosophical research. Philosophers go to the PhilPapers database to access journal articles and other publications, gauge the popularity of a given publication, demonstrate their own interest in certain publications through views and downloads, and otherwise stay abreast of recent developments in philosophy. In other words, PhilPapers is a sort of academia.edu designed specifically for philosophers and philosophical research.

Unlike academia.edu, however, the content of the PhilPapers database is organized into a limited number of predetermined areas of specialization, subfields, and topics in philosophy that are hierarchically arranged according to prevailing ideas in Eurocentric Western philosophy about which areas, subfields, and topics have the most philosophical import and most explanatory power and should be endowed with the most authoritative status.

Within the PhilPapers database, critical philosophical work on disability is primarily relegated under Applied Ethicsꟷa subcategory of the database’s supreme category of Value Theoryꟷand is largely medicalized and individualized. For example, sub-sub-subcategories related to disability can be found under Biomedical Ethics, a sub-subcategory of Applied Ethics, alongside and on par with topics such as Drugs, Death and Dying, and Neuroethics, as well as under Social Ethics, another sub-subcategory of Applied Ethics, alongside and on par with topics such as Deception and Friendship.

Yet this almost exclusive medicalized and individualized categorization of disability under the rubric of Value Theory circumscribes critical philosophical work on disability too narrowly, obscuring the fact that the phenomena of disability raise questions about its metaphysical and epistemological status, questions that philosophers of language consider, questions about the history of philosophy, and so on. As I have argued in other contexts, furthermore, the way in which disability is categorized in the PhilPapers database discourages intersectional feminist analyses of its phenomena. (I won’t elaborate this claim in my presentation, but I’m happy to do so in our discussion.)

It would be difficult to overstate the constraining effects that the PhilPapers database generates for the development of critical philosophical work on disability. Nor could one easily overstate the deleterious consequences that accrue to disabled philosophers due to the structure of a spinoff of PhilPapers, that is, another database in this consortium, namely, PhilJobs, the leading international philosophy job board whose architecture mirrors the framework of PhilPapers.

To make a long story short, the structure of PhilJobs, like the structure of PhilPapers, systematically precludes adequate reference to philosophy of disability, discouraging the creation and posting of job ads in philosophy of disability and preventing the specification of database searches for jobs in the area. Indeed, to date, no advertisement for a full-time philosophy job anywhere in the world has seriously designated philosophy of disability as an area of specialization that a department wants to develop and hire for, despite the fact that research and teaching in philosophy of disability has been done for decades and even though philosophy of disability’s close relatives—that is, critical disability theory and disability studies—are burgeoning interdisciplinary fields of inquiry elsewhere across the university.

At present, philosophy jobseekers who specialize in philosophy of disability must represent their work in medicalized terms, that is, as a form of bioethics to be regarded as serious candidates for jobs in philosophy. In other contexts, I have argued that bioethics is first and foremost a technology of modern government whose biopolitical aim is normalization of the population. My argument in this context is, thus, that insofar as philosophers of disability must package their work as bioethics, leaving the fundamentally pernicious nature of the enterprise of bioethics intact, philosophy of disability and philosophers of disability are effectively put in the service of a form of neo-eugenics (see also Hall 2016).

Let me underscore that the invalidation of philosophy of disability is enabled by the constitutive character of the individualized and medicalized classifications of disability that both these databases reproduce. Classification of subfields in philosophy and the questions and concerns that these subfields make up are not merely value-neutral representations of objective differences, relations, and similarities that await discovery and recognition. Rather, classification and classification systems in philosophy (as elsewhere) are performative, that is, they contribute to the constitution of the value-laden resemblances, differences, and relationships between people, things, and states of affairs that they put into place.

Job postings in philosophy influence what philosophers regard as current and emerging research in the discipline and as important areas of the field to develop in their own departments. Hiring departments, insofar as they do not see other departments recruit and hire specialists in the subfield of philosophy of disability, are not motivated to recruit and hire specialists in philosophy of disability themselves. Given that many, if not most, specialists in philosophy of disability are themselves disabled, the current classificatory scheme of PhilPapers and PhilJobs ought to be recognized as a technology of power that contributes significantly to the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in the profession of philosophy.

In short, PhilPapers and PhilJobs reproduce and sustain the status quo in philosophy with respect to disability (and I should point out, other marginalized areas of specialization such as Indigenous philosophies and trans philosophy).

Most philosophers believe that disability is a prediscursive and politically neutral human characteristic, a natural disadvantage and personal misfortune that is appropriately addressed in the domains of medicine, science, and bioethics rather than in social and political philosophy and critical theory. As I noted at the outset of this presentation, I have aimed to show that the prevalence in philosophy of this kind of individualized and medicalized understanding of disability, according to which disabled people are naturally flawed, is inextricably entwined with the exclusion of disabled philosophers, especially disabled philosophers of disability, from permanent employment in philosophy.

Although the formula of PhilPapers and PhilJobs promotes the idea that both philosophy and classification of subfields in philosophy are value-neutral, disinterested, and impartial enterprises, political, social, economic, cultural, and institutional force relations influence every aspect of the discipline (and profession) of philosophy. Every philosophical question and concern, as well as every philosophical subfield that these questions and concerns make up, is a politically potent artifact of historically contingent and culturally specific discourse. As discursive artifacts, furthermore, every philosophical question and concern, as well as the subfields of philosophy that these questions and concerns make up has a history which genealogy, the sort of analysis that Foucault conducted, can effectively trace.

The underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in full-time faculty positions in philosophy is of course also due to the institutionalized biases and structural inaccessibility that disabled people in general confront in academia. Many disabled studentsꟷregardless of the discipline in which they majorꟷfeel compelled to leave school before the completion of a graduate degree due to the structural barriers, institutional discrimination, epistemic injustice, and personal prejudice that they encounter. The escalating incidence of student suicide on campuses throughout North America is itself testament to the systemic inadequacy of supports for students positioned outside the ableist norms, expectations, and demands of the neoliberal university.

Nevertheless, certain metaphysical and epistemological assumptions; specific disciplinary approaches; and distinct professional agendas, interests, and requirements render philosophy especially hostile to both disabled people and critical analyses of disability. The prevalent assumption in philosophy that disability is a disadvantageous personal characteristic or property properly studied in biomedical contexts, the life sciences, and related fields is the crux of the problem, a problem that neoliberalism has produced through what Foucault called “biopower,” which is a vast network of forms of coercion and population control.

In short, the assumptions that disabled people are naturally flawed and that disability should be addressed in the domains of medicine, bioethics, and cognate fields have shaped philosophy, influencing course curricula, dictating authoritative areas of specialization in the discipline, conditioning the composition of philosophy departments and professional networks, and fashioning the contents of philosophy journals (see Tremain 2017; also see Tremain 2013, 2014). That the subfield of bioethics is financially lucrative for modern philosophy departments and for the neoliberal university more broadly goes considerable distance to ensure the endurance of the medicalized and individualized understandings of disability that prevail in philosophy.

Section 3: What is Philosophy of Disability and What Do Philosophers of Disability Do?

Philosophers of disability critically assess assumptions about disability that philosophical claims presuppose and identify the ways in which disabled people have been either vilified within the discipline of philosophy or exiled from it altogether. Philosophers of disability also advance accounts of disability that resist and run counter to the dominant conception of disability that persists within bioethics, cognitive science, and mainstream political philosophy and ethics, according to which disability is a natural disadvantage that necessarily reduces the quality and worth of disabled people’s lives, inevitably leading to the social and economic disadvantages that accrue to disabled people.

Insofar as practitioners of the Western philosophical tradition have, with few exceptions, cast disability as a natural, negative, and inert phenomenon in this way, they have effectively precluded disability from the realm of most philosophical inquiry. By contrast, philosophers of disability variously use and take a critical stance toward the history and contemporary practice of philosophy to articulate alternative ways in which to think philosophically about disability and about the current social, political, cultural, and economic position of disabled people.

Nevertheless, some philosophers of disability too willingly accept the importance conferred upon the conceptual frameworks, theoretical questions, concerns about policy, and general philosophical approaches that the philosophers whose positions they ostensibly write against have put into place; in other words, they remain too obediently preoccupied with these conceptions, questions, concerns, and philosophical approaches, philosophical approaches that constitute what South African philosopher Leonhard Praeg (2019) refers to as “the holy trinity” of Western philosophy, namely, deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics.

Hence, examination of the metaphysical and epistemological status of disability has, until recently, been largely neglected; naturalization of disability in philosophy is expanding in new directions; the historical emergence and contingency of disability have remained obscured; the constitutive forms of power that Foucault identified have not been adequately addressed; and the ways that disability is intertwined with settler colonialism, the climate crisis, white supremacy, and the exploitation and slaughter of nonhuman animals have been largely ignored.

Philosophy of disability should prod philosophers out of their complacency with respect to disability; in addition, philosophy of disability should undermine the intransigent belief that most philosophers hold according to which disability is fundamentally natural rather than entirely artifactual; and, furthermore, philosophy of disability should offer a new way in which to understand disability in political terms, an understanding that takes account of disability’s production and collusion by, through, and with racialized, gendered, and otherwise stratified and stratifying forms of social power.

Indeed, I aim to subvert the conceptions of disability that continue to prevail in philosophy and disability studies more generally by arguing that disability is an “apparatus.” I (and, increasingly, other philosophers of disability) have employed Foucault’s notion of an apparatus in various contexts to critically undermine the individualized and naturalized understanding of disability that prevails in Foucault scholarship, in philosophy, and in society more generally.

Foucault (1980) introduced the term apparatus to refer to an interconnected ensemble of discourses, institutions, scientific statements, administrative measures, and philosophical propositions that responds to an “urgent need” in a particular historical moment. The urgent need to which the apparatus of disability responds in this historical moment is biopolitical normalization, that is, the need to normalize the population in order to make it more cost-effective and manageable. As an apparatus, in other words, disability is a historically specific and dispersed system of power that produces and configures social, epistemological, and institutional practices toward certain strategic and political ends.

To understand disability as an apparatus is to conceive of it as a historically contingent matrix of power that contributes to, is inseparable from, and reinforces other apparatuses of force relations, including settler colonialism, gender, and class. As a historically contingent matrix of power, furthermore, the apparatus of disability is constituted by and through a complex set of technologies, identities, institutions, and discursive practices that emerge from medical and scientific research, government policies and administrative decisions, academic initiatives, art and literature, and popular culture.

In the next section of my presentation, I indicate some of the presuppositions and implications of philosophy of disability that I have now introduced.

Section 4: Denaturalizing Disability

A great deal of my writing, teaching, service, and activism in philosophy is designed to undermine a cluster of assumptions about the relation between nature and nurture, that is, a cluster of assumptions about the relation between biology and society, assumptions that naturalize disability, gender, race, and other apparatuses of power.

I agree with African American feminist sociologist and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts (2016) who argues that there is no natural body; that all of life is at once biological and social; that genes do not determine anything; and that our brains are plastic, with the ability to be modified by social experience. As Roberts points out, biology is not a separate entity that interacts with the environment; rather, biology is constituted through these social interactions. In her social constructionist, anti-essentialism, Roberts argues against the kind of biosocial science that locates the origins of social inequalities in inherent personal traits rather than imposed social structures. Hence, she also argues against biosocial science that intervenes to fix perceived biological deficits in the bodies of oppressed people themselves rather works than to end the structural violence that dehumanizes them and maintains an unjust social order.

In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I argue that critical analyses of the naturalization of social inequalities must consider how claims about the social construction of biological phenomena are produced, in what contexts these allegedly prediscursive phenomena are mobilized, and for what political purposes. Indeed, my work to articulate a feminist philosophy of disability that construes disability as an apparatus of power denaturalizes and de-biologizes the phenomena of disability in these and other ways, using Roberts, Foucault, and other thinkers to do so.

I use Foucault’s idea of apparatus to shift philosophical discussion about disability away from restrictive conceptualizations of it as a personal characteristic or attribute, a property of given individuals, an identity, or a biological difference; that is, my assumption that disability is an apparatus of productive power moves philosophical discussion of disability toward a more flexible conceptualization of it than other conceptions of disability provide, toward a conception of disability that is historically and culturally sensitive in ways that other conceptions of disability are not.

Disability is not a metaphysical substrate, a natural, biological category, or a characteristic that only certain individuals embody or possess but rather is a historically contingent network of force relations in which everyone is implicated and entangled and in relation to which everyone occupies a position. In other words, to be disabled or nondisabled is to occupy a certain subject position within the productive constraints of the apparatus of disability. There are no “people with disabilities” and “able-bodied people”; rather, there are “disabled people” and “nondisabled people.”

On my antifoundational, social constructionist approach, people are variously racialized through strategies and mechanisms of the apparatus of race, but no one “has” a race or even a particular race. On my approach, furthermore, people are variously sexed through strategies and mechanisms of the apparatus of sex, but no one “has” a sex or even a certain sex. So, too, people are variously disabled or not disabled through the operations of the apparatus of disability, but no one “has” a disability or even a given disability. Disability, like race and binary sex, is not a nonaccidental attribute, characteristic, or property of individuals, not a natural biological kind (see Tremain 2001, 2015, 2017).

That females and people of colourꟷwhich are by no means mutually exclusive social groupsꟷhave been perceived as the bearers of sex and race respectively, doesn’t mean that males are not also sexed in accordance with the apparatus of sex, nor does it mean that white people are not racialized in the terms of the apparatus of race. Likewise, that one is not subjected as a disabled person doesn’t indicate that one occupies a space apart from the apparatus of disability.

The apparatus of disability is expansive and expanding, differentially subjecting an increasing number of people to relatively recent forms of power based on constructed perceptions and interpretations of (among other things) bodily structure, appearance, style and pace of motility, mode of communication, size, emotional expression, mode of food intake, and cognitive character, all of which phenomena are produced and understood within a culturally and historically contingent frame and shaped by place of birth, place of residence, racialization, gender, education, religion, years lived, and so on.

Key classificatory schemes and distinctions currently made in philosophy of disability and disability theory are technologies of disabling relations of power, including the distinctions between visible disabilities and invisible disabilities; physical disability versus cognitive disability; physical impairments as opposed to sensory impairments; severe disabilities versus moderate or mild disabilities; and high functioning as opposed to low functioning.

Although many disabled people reify or objectify these historically contingent products of the apparatus of disability, incorporating them into their sets of beliefs, theories, values, and practices and interpreting them as the ground of purportedly natural identities, I maintain that this constitution of disabled subjectivities should also be recognized as a strategic mechanism of (neo)liberalism, that is, as the continuous capacity of a liberal regime to mold the subjectivities of individuals in particular ways, for particular purposes.

When disability is located within the domain of force relations; that is, when disability is construed as an apparatus of power rather than as a personal characteristic or attribute, its collaboration with other apparatuses of force relations can be more readily identified and more thoroughly investigated than has been done thus far. For one is never only disabled or nondisabled, but rather is also gendered, racialized, and positioned in some way with respect to sexuality, nationality, and age.

Section 5: The Fruitfulness of Foucault for Feminist Philosophy of Disability (the final section of my presentation)

In “Foucault: The Premier Disabled Philosopher of Disability,” my contribution to a forthcoming collection on Foucault’s thinking, I propose that, for all intents and purposes, Foucault was the first disabled philosopher of disability. The chapter is intended to be a love letter to Foucault or, at least, my tribute to Foucault that articulates some of the ways in which his insights have impacted my own thinking about power, disability, subjectivity, and social transformation; how his understanding of the self as a work of art has guided me in shaping my own life; and how his ideas about freedom and social change have enabled me and other disabled philosophers of disability to build community and conscience.

Foucault himself did not explicitly identify as a disabled philosopher; nor did he specifically categorize his work as philosophy of or about disability. Thus, I motivate the tribute to Foucault and his thinking by elaborating an explanation of how he can, nevertheless, be classified as a disabled philosopher of disability, an explanation that I unfold over the course of the chapter. Although my objective in the chapter was to demonstrate why Foucault should be recognized as the disabled progenitor of philosophy of disability, I note that his work has been unfavorably received by some philosophers and theorists who write about disability. In turn, I explain why the criticisms that these authors direct at Foucault ought not to be accepted.

In short, a variety of Foucault’s claims—including his claims about the productive character of power, the constitution of the subject, and the critical force of historical approaches—have been (and remain) commonly misunderstood in philosophy and theory of disability. Although the chapter addresses how, in this way, philosophers and theorists of disability have contributed to the marginalization of scholarship with respect to disability that relies on Foucault, I should emphasize that, despite the centrality of disability to Foucault’s own work, heretofore scholarship on Foucault in philosophy has, for the most part, ignored philosophy and theory of disability (Tremain, 2015a).

Research and scholarship on Foucault, like research and writing in philosophy more generally, has in large part both implicitly assumed and explicitly reproduced a naturalized conception of disability according to which, as I have indicated, the phenomena of disability constitute a biological property of individuals that exists prior to culture and language, a natural personal defect or disadvantage that should be rectified or eliminated. In other words, predominant metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that philosophers make; specific disciplinary approaches that they cultivate; and distinct professional agendas, interests, and norms that they reproduce render the profession and discipline of philosophy especially unwelcoming, if not hostile, to both disabled scholars and critical philosophical analyses of disability.

The prevalent assumptions that disability is a disadvantageous personal characteristic or property; that it exists prior to the social and political realms; and that it is properly studied in biomedical contexts, the life sciences, and related academic fields are products of the constitution and entrenchment of the “problem” of disability in philosophy and in society more widely. Foucault’s studies facilitate recognition of how the production of the problem of disability, of disability as a problem to be resolved, has been a strategic technology of liberalism and capitalism (Tremain, 2017, 8).

Foucault’s studies of the problems of abnormality, deviance, perversion, and madness (among other things) were not intended to provide normative responses to the phenomena that these problems comprise, that is, they were not intended to tell us what to do but rather were designed to show how the phenomena became thinkable, emerged as problems to which solutions came to be sought. Likewise, my feminist philosophical inquiries into the problem of disability have not thus far offered explicitly normative feminist proposals or responses to the phenomena that disability comprises, proposals and responses that would purportedly identify and ultimately recommend a definitive solution to the “problem.”

Rather, the feminist philosophical inquiries into the problematization of disability that I have developed are designed in large part to indicate how a certain historically and culturally specific regime of power (namely, biopower) has produced certain acts, practices, subjectivities, bodies, relations, and so on as a problem for the present; that is, I follow Foucault’s suggestion that inquiry into the problematization of a given state of affairs attempts to uncover how the different solutions to a problem have been constructed, as well as how these different solutions resulted from the problematization of that state of affairs in the first place (Foucault, 2003, 20-24).

My argument is that Foucault, insofar as he introduced critical examinations of normality and deviance into philosophy, that is, insofar as Foucault rendered contingent and political discursive practices and modes of subjectivity that contribute to the constitution of the phenomena that disability comprises, he ought to be recognized as the predecessor of contemporary philosophers of disability, whether they use his work and they agree with its claims or not.

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.

As I have indicated, my use of Foucault to shape a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability is not without its critics in mainstream philosophy, feminist philosophy, and disability studies. Some of these critics have raised concerns about the status and character of the subject in Foucault’s work and whether the absence from his writing of first-person narratives and perspectives limits the appropriateness and effectiveness of his analyses for feminist philosophy of disability.

To take one example, feminist philosopher Chloë Taylor (2019) has argued that Foucault disregards the subject’s materiality and experience of it. To take another example, Jesse Prinz (2019), a disabled philosopher of mind, worries that Foucault does not attend to the motives and intentions of the subject.

Does Foucault deny the subject and its agency? Does Foucault discount the epistemic value of personal experiences, including experiences of embodiment, experiences such as pain?

For years, such concerns and questions have been directed at feminist and other philosophers and theorists of disability who draw on Foucault. Numerous disability studies scholars, for example, have been either overtly hostile to Foucault’s work or very skeptical about its suitability as a discourse with which to provide an account of disabled people’s lives. Even now, some disability studies scholars remain unconvinced about the fruitfulness of Foucault for analyses of disability.

The general charges that disability studies scholars have directed at Foucault can be summed up thus: because Foucault disregards personal experiences, denies the foundational subject and its agency, as well as obscures the body, his work is inappropriate for disability theory and philosophy of disability, both of which ought to attend to the lived experiences and knowledges of disabled people, including their experiences and knowledges of their own embodiment.

Taylor and other feminist philosophers have expressed similar concerns about Foucault’s work. For instance, some feminist philosophers have argued that insofar as Foucault ignores the material body that, historically, Eurocentric Western philosophy has associated with women and hence subordinated to an allegedly unencumbered reason associated with men, he extends the subjugation of women in his discourses on power and his history of sexuality especially.

Despite the prevalence of these sorts of criticisms of Foucault in disability theory and in feminist philosophy, the criticisms have never seemed compelling to me. Indeed, I want to emphasize that Foucault did not abandon the subject and its experiences but rather was concerned to show that the subject and its experiences cannot be dissociated from the historically contingent practices that constitute the subject by and through its experiences.

In other words, Foucault did not eliminate the materiality of the body; rather, Foucault used his genealogical approach 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 colonized, as gendered, as sexed, and so on.

As Foucault put it, “The body and everything that touches it: diet, climate, and soilꟷis the domain of [historical descent].… Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (83). In short, the task of genealogy is to de-essentialize the body and the political, economic, and cultural mechanisms that have contributed to its constitution.

Contra Prinz’s worries about the subject’s agency, furthermore, Foucault was also concerned to show that the subject’s intentions and motives are by-products of apparatuses of modern power which themselves are intentional and non-subjective, that is, are directed at certain aims but cannot readily be attributed to any particular actors or agents.

“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 time when HIV-positive people and people living with AIDS—spurred on by groups such as Gay Men’s Health Crisis-GMHC (created in the United States in 1982), Vaincre le sida (created in France in 1983), AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power-ACT UP (created in the United States in 1987), and AIDS Action Now! (created in Canada in 1988)—sought public policy and legislative recognition as “people with disabilities” to gain access to the social services and health-care resources that they needed. Given Foucault’s activism and the constant attention that he accorded to subjugated knowledges, he and his work likely promoted these efforts. Indeed, AIDES, the largest HIV/AIDS organization in France was created in 1984, shortly after Foucault’s death, by his partner (and beneficiary) Daniel Defert.

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.

My argument is that if philosophers of disability were to take up Foucault’s approach to power, the constitution of subjects, and neoliberalism (among other things), their analyses of disability could address the neoliberal problematization of disability in philosophy, including the exclusion of disabled philosophers, especially disabled philosophers of disability, that this problematization of disability in philosophy requires. Hence, the value and iconoclastic importance of Foucault.

Let me end by saying that it has been a distinct honour to address this audience at Beacon College’s first international conference. Finally, I want to say that you are always welcome to contact me by email or through BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, our philosophy blog. You will find one of my email addresses on the Contributors page of the blog.