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

The land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg 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. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in 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.

My guest today is Nic Cottone. Writing from ancestral and contemporary lands of Anishinaabe, Nic is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University interested in socio-political philosophy and feminist philosophy–especially social reproduction theory and Marxist feminism, theories of sexual violence, and feminist philosophy of disability. Nic enjoys spending time with her partner and their two cats, sculpting and painting clay, writing/reading poetry, and playing video games.

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Nic! Please tell us about your background and educational history, as well as how they led you to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy.

Thank you, Shelley. I am a long-time reader of Dialogues on Disability and happy to participate!

[Description of photo below: Sitting on a couch in front of a multi-coloured installation, a smiling Nic is looking off in the distance. She is wearing a beret, has a tattoo on her right arm, and has long hair with bangs.]

My academic career did not take the usual route due to my experiences in high school with accessibility and ableism–which I will say more about later in this interview. I began at a college-branch campus due, ultimately, to medical leave and inaccessibility that I faced in my secondary education. After two years of college classes at that campus, I had enough college credits and a high enough GPA to join the university’s honors program and transfer to my university’s main campus. There, I eventually graduated with Latin and departmental honors, in addition to the honor’s program recognition of “with distinction”.

I did well academically at that university; however, my experience there was complicated. The undergraduate institution that I attended had a culture centered around their renowned business school and their heavy investment in Greek life. I experienced “culture shock” when I transferred to it. For example, I started to form a friendship with someone in two of my classes who subsequently quit talking to me when she found out that I was not rushing, that is, was not doing sorority recruitment rounds/bids. This experience and others like it clarified things for me—that I was not at ease in that world, and that I didn’t need to be.

When I began undergrad, I took environmental science courses, which had a big impact on me. I searched for other courses that addressed environmental issues and found a 300-level environmental philosophy in the course calendar. I had never taken a philosophy course before, but I enrolled. The class began with Aristotle, and I was immediately enthralled by the density and complexity of the philosophical texts. After the first week of the class, I declared a philosophy major and enrolled in an additional philosophy class. After completing my B.A., I pursued my M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy.

When, in that first philosophy class, I read something that I did not understand, I saw it as an invitation to figure it out—a challenging and rewarding process that I continued throughout graduate school. Through this process, I learned that philosophy gave me the tools with which I could explore and express things that I had not previously known how to do and things that had not seemed necessary to explore and express—that is, until I saw other philosophers exploring and expressing them, including past interviewees in this series! In short, I was captivated by philosophy’s rigor, mode of inquiry, and its dialogic nature.

You recently defended your dissertation which examined sexual violence and rape, using social reproduction theory and Marxism to do so. Please elaborate the arguments of the dissertation and explain the implications of the dissertation for work done in this area.

My dissertation primarily aims to historicize discussions about sexual violence within feminist philosophy by giving a materialist analysis. Many discussions of sexual violence focus on its primary harm, whether that means analyzing the impact that it has on agency, autonomy, epistemology, embodiment, or affect. While identifying and clarifying these harms are important, my intervention is to apprehend sexual violence through social theory; that is, I do not merely show the harm of sexual violence, but rather explain it as a social problem, including accounting for what shapes sexual violence, how it is sustained, and ultimately, how it can be resisted. I needed a theory capable of explaining how sexual violence manifests within the 21^st century—that is, in a historically specific way.

The dissertation begins by motivating this intervention, specifically by showing how contemporary discussions can (even unwittingly) retain narrow definitions of rape that have troublesome histories. Of primary concern is how sexual violence is shaped through processes of hegemony—making it a site of ideological conflict—where the occurrences and meanings of sexual violence are socially contested, shaped, and historically specific. This work is crucial for feminist theorists because existing conceptions of sexual violence—such as the conceptions available within law or the social imaginary—are exposed as already mediated through social processes, a fact which warrants feminist ideology critique. If we do not engage in this critique, we risk the hypostatization of the social relations that sustain these meanings and facilitate the practice of sexualized violence. I first explored this issue in my article “Addressing the “Puzzle” of Gray-Area Sexual Violations,” an article upon which the first chapter of my dissertation expands.

To put it simply, to apprehend the social reality of sexual violence, it is necessary to explicitly theorize misconceptions about it, especially in relation to their material conditions. In this sense, there are two interrelated parts to my dissertation. First, I develop an account of misconceptions of rape as an ideological form of social consciousness, where I characterize and draw out what it means for an understanding of rape to be ideological in materialist terms. The second part draws on social reproduction theory (SRT) to directly theorize the social relations that facilitate, shape, and sustain sexual violence.

I use SRT to explain how these relations materially situate people in ways that either expose them to or insulate them from varying degrees of types of social violence, including sexualized violence. When I think about the people in my life who have experienced sexual violence and reflect on the specific spatialities that they were made to inhabit—including why they were there, whether they could be somewhere else, and how the social world failed them—the recurring throughline is the constraining force of material conditions, especially how these conditions are shaped by racialization, colonization, ableism, and sexism. As even non-marxists have pointed out, constraining factors—such as social and economic forces that limit options—are requisite to sexual violence.

Accordingly, my dissertation makes three crucial interventions: first, its materialist analysis of sexual violence departs from the focus on sexual violence in interpersonal or intersubjective terms which is typical of work in the philosophy of sexual violence; second, by articulating misconceptions of rape using marxist accounts of ideology, I depart from the prevalent approach in feminist theory and social sciences that explains them through “rape culture” and “patriarchy,” both of which notions are rooted in radical feminism; and third, by drawing on SRT to explicate sexual violence, I challenge basic assumptions regarding labor within marxist theory, while simultaneously interrupting feminist theory’s understanding of rape by putting it in relation to labor. I do so without identifying or reducing either of them. Instead, I articulate sexual violence and exploitation in dialectical relation to one another by using marxism and SRT. Currently, some of my work to elaborate these claims is under review.

Nic, tell us about your current research on feminist philosophy of disability, neurodivergence, and Marxism.

I read foundational works in disability studies and feminist philosophy of disability during my M.A.; however, I did not return to philosophy of disability until after I finished writing a dissertation that utilized Marxism, when I brought that marxist understanding to bear on thinking philosophically about disability.

Your work, Shelley, exposing the naturalization of disability qua impairment, played a formative role in my thinking about, and approach to, disability. I became interested in the concept and role of pain, especially chronic pain, because the discussion of bodily experiences such as pain and fatigue played a major role in the revival of impairment as partially constitutive of disability. Several (feminist) disability theorists characterize the in-pain body as an impaired body, going as far as to depict the body itself as the problem—a cluster of views which I critically explore in depth in a recent project. I became concerned with how to explain the tension between the experiences of chronic pain and the tendency to depict pain and suffering as impairment. My work began to focus on how to understand the naturalization of impairment and the historical specificity of disability as a category produced through capital.

In a recent project, for instance, I explicitly framed this problem to think through alternative ways of approaching the question of pain. I co-authored a paper (currently under review) with my dear friend and colleague, Jessica Martínez-Cruz, on the question of chronic pain in relation to disability. Because pain is inherently mediated by social meanings—meanings shaped through evaluative judgments about the “badness” of pain and disability and bound up with histories of violence against disabled people—we develop an account that situates pain within the broader political and social conditions that give rise to these meanings and structure the violence: colonialism, ableism, medical racism and sexism, and capitalism. To take a concrete example of the latter, one of my chronic pain conditions is classified as an “orphan disease,” which is the term used to describe rare conditions for which no viable pharmaceutical market exists to justify investment in research or the treatment (at least from the standpoint of producing surplus value).

These kinds of experiences come into sharp contrast, for me, with theories of disability that frame the in-pain body as the problem because of its “impairment”—where impairment is understood as a natural inhibition that disables irrespective of the society or moment of history (as these accounts explicitly claim). In my view, such claims are transhistorical abstractions that reify the (historically) specific social relations that constitute disability and shape our experiences. In the paper that we co-author, by contrast, we are interested in how we can engage with our experiences of pain in ways that run counter to such framings.

To think through this frame, we draw on Indigenous feminist epistemologies of memory and women of color structural feminisms to develop a method for tracing our experiences of pain through their social meanings (including hegemonic ones) and histories; doing so enables us to hold pain in relation, mobilizing our own experiences of it, especially by orienting to one another in life-preserving ways. We use personal narrative to exemplify this method, showing how people orient to, and relate with, one another through (their experiences of) pain, drawing out how these interactions reverberate through our lives in ways that can enable survival and orient collective futurities.

Another thread of my work takes up the issue of disability in relation to “care” Recently, I have been concerned with what I refer to as the veneration of care (e.g., venerating “care work”). Despite sustained critiques of care discourse for neglecting its racialized dimensions and exploitative dimensions, idealized discussions of care proliferate. In another recent project, therefore, I explain how SRT offers resources for resisting this idealization because of the way that it exposes the mystification of exploitation by capital. As my analysis shows, the focus of care discourse on the worker offers limited tools for conceptualizing those who are “cared for.” I call this lacuna the “other side of care,” which both refers to those “being cared for” and names a problematic that draws attention to how care discourse enacts alterity, where the tendency to conceptualize care primarily from the standpoint of the caregiver obscures how those “receiving care”—especially disabled people—are situated as passive recipients of care under capitalism.

By contrast, I discuss how social reproduction and care are shaped by the material demands of capital, demands that actively produce, differentiate, and naturalize disability. I discuss the way that behaviors associated with disability and autism are interpreted and responded to within so-called sites of care, specifically through coercive and carceral logics, which disproportionately target Black and disabled children (as evidenced through the school-to-prison pipeline). Furthermore, I attribute the theoretical neglect of this reality to the idealization of care and to SRT’s narrow focus on exploitation which entails exclusion of the broader structuring of capitalist society, including the production of disability—a narrow focus which, I argue, is not inevitable in marxist theory.

I think this problem, which I have here framed in marxist terms, ultimately corresponds to what you flagged, Shelley, in your critical BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY post about the political subject of the Left. When considering disability vis-à-vis capitalism, I am concerned with the tendency to narrowly focus on either the production process (which SRT addresses but some Marxists do not), or primarily on labor and exploitation as the primary (or only) analytic category. In contrast, my work addresses these issues.

Nic, you have confronted ableism throughout your pre-college and post-secondary education. What would you like us to know about these experiences?

My experiences with ableism have varied depending on the stage of my life, including the institutions involved and my living conditions at the time. *Whether* I experienced ableism did not hinge on if I had accommodations. I do not wish to suggest that accommodations are unimportant things, but rather that my experience of ableism is in no way reducible to these factors—they come apart. Close readings of the history of disability studies shows how one’s understanding of disability ultimately determines the kind of “response” or “intervention” that addressing ableism would involve. As your work points out, Shelley, many views of disability that are considered versions of the “social model” reduce addressing ableism to implementing minor changes in the environment or workspace. These approaches are individualist, even while purporting to be something more than that. One expression of this tendency is what you refer to as “accommodationist” approaches.

Where and when accommodations have been the (primary) means of addressing ableism, accommodationism mediated my experiences of ableism within school (and later, the academy), whether I had formal accommodations or not. In other words, the ableism that I experienced took shape through accommodationism; that is, accommodationism was not a means that sufficiently ameliorated the ableism. A few examples should help to make this distinction clearer to readers and listeners of this interview.

In my pre-college education, the segregation of disabled kids was the standard. We were placed into our own classrooms, whether for part or all of the day—notably into classrooms that were not in the same school building as all the other kids, that is, we were put into portable classrooms or trailers. In high school, there were so-called alternative programs for disabled kids and kids who were dealing with tough home lives that further facilitated our separation from the rest of the school. Not only were we spatially separated, but the modality of our education differed with these “programs,” which relied upon online “instruction,” while we were monitored by teachers who operated more like non-teaching staff.

Within those spaces, I routinely experienced harassment and discrimination by certain teachers. Sometimes, I would be so ill that I could not keep my head up. One of my teachers (a man) would shove my seat into the table to “wake me up,” though I was never asleep. My teachers—through my 504 plan—knew that they were meant to support this behavior on my part. Due to my sickness and my treatments, making it to school and remaining there were challenging and sometimes impossible. Because of truancy laws, which functionally punish kids under the guise of a justified paternalism, I had to be “in attendance.” De jure, truancy law applies to “unexcused absences,” but de facto, within compulsory education, what should be regarded as a “legitimate” absence is instead reconfigured and disabled kids receive pressure from admins and school police.

Inaccessibility is transformed, through the language of institutions, into attendance problems, truancy problems, and a state problem. Hence, the carceral nature of the school, wherein disabled kids are statistically more likely to be punished, suspended, secluded, restrained, etc.—a matter made worse through racialized and gendered ableism, especially among Black disabled kids. Accommodations alter what is in place to putatively ensure equity. When what is in place is designed to fail whole swaths of the population, small adjustments to existing structures will never suffice, let alone bring justice.

My experience with separated classrooms was further amplified by forms of gendered and sexualized violence. Between the prevalence of sexualized violence and the contradictory responses to it—i.e., whether sexual violence is depicted as an egregious crime and typically rooted in logics that see incarceration as justice; or ignored, tolerated, or even encouraged—the social responses to sexual violence are essentially non-existent and fail people, especially children. Sexual violence is made more complex, too, in cases involving children, where, for example, medical professionals have a distinct requirement to report knowledge of violence, which means for kids in that situation, they do not have control over whether they encounter the carceral response (i.e., police).

The adults who were responsible for us at school (teachers, admin, staff) were unprepared to address interpersonal violence between their students. Good intentions alone do not equip adults/teachers to respond to someone sharing a classroom with their assailant. Sara Ahmed observes that when we point out a problem, we become a problem. Sometimes, even our mere presence is taken as a sign of a problem—as if we embody its existence, personify it; hence, the enacting of fragmenting logics (which are, as Maria Lugones explains, logics of purity): since they could not remove the assailant, they separated me out of the already segregated modular classrooms. Remove the disabled kids from non-disabled kids. Remove the disabled girl from disabled kids. Remove the remainder of violence to remove the reminder of the violence—at least, of its effects.

Eva Kittay has suggested that disability itself constitutes a form of precariousness that contributes to our precarity. But the relation goes in the opposite direction: precarity is constituted in how people are materially and socially situated where exclusion and forms of violence accrue—effects that are ascribed onto populations and naturalized as precariousness or, as your work painstakingly argues, Shelley, impairment.

Fast forward: once I was attending university, there were periods during which I did not have access to university-sanctioned accommodations. These gaps resulted from changes in access to resources required to obtain them—such as medical providers—and in one case, resulted from delay in medical diagnosis, which related to medical sexism, sanism, ageism (e.g., “you’re too young”), and discrimination regarding “disease” incidence (e.g., “but that’s rare, therefore you can’t have it”). During one of these gaps, I was forced to rely on inconsistent and informal means through negotiations with individual instructors, which resulted in varying degrees of success.

When my circumstances changed and I gained access to the requisites for official accommodations, neither accessibility nor accommodations necessarily followed. For example, during my Ph.D., I learned that the institutionally ambiguous “graduate-employee” status of grad TAs/RAs also fragments our accommodations: accommodations for graduate students and graduate employees are handled through different processes. Due to the pandemic, I worked remotely for three years but eventually decided to undergo the process of work-place accommodations. In August, at the start of the academic year, I filed for workplace accommodations. I did not receive the Statement of Employee Accommodation Determination (SEAD)—the document that informs the supervising unit of the approved accommodations—until mid-April, two weeks before the academic year ended. Receiving the SEAD only initiates the next step: a required meeting between employee and supervisor to discuss how accommodations might be implemented.

Nine months after beginning the process, I had only reached the point at which I was formally entitled to discuss accommodations (which notably differs from accessibility) with my supervisor. I spent that year like others: without formal workplace accommodations, although I had medical documentation and state-issued disability parking. Instead, I had to navigate inaccessibility with the support of Jessica (whom I mentioned earlier) and my partner. Commonplace (and theoretical) depictions of disabled people as passive recipients of care obscure how we actively and creatively find ways to support one another in ways that institutions and nondisabled people do not support us.

What are your future plans with respect to your research in particular and work in philosophy in general?

My work will likely continue in its current direction with respect to marxist theory and feminist philosophy of disability. In the Fall, I will give a presentation on disability studies and marxism that critically interrogates the so-called historical materialist roots of the social model by locating moments where it reifies social relations—moments at odds with its insistence upon historical materialism. The presentation will explore the ways in which disability is a historically specific social relation produced through capital.

As a “sibling” project to the paper on SRT, care, and disability, I will also present at The Critical Neurodiversity Studies Conference this month on social reproduction and neurodivergence. The presentation specifically examines alienation in relation to autism and childhood.

Incidentally, my research for that paper led me down the rabbit hole of theories of alienation, eventually inspiring a separate paper. Despite its ubiquity, the meaning of alienation varies widely, sometimes referring to subjective dimensions (e.g., feelings of estrangement); other times referring to structures related to the production process. Some people have begun to elaborate alienation in relation to capitalist society more broadly (not merely within the productive process). I want to build on that line of work, specifically in relation to social reproduction.

As I argue in both my dissertation and a paper under review, the activity that we describe as constitutive of social reproduction cuts across (i.e., occurs within) both productive and reproductive spheres, an argument that contrasts with two opposing positions, one of which suggests that it is inherently productive, while the other suggests it is inherently unproductive. An analysis of alienation that examines social reproduction must therefore be capable of theorizing both—a task taken up by this current project. I carefully distinguish alienation from a cluster of closely related marxist concepts that are required for explaining alienation but are often conflated with it in the literature—including objectification, dispossession, and reification. This distinction, in turn, allows me to more precisely articulate how they function in relation to social reproduction.

Nic, how would you like to end this interview? Are there topics or concerns that we have not discussed that you would like to address? Would you like to recommend some books, articles, blogs, or videos that readers and listeners should explore for more information about the issues that you have addressed?

Thank you, Shelley, for the opportunity. Recently, I became involved with an organization for neurodivergent scholars in the humanities—Neurodivergent Humanities Network, or NDHums—in which I get to serve as a mentor with neurodivergent grad students in the upcoming year. Considering how to connect with mentees and explore how people experience and navigate ableism within their disciplines gave me further insight into, and perspective about, how unique your work is—both your work with the Dialogues on Disability series and your philosophical work on ableism within academic philosophy. Most disabled grad students outside of philosophy do not have anything remotely similar within their own disciplines.

To conclude this interview, I will offer recommendations for reading related to the topics that I’ve discussed. While these recommendations are organized by theme, the topics themselves overlap; so, some texts could fit into multiple categories.

Categorized Resources:

Marxist-Feminism and SRT

Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (ed. Bhattacharya)

Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Nadasen)

Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, Fraser)

Cannibal Capitalism (Fraser)

Patriarchy and Accumulation on A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor (Mies)

“The Formal and Real Subsumption of Gender Relations” (Portella and Busk)

“Rape, Racism, and the Capitalist Setting” (Davis)

“A Social Reproduction Theory of Gender Violence” (Hall)

“A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of ‘Sex Work’” (Forseca)

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Federici)

Women’s Work: Feminism, Labor, and Social Reproduction (Ferguson)

“Explaining Gender Violence in Neoliberal era” (Bhattacharya)

Revolutionary Left Radio (podcast)

Disability

Brilliant Imperfection (Clare)

Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (Tremain)

Empire of Normality (Chapman)

“In the Name of Pain” (Siebers)

“This is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like” (Tremain)

“Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse” (Patsavas)

“Is Disability Studies Actually White Disability Studies?” (Bell)

Crip Theory (McRuer)

Disability Intimacy (ed. Wong)

Care Work (Piepzna-Samarasinha)

Unmasking Autism (Price)

Capitalism and Disability (Russell)

Socio-political and Feminist

Cultural Politics of Emotion (Ahmed)

Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed)

Complaint! (Ahmed)

Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Lugones)

Theft is Property: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Nichols)

Transcending the Talented Tenth (James)

“Gender-Based Administrative Violence as Colonial Strategy” (Ruíz, Berenstain)

“White Feminist Gaslighting” (Berenstain)

“Can We End the Feminist Sex Wars?” (Brison)

“Why I Don’t Believe in Patriarchy” (Haslanger)

The Work of Rape (Jaleel)

Rape and Resistance (Alcoff)

Just Sex? Cultural Scaffolding of Rape (Gavey)

What is Rape? Social Theory and Conceptual Analysis (Hänel)

Nic, thanks very much for this abundance of resources and for your terrific responses throughout this interview. Your interview will make an important addition to the archive for the series.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Nic Cottone’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are 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 supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, July 16, 2025, for the one hundred and twenty-fourth 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.