My work as editor of the Philosophy and Theory of Disability area of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Disability Studies is winding down. Overall, the experience of putting together this collection of articles has been remarkably valuable. The authors whom I selected and recommended to write for the encyclopedia have produced outstanding pieces on their respective topics. The reviewers who generously offered their time to adjudicate the articles have benefited the project. The staff at Oxford Research Encyclopedias (ORE) with whom I have worked are committed to the issues for institutional, political, and social justice that the encyclopedia addresses; working with them has been a pleasure. And the feelings of appreciation have been reciprocated, both financially and in other ways. In an email to me last week, for example, the Oxford Project Editor with whom I have worked closely unexpectedly wrote to me and said: “You have been an absolutely phenomenal editor for this project.”
With new feminist anthologies, collections, readers, and encyclopedia entries released almost weekly, you might wonder why so many feminist philosophers (and theorists) have devoted themselves to this particular project. One glaringly obvious answer to that question is this: most of them are disabled. Feminist philosophy (and theory) of disability and disabled feminist philosophers remain excluded from virtually every component of the discipline and profession of philosophy and this exclusion is palpable: exclusion from employment (here and here), from editorial boards of feminist philosophy journals (here), from feminist philosophy anthologies (here and here), from conferences (here), from feminist entries in other encyclopedias to which philosophers contribute and congregate (here, here, and here).
Collectively, feminist philosophers–OK, let’s be frank: nondisabled feminist philosophers and disabled feminist philosophers who pass as nondisabled/have passed as nondisabled/otherwise began to identify as disabled after they were tenured–have done very little to eliminate ableism in philosophy:
they generally don’t work to dismantle the structural ableism in the profession; on the contrary, if they are disabled, they are “good (feminist) crips” who comply and protect their nondisabled (feminist) philosopher friends from “bad (feminist) crips” who complain (like me); whether nondisabled or good crips, they take relief in their promotions and await retirement and their pensions; indeed, they continue to contribute to and promote collections, conferences, and other mechanisms and practices that exclude disabled feminist philosophers and feminist philosophy of disability. When one challenges these feminist philosophers on their reinforcement of ableism, the response is always the same: you are told they are “Sorry,” or they unfollow you on social media, or they render you persona non grata altogether.
Hence, the dire need to alleviate some of the huge disparities that structural and interpersonal ableism continues to generate in philosophy. I have done my utmost to lessen these disparities throughout my career as a marginalized disabled feminist philosopher of disability, some of which I have documented in various contexts, including here. It is this crucial requirement, furthermore, that motivated and sustained my work on the Philosophy and Theory of Disability Area of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Disability Studies which is scheduled to launch in January 2026. I have copied the final version of my encyclopedia article “Feminist Philosophy of Disability” below.
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Feminist Philosophy of Disability
By Shelley Lynn Tremain
Summary
This article considers feminist philosophy of disability, a relatively new subfield of philosophy that constitutes a feminist intervention into the ways that disability has hitherto been researched and represented in philosophy and society at large. The article explains the central assumptions of feminist philosophy of disability by situating this new field in relation to traditional mainstream philosophy, (mainstream) feminist philosophy, and philosophy of disability that does not align itself with feminism, as well as in relation to feminist disability studies and the interdisciplinary field of disability studies in general. Although, as the article shows, feminist philosophy of disability may draw upon some of the assumptions of these other fields, it departs from each of them and variously goes beyond them in important ways, especially with respect to its motivational assumptions about the constitutive and complex character of social power and how power relations condition philosophy and academia more broadly. Although feminist philosophy of disability shares with feminist disability studies, as well as disability studies and philosophy of disability that are not explicitly feminist, the aim to subvert the subjugating effects of dominant medicalized approaches to disability in philosophy, academia, and society more broadly (and may even derive conceptual tools from them), it conceives of their respective analyses as incomplete, philosophically, politically, and materially. The article begins by locating philosophy of disability and feminist philosophy of disability within the domain of mainstream philosophy.
Keywords: British social model; feminist philosophy; impairment-disability distinction; bioethics; PhilPapers database; philosophy of disability; race; settler colonialism; sex-gender distinction; structural injustice
Situating Disability in Philosophy
Feminist philosophy of disability is a feminist extension and expansion of the field of philosophy of disability and thus is a critical philosophical intervention against the ableist, white androcentrism of the dominant tradition of philosophy; that is, feminist philosophy of disability extends and expands the scope of the analytical framework that philosophy of disability which is not explicitly feminist takes as its domain, encompassing a more comprehensive understanding of what the political realm comprises and how it is constituted. For both the discipline and profession of Euro-American, or “Western,” philosophy are predominantly composed of nondisabled, cisgender, propertied white men, continuing a cultural tradition in which these philosophers have postulated their values, perspectives, beliefs, and experiences as politically neutral, disinterested, and universal, and as representing reality, truth, and goodness (Tremain 2013; Alcoff et al. 2020). From the mid-twentieth century, however, feminist philosophers and various other social groups previously marginalized in and excluded from mainstream philosophy—whether due to (say) gender, disability, race, class, nationality, or sexuality—have increasingly identified and challenged the historical, structural, institutional, and intersubjective elements of the discipline and profession of philosophy that variously contribute to their respective marginalization, including the asymmetrical demographic composition of philosophy and its constitutive effects. Philosophers in these marginalized and excluded groups have, for example, persistently articulated discourses and situated knowledges that run counter to the entrenched homogeneity and exclusionary nature of Euro-American philosophy, expanding the purview of philosophical investigation. The persistent efforts of these disabled, racialized, trans, and feminist philosophers (which are by no means mutually exclusive groups) have, by now, had noticeable influence on the demographics and subject matter of philosophy, transforming the self-understandings of philosophers and self-representations of the profession of philosophy itself.
Philosophy of disability, which is one example of this kind of ameliorative discourse, has emerged relatively recently as a subfield of philosophy and area of philosophical inquiry, unfolding in part as a critical response to the homogeneous and exclusionary character of philosophy, that is, insofar as the dominant and widely accredited tradition of Northern philosophy comprises the values, perspectives, beliefs, and experiences of nondisabled white people almost exclusively. Feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, Latinx philosophy, LGBTQ philosophy, and other oppositional philosophies identify structural injustice and forms of oppression, discriminatory practices, and biases within philosophy with respect to gender, race, and sexuality; furthermore, these diverse philosophical discourses continue to provide alternative understandings of social categories and identities.
Likewise, the new subfield of philosophy of disability aims to identify and articulate the oppressive character of (for example) certain taken-for-granted ideas, argumentative claims, and structural injustices with respect to research and knowledge on disability. The efforts of philosophers of disability to do so comprise novel ways in which to conceive problems of power, inequality, inclusion, and distribution with respect to disability; constitute critiques of the medicalized and individualized solutions that philosophers have proposed to resolve these problems; and evince innovative approaches to the ontology, epistemology, and phenomenology of disability. For example, Indigenous philosophers and theorists of disability critique Eurocentric settler analyses of disability, emphasizing that endeavors to denaturalize and politicize disability must be tied to the injustices of settler colonialism, expropriation, and land theft (Jaffee and John 2018; Gilroy et al. 2021; Lovern 2021). In short, politically and theoretically astute (feminist) philosophy of disability does not simply consist of the mere application of allegedly pregiven and foundational philosophical principles to a self-evident category of disability; rather, a cutting-edge (feminist) philosophy of disability takes intersectional analysis of (the constitution of) disability as its starting point, that is, as its launchpad for philosophical engagement, considering philosophical (epistemological, ontological, linguistic, etc.) arguments and problems through this lens.
Michel Foucault was arguably the premier disabled philosopher of disability, if not the premier disabled feminist philosopher of disability. As Barry Allen asserts: “Foucault was the first (or the most persuasive at least) to describe how, through a supposed knowledge of the ‘normal case,’ differences among people become targets of power” (Allen 2015, 93). An example of this “intermingling” of power and knowledge, Allen argues, is illustrated by Foucault’s description of “the perverse implantation” in volume one of The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1978, 36-49). The “idea of perversion,” Allen writes, was one of the first ideas to emerge from the nineteenth-century medicalization of sexuality. “Medicine,” he remarks, “identified a human sexual instinct,” construed as “a natural physiological function in principle no different from other natural functions, which medicine must define and cure.” Thus, “perversions,” Allen writes, “were deviations or abnormalities in the operation of this sexual instinct, which was itself defined by a medical perception of normality” (Allen 2015, 93). Foucault—in keeping with his conviction that the most effective exercises of power are productive rather than merely repressive—indicated that the greater was the extent to which psychiatrists looked for sexual deviants, the more of them that they found. For Foucault, Allen explains, sexual perversions were not medical discoveries about human nature but rather were artifacts implanted among us by the so-called experts who “know” (Allen, 2015, 94). As this article will show, disabled feminist philosopher of disability Shelley Tremain (2001) has drawn on Foucault’s claims about the constitution of normality and the implantation of abnormality to interrogate the categories of impairment and disability.
Notwithstanding Foucault, philosophers have largely ignored disability and its politically potent and artifactual social character, deeming it to be a straightforwardly natural, biological entity, a transhistorical and transcultural property of individuals which is thus philosophically uninteresting; that is, they have, in general, uncritically accepted and promoted common misunderstandings of disability that rely upon presuppositions and constructions of normality—with respect to, say, function, motility, intelligence, structure, size, cognition—and hence normal human beings or “normates,” to use feminist disability theorist Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s term(Garland Thomson 1997). Indeed, mainstream Eurocentric philosophers rely on ableist and eugenic assumptions about disability, taking so-called “normal” people as the proper subject matter of philosophical attention, with often dire implications and consequences for disabled people; that is, philosophers have typically cast disability as prediscursive, as logically and temporally prior to culture and language, and hence politically neutral. Disability, in their view, is an inert and self-evidently disadvantageous natural characteristic of individuals that ought to be prevented, cured, or otherwise eliminated and thus is appropriately and adequately addressed in the realms of science, medicine, and bioethics.
Contra the inclination of philosophers to thus naturalize, dismiss, and trivialize the political, social, and economic injustices that disabled people confront, philosophers of disability boldly advance arguments with respect to the ways in which these injustices are socially generated, arbitrary, and contingent—including arguments about the unjust, arbitrary, and contingent nature of the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers and the marginalization of philosophy of disability in philosophy itself. Disabled philosophers of disability have repeatedly shown that these injustices are integral to the very structure and practice of philosophy at present.
The pervasive refusal within the discipline and profession to acknowledge the philosophical and political import of disability is exemplified in formative arguments of a mid twentieth-century discourse about distributive justice in mainstream political philosophy. This discussion, purportedly about disability and social justice, began with John Rawls’s (1971) argument according to which concerns about disability are not relevant to questions about “the basic structure of society” and thus need not be considered in a theory of justice nor political philosophy more generally. For Rawls, questions about disability should be sequestered in a certain medicalized domain, namely, the realm of “healthcare.” In a critical response to Rawls, Ronald Dworkin (1981) advanced a resources-based theory of distributive justice that he deemed to counter the way in which the former philosopher neglected the pressing issues that a theory of social justice ought to address with respect to “handicaps.” Yet Dworkin’s theory, too, reproduced assumptions about disability that largely naturalize and individualize it as Rawls’s theory did; that is, although Dworkin, unlike Rawls, explicitly addressed distribution to disabled people in his egalitarian theory of resources, the insurance scheme with which he proposed to do so assumed that disabled people should be “compensated” for their “natural misfortunes” and the opportunity costs that, allegedly, would inevitably accrue to them given these “natural” disadvantages (Tremain 1996, 2019).
In other words, these prominent frameworks in political philosophy, even though they are opposed to each other in certain ways, rely upon shared assumptions about disability that naturalize, medicalize, individualize, and decontextualize the phenomena that disability comprises, assumptions that, hence, condition the proposals for social justice that the theories ultimately recommend. As (nondisabled) feminist philosophers such as Nancy Fraser (1989) and Iris Marion Young (1990) have argued, the recommendations that these mainstream theories of justice advance rely upon a conception of political and moral agents as rational, atomistic, independent, and self-sufficient holders or rights and duties, a conception that homogenizes human beings and human societies, obscuring structural injustices and forms of oppression, as well as important aspects of human existence—including infancy and childhood, emotion, disability, pregnancy, and old age. Eva Feder Kittay (1998) has argued, furthermore, that Rawls’s account, which stipulates that people in “the original position” of his social contract theory ought to be “normal and cooperating,” implicitly assumes and requires that no one is in a relationship of dependency, that is, as a provider of care or dependent on others for care.
Disabled Indigenous authors assert that these sorts of Western feminist claims, like arguments about rights and distributive justice with respect to disability, diverge from how Indigenous cultures understand the character of disability. For example, Sandra Yellowhorse (Diné) states that although Diné notions of disability have been impacted by colonialism and forced assimilation, these Diné understandings of disability construe it as a communal relationship rather than a juxtaposition between dependents and caregivers. In a different context, moreover, Charles Mills (1997) has identified how Rawls’s theory in particular and social contract theories in general have concealed and propped up the racial injustice, enslavement, and other anti-Black violence that Black people have endured for centuries, as well as the enslavement and genocide of Indigenous peoples, especially in the North American cultural context in which Rawls himself lived and wrote. In short, Rawls’s theory and social contract theory more generally position disabled people, Black people, Indigenous people (which are not mutually exclusive groups) as beyond both the scope of justice and the humanity that the theory is alleged to actualize.
As these dominant political philosophies indicate, the conception of disability that prevails in philosophyꟷaccording to which disability is a detrimental biological property of individualsꟷuncritically replicates prevalent misconceptions about the ontology of disability that circulate in mainstream Western societies at large. The replication of these misconceptions in philosophical contexts reproduces demeaning normative claims by philosophers who recommend that “disabilities” be administered, managed, improved, or cured. Indeed, Tremain (2017) argues that the field of bioethics is a biopolitical technology of government, that is, a technology of “racism against the abnormal” (to use Foucault’s phrase), a modern form of eugenics which ought to be abolished. The work of bioethicists such as Jonathan Anomaly (2018), Julian Savulescu (2001), and Udo Schüklenk (2024) is especially egregious in this regard (Tremain 2024a).
For example, Norman Daniels (1985) has taken up Rawls’s assertion that considerations with respect to disability should be sequestered in the realm of healthcare, an overlooked factor in the rise to prominence and increasing growth of bioethics in the field of philosophy. The artifactual Boorsian notion of “species-typical functioning”—around which revolves Daniels’s claim that healthcare should aim to restore subjects to “normal” species-typical functioning—has enabled the intermingling of power and knowledge to be obscured and the eugenic impetus of the subfield of bioethics to operate openly. Disabled philosopher of biology Ronald Amundson (2005) has remarked that although the use of the word typical in the term typical function seems to suggest statistical assessment—that is, what constitutes the common or usual function—Boorse intended the notion to imply the normal function of members of a species, where the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” function is an empirically grounded implication of biomedical science; that is, normal and abnormal function are, according to Boorse, distinct natural kinds, objective facts of the natural world. Within Boorse’s theory, Amundson notes, the notion of normal function carries a double implication. First, normal function is statistically common in the species; abnormal function is rare. Second, normal function is the most successful or (in Darwinian terms) the most fit. The claim is that the more an organism diverges from its species average, the worse it will function (Amundson 2005, 105; see also Amundson 2000). Amundson (2005) argues, however, that Boorse’s contribution to this discussion in bioethics misrepresents biomedical science. Amundson argues, furthermore, that neither functional uniformity nor the association between statistical typicality and excellence of function is a scientific discovery about the biological world.
Dominant ideas about the relation between disability and technology can serve as another example to illustrate how disability is depoliticized, individualized, and medicalized in philosophy. For philosophers of technology, too, largely accept the biases and assumptions about disability and its ontology that circulate in mainstream Western discourse and culture, where disability and technology are understood to be related thus: disability is remediable through technology, with scientific and medical technology regarded as the superior means through which prediscursiveꟷi.e., transhistorical, transcultural, and naturalꟷdisability can be rectified, alleviated, or eliminated (Franssen, Lokhorst, and van de Poel, 2018; Tremain 2025b)). When most nondisabled people think of technology vis-à-vis disability, they think of the ways in which forms of technology can fix, remove, or lessen the disadvantages that disability allegedly imposes naturally. In other words, the prevalent understanding of disabilityꟷwhich philosophers of technology uncritically reproduceꟷcasts it as a politically neutral personal defect or flaw, an individual characteristic, while technology is a politically neutral artefact utilized to facilitate the ways that science and medicine addresses and administers the natural disadvantages that disability imposes. Whether it be prostheses, AI, prenatal diagnosis, TTYs, or electric wheelchairs, technology is generally believed to be a politically neutral and value neutral means through which to improve the lives of disabled people (Tremain 2025b).
Philosophers of disability (and disability theorists) have astutely argued that many kinds of technology—such as prenatal genetic screening, stem-cell research, and cochlear implants—are designed and developed to modify the human in ways that produce negative public perceptions of disabled people as a social group and detrimentally influence public perceptions of certain disabled individuals especially, advancing eugenic aims to eliminate a range of non-normative forms of embodiment, modes of communication, and kinds of cognition. Melinda Hall’s (2013) work on prenatal testing and risk; Johnathan Flowers’s (2024) work on ADHD, AI, and technology in general; and Mich Ciurria’s (2023) work on technofascism and disaster ableism are examples of critical philosophical responses to the ableist assumptions that motivate both the development of technology and the promotion of it that predominates in philosophy.
While development of technology to, for instance, test and screen prenatally is variously claimed to be a value-neutral endeavor (as Carole Browner and Nancy Ann Press [1995] early noted), philosophers and bioethicists concede that decision-making about which “traits” the testing and screening technology should identify is a value-laden process. Philosophers of disability go further to argue that unquestioned assumptions according to which purportedly value-neutral technology can paradoxically alleviate or eliminate the allegedly natural disadvantages claimed to constitute disability condition work in a range of subfields of philosophy, including bioethics, political philosophy, cognitive science, and philosophy of technology itself. In other words, most philosophers of disability share with mainstream philosophers the assumption that technology is an instrumental externality of disability.
In a departure from other philosophers of disability, Tremain argues, however, that technology is a co-constituting mechanism of disability, that is, disability is a fully-fledged technology itself, a complex and complicated apparatus of power, a composite of other technologies and other artefacts rather than a natural, i.e., biological, feature of human beings that technology is conceived and introduced to dissipate, fix, or eradicate altogether (Tremain 2026). As Tremain notes, claims about the social construction of the human being are no longer cavalierly dismissed in philosophical circles, where work on the constitution of subjects by authors such as Foucault (1997), Ian Hacking (1999) Linda Martﭐn Alcoff (2006), and Pitts (2021) is now acknowledged as philosophically significant. Tremain argues that if the claim that the human being is a social construction must be taken seriously and if it makes sense to claim that the phenomena that make up the human—such as disability, race, materiality, and identity—are themselves social constructions, then it makes sense to say the human and phenomena that constitute the human have emerged into being and have histories, that is, are artefactual. She argues, furthermore, that if it makes sense to claim that the human and the phenomena constitutive of it are artefacts with histories, then it seems plausible to say that the human and the phenomena constitutive of it can be regarded as technologies whose characteristic functions are themselves products of history. For Tremain, the growing production of technology that targets disabled people and the assumption on which this production relies–that is, the assumption according to which technology should be increasingly developed and employed to alleviate and eliminate the allegedly natural disabilities of individuals–are strategic mechanisms and effects of biopower, a distinctly modern form of power that began to emerge in the eighteenth century and that continues to operate in order to maximize the conditions conducive to “life,” the life of the species and the life of the individual.
Individualized, medicalized, and depoliticized conceptions of disability also condition arguments advanced in moral responsibility theory. In this regard, disabled feminist philosopher of disability/crip theorist Ciurria has done pathbreaking work to point out the ableist, racist, sexist, and speciesist assumptions that condition the thinking of philosophers who advance claims about moral responsibility (2023). Ciurria argues for a critical approach to responsibility that both underscores its political construction “as a system of practices that enforce hierarchies of power” and examines the structural injustices that the concept of responsibility itself enables and portends (Tremain 2024c, 3). As Ciurria remarks, “Most philosophers do not see moral responsibility as a political practice structured by apparatuses of power,” (Ciurria 2023, 35) but rather have been concerned with the relation between responsibility and metaphysical determinism, an analysis that abstracts away from the political sphere (35).
To be sure, philosopher P.F. Strawson shifted debates in the field of moral responsibility theory “by redefining responsibility as an interpersonal practice involving the reactive attitudes, which embedded responsibility in social relations;” nevertheless, his account neglected the political dimensions of interpersonal relationships and the ways in which the reactive attitudes “uphold ableist oppression by imposing double binds on disabled people” (Ciurria 2023, 44). On the terms of these ableist double binds, Ciurria notes, “disabled people are either morally ‘impaired’ or culpably evil [which] resurrects the paradox of dehumanization,” whereby target groups are rendered as “either subhuman or demonic” (44). Ciurria notes, furthermore, that on the terms of these ableist double binds “If disabled people are not submissive, we are hostile ‘cripples’, threatening the health and morality of civilized society” (44). Referring to Ciurria’s insights, Tremain (2024c) has remarked that Strawson uncritically presupposed a naturalized and individualized conception of disability insofar as he argued that people who are “neurotic,” “warped or deranged,” “schizophrenic,” “compulsive,” “insane,” or “delusional” are not members of the moral community, that is, should not be regarded as moral agents who participate in the relationships that characterize responsibility practices (Strawson [1974] 2008, in Tremain 2024c, 5). In Strawson, Tremain explains, the parameters of the moral domain are delineated, established, and secured through the exclusion of disabled people (5).
Tremain has pointed out that even feminist philosophers who recognize that relations of social power—and, indeed, structural injustice—condition attributions of responsibility uncritically invoke naturalizing and individualizing constructions of disability to thereby circumscribe both the scope of the moral landscape and a set of morally relevant agents. For example, in their introduction to a collection on “the social dimensions of moral responsibility,” Katrina Hutchison, Catriona Mackenzie, and Marina Oshana assume an essentialist ontology of disability, according to which disability is a self-evidently natural and deleterious characteristic (difference, attribute, or property) that some people embody or possess, in order to argue thus: “individuals whose capacities are intact may be (incorrectly) judged to lack the relevant capacities due to their social situation. Others’ assessments of the moral agency of an individual might track social identity rather than capacity” (Hutchison, Mackenzie, and Oshana 2018, 9, emphasis added). For Hutchison and coauthors (as for Strawson and other philosophers of moral responsibility): (1) the construction of certain modes of existence as idealized “capacities” is not itself a technology of power; (2) prevalent perceptions of these so-called relevant capacities (and “lack” thereof) are not instruments of social power; (3) these perceptions of one’s ostensibly natural capacities are not constitutive of one’s social identity and situation; and (4) these allegedly natural capacities not contingently constructed products and effects of this situation. Thus, these feminist authors assume (like Strawson) that they can use their distinction—that is, use their “capacity criterion” (Jenkins 2024)—to determine who should be included in accounts of moral responsibility and who should be excluded. As disabled feminist philosopher of disability Stephanie Jenkins argues, however, philosophical claims and theories that employ such criteria to determine which beings deserve full moral consideration are both ableist and speciesist, providing rationale (and rationalization) for the mistreatment and disregard of both disabled humans and nonhuman animals.
The Ableist Infrastructure of Philosophy
As noted at the outset of this entry, mainstream philosophy, like other “traditional” disciplines of the university, allegedly operates in accordance with the putative values of neutrality, rationality, impartiality, and objectivity. Tremain has argued, however, that the discipline of philosophy, like every other discipline that constitutes the contemporary university, implicitly promotes certain ontologies, methodologies, and epistemologies, while demoting other ontologies, methodologies, and epistemologies (Tremain 2013, 2017; Foucault 1982); that is, she points out that certain political, social, economic, cultural, and institutional mechanisms and influences condition philosophy and every other discipline of the contemporary university, although conventional, established disciplines such as philosophy continue to be represented—and to variously represent themselves—as value neutral, detached, disinterested, and impartial. Against the latter discourses, Tremain notes, philosophy of disability explicitly represents itself as politically motivated in character and socially engaged in content. For like other disciplines of the contemporary university that revolve around a social position or identityꟷsuch as gender studies, queer studies, and Black studiesꟷphilosophy of disability has grown out of and remains associated with a political movement for social change and social justice, namely, the international disabled people’s movement.
Indeed, Tremain (2017) argues that, in part, the explicitly political and interested character of the subfield of philosophy of disability provides the rationale for its continued marginalization within the discipline of philosophy more broadly and the exclusion of disabled philosophers that this marginalization entails. This institutional delegitimization of the epistemologies and knowledge claims of disabled philosophers is indicative of the systemic and structural delegitimization of the perspectives, aspirations, concerns, and insights of disabled people in general throughout society. A critical overview of one influential element of the infrastructure of research in philosophy, namely, PhilPapers: Online Research in Philosophy—a database of philosophical research whose architecture is purported to be value neutral and merely descriptive of philosophy’s authentic nature—can serve as a case study to illustrate this form of epistemic oppression.
The subfields of metaphysics, ethics, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of language are widely regarded in the contemporary discipline of philosophy as foundational to it, supposedly distinguishing the discipline of philosophy from other disciplines of research and teaching and reaffirming its self-ascribed status as “the queen of the sciences.” Philosophers who hold this conventional view of philosophy maintain that these subfields of philosophy are the necessary, unchanging, and “core” elements of the discipline, while they regard other subfields of philosophical inquiry—such as philosophy of disability, philosophy of race, and feminist philosophy—as applications and contingent derivatives of these foundational subfields. In other words, philosophers who understand the structure and practice of philosophy in this conventional way assume that the former subfields are ontologically and epistemologically prior to the latter subfields and render possible the latter subfields. For philosophers who distinguish in this way between the former “core” subfields of philosophy and the latter “applied” subfields of philosophy, the questions and concerns that make up the former subfields are generally regarded as timeless, disinterested, and universal in character, while, alternatively, the questions and concerns that constitute the latter subfields are generally taken to be accidental, interested, and partial (Tremain 2013, 2017; Dotson 2012; Foucault 1982).
In an examination of the infrastructure of philosophy, Tremain (2013, 2017) has argued that this conventional understanding of philosophyꟷwhich frames disability as a philosophically uninteresting and self-evidently natural entity to which universal principles can be appliedꟷconditions PhilPapers. The content of the database is organized into predetermined areas of specialization, subfields, and topics in philosophy that are hierarchically arranged in descending order of importance according to prevailing ideas in the tradition and discipline of Euro-American, Western philosophy about which areas, subfields, and topics: (1) have the most/less philosophical import; (2) have the most/less explanatory power; and (3) should be endowed with the most/less authoritative status. So-called core or fundamental areas of the discipline—“Metaphysics and Epistemology,” “Value Theory,” “Science, Logic, and Mathematics,” “History of Western Philosophy,” and “Philosophical Traditions”—are designated as the supreme categories on the database and, in turn, other areas of inquiry are designated as subcategories of these supreme categories, or subcategories of the subcategories of the supreme categories, or (“leaf”) subcategories of the subcategories of the subcategories of the supreme categories, where a category’s distance from the supreme categories is understood to be indicative of the allegedly diminished import and explanatory power that it holds, as well as the relative authority within philosophy of the areas of inquiry that it comprises (Tremain 2013, 2017, xi–ix).
Mary Douglas and David Hull, Hacking, and Nelson Goodman are among the scholars who have challenged assumptions according to which classifications and categories accurately report or reflect a pre-given reality (Douglas and Hull 1992; Hacking 2004; Goodman 1978). They have variously argued that the practices of classification and categorization, the relations between classifications and categories, and the questions and concerns to which these phenomena give rise are no mere value-neutral reportage or representation of objective differences, relations, and similarities that await discovery and recognition. Rather, classification (and classification systems), they argue, is performative insofar as it contributes to the constitution of the very value-laden resemblances, distinctions, associations, and relationships between phenomena and states of affairs that it puts into place. In short, the work on classification of these thinkers is designed to show that political, social, economic, cultural, and institutional force relations influence every aspect of our classification and ordering of the world. Hence, every aspect of the discipline (and profession) of philosophy, every philosophical question and concern, as well as every subfield that these questions and concerns constitute, should be regarded as a social artifact of historically contingent and culturally specific discourse (Tremain 2013, 2017, ix–xi). In other words, what counts as philosophy of disability and feminist philosophy of disability is a performative endeavour.
In Tremain’s analysis of the PhilPapers database, she has argued that the marginalized location that the emerging subfield of feminist philosophy of disability occupies within the current formulation of the PhilPapers database exemplifies the constitutive character of classification in general and reproduces the marginalization of feminist philosophy, philosophy of disability, and feminist philosophy of disability in the discipline in particular. Within the current categorization of the database, Tremain has pointed out, feminist philosophy is construed as “Topics in Feminist Philosophy,” a subcategory of the superior category of “Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality,” which is, in turn, a subcategory of the supreme category of “Value Theory.” Furthermore, feminist philosophical work on disability is situated under the rubric of a “leaf” subcategory—namely, “Feminism: Disability”—that is subordinate to the subcategory of “Topics in Feminist Philosophy.” In the schema of the PhilPapers database, Tremain notes, feminist philosophy of disability is represented as on par with “topics” in feminist philosophy such as “Autonomy,” “Love,” “Identity Politics,” and “Reproduction,” rather than represented as on par with, an element of, and in relationship with other apparatuses of identity and subjection—namely, gender, race, and sexuality—in a more comprehensive category of “Philosophy of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Disability,” to which the subcategory of “Topics in Feminist Philosophy” would in turn be subordinate. Although the superior category of “Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality” includes subcategories of “Philosophy of Gender,” “Philosophy of Race,” and “Philosophy of Sexuality,” it does not encompass a derivative category of “Philosophy of Disability.” Tremain argues that no allegedly objective and value-neutral explanation can be offered for why feminist philosophy and feminist philosophy of disability are thus categorized in the PhilPapers database. Rather, the relegated statuses conferred upon feminist philosophy and feminist philosophy of disability in the database, she argues, reflect political decisions and the assumptions on which they rely. These political decisions, Tremain notes, preclude the incorporation of disability into intersectional feminist analyses, and thus thereby reinforce depoliticized conceptions of disability in philosophy and contribute to the marginalization and diminution of critical work on disability within the subfield of feminist philosophy and the discipline more generally (see Tremain 2013, 2017, ix–xi).
For Tremain, furthermore, the almost exclusive classification and categorization within the database of (feminist) philosophical work on disability as “value theory” relies on reductive assumptions according to which the only worthwhile inquiries about disability in which philosophers engage are “ethical” in nature, effectively obscuring the fact that the phenomena of disability raise pertinent questions for every subfield of the discipline: disability problematizes the metaphysical status of corporeal, material, and institutional boundaries; disability suggests questions about what counts as oppressive linguistic practice that philosophers of language should consider; disability points to unexamined questions about how the apparatus of ableism and the apparatuses of racism, classism, and sexism (among others) with which disability is inextricably intertwined have shaped the history of philosophy; and disability unravels constructs of rationality and objectivity in ways that nondisabled feminist epistemologists have not imagined (see, e.g., Tremain 2013, 2017, 2024b; also Tremain 2015).
In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, Tremain (2017) develops an argument designed to show that the prevailing conception of disability in philosophy (that the PhilPapers database promotes) is mutually constitutive with the exclusion of disabled philosophers, especially disabled philosophers of disability; that is, she argues that the conception of disability that predominates in philosophy, according to which disability is a natural personal flaw or defect, contributes to and reproduces the exclusion of disabled philosophers in the profession and, in turn, the absence of disabled philosophers (many of whom themselves specialize in philosophy of disability) enables the perpetuation in philosophy of the conception of disability as a detrimental personal trait or individual characteristic. Tremain’s argument is, in short, that the homogeneity of the topics and questions studied in philosophy is co-constitutive with and reinforces the homogeneity of the demographics of philosophy, which, as indicated, is the most demographically homogeneous discipline in the humanities and social sciences.
In a 2013 article, Tremain reported that disabled philosophers make up about 1 percent of full-time philosophy faculty in Canada and only marginally more in the United States, although, by most credible estimates, disabled people constitute an estimated 27 percent of the general population of North America. In that historical context, she noted, that not a single disabled philosopher of disability was employed full time in a Canadian philosophy department. In more recent contexts, Tremain has noted that the homogeneity of Canadian philosophy has improved little with respect to disability and race. For example, disabled philosophers of disability who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in Canada have been compelled to take employment in the United States; have left philosophy, taking employment in another discipline; have left academia altogether; are drastically underemployed; or are viciously unemployed. Tremain points to a distinctly Canadian form of prestige bias in Canadian academia to argue that when Canadian philosophy departments diminish and discount degrees from Canadian universities, that is, when hiring departments in Canada venerate degrees taken from American and Oxbridge universities over degrees taken from Canadian universitiesꟷwhich, she argues, they uniformly doꟷthey actively discriminate against Canadian disabled philosophers. many of whom rely upon networks of support and care that they have established in Canada without which it would be difficult for them to live and thrive in an ableist society (Tremain 2025a).
In sum, Tremain, Ciurria, Hall, Flowers, and Pitts, as well as Agnès Berthelot-Raffard, Robert Chapman, Emily R. Douglas, Jane Dryden, Kristin Rodier, and other disabled (feminist) philosophers of disability have articulated the ways in which disability is variously produced and naturalized across the disparate subfields of philosophy as a nonaccidental and disadvantageous biological human characteristic, attribute, difference, or property that ought to be corrected or eliminated—naturalization that is vividly demonstrated by the ongoing production of doctrines in bioethics that promote selective abortion, genetic technologies, and euthanasia; arguments in ethics and political philosophy about ways to compensate disabled people for their natural disadvantages; and claims about autism and theory of mind in cognitive science (Berthelot-Raffard 2024; Hall 2015; Tremain 2006, 2010, 2017, 2019; Valentine 2024; Yergeau 2013). In the profession of philosophy, that is, the subordinated status of disabled philosophers has not been widely acknowledged as a contingent effect of productive power relations but rather has been taken for granted as an outcome of allegedly natural human differences and subjective preferences, or in any case, attributed to factors external to the operations of power that circulate within and around the discipline and profession of philosophy.
Feminist Philosophy and Disability
Feminist philosophers have responded to the homogeneity, sexism, and masculinism of the discipline and profession of philosophy in a variety of ways. These feminist efforts have had lasting and far-reaching effects, raising the consciousness of professional philosophers about gender inequality and sexism (largely construed as binary relations between men and women) within the profession, discipline, and tradition of philosophy. These efforts and the fruit of them include: the publication of a number of anthologies and edited collections of feminist philosophy; the establishment of professional associations for women philosophers and feminist philosophers; the founding and development of a premiere journal of feminist philosophy; special issues of other philosophy journals devoted to feminist philosophy or topics especially of interest to feminist philosophers; the establishment of a blog for feminist philosophers; the election of quite a number of women and feminist philosophers to leadership positions within national philosophy associations; and the growing presence of feminist philosophy at professional meetings, that is, the increasing number of sessions on professional philosophy association programs that address topics and concerns especially of interest to feminist philosophers and women, that highlight gender inequality in the profession, or that focus on the work of a woman philosopher.
Feminist philosophers have convincingly shown that there are correlations between the asymmetrically gendered demographics of the profession and the content of philosophical inquiry, conditioning (among other things) what questions are prioritized, how they get asked, what kinds of answers are sought, and what methods of investigation are employed. In particular, feminist epistemologists and feminist philosophers of science have long argued that philosophical inquiry must take account of information about the social contexts from which both philosophical questions emerge and responses to them are generated, including the subjectivity and social positioning of any given questioner and respondent. In short, they have argued that knowledge-production and philosophy in general is “situated” and that the situated character of knowledge must be acknowledged. For example, Sandra Harding has argued that information about the subjectivity and social situation of knowers can provide valuable insights into the assumptions and biases on which a given position relies (see, e.g., Harding 1986, 1991, 2015).
Harding and other feminist epistemologists and feminist philosophers of science maintain that any given proposition, argument, or other discursive practice is a product of the enculturation along gendered, racial, classist, and national lines of the subject (or group of subjects) who articulates it and the sociocultural milieu from which it emerges. Harding and other feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science claim, in short, that there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. To argue this way, Harding and a growing number of feminist (and other) philosophers assume some version of “standpoint epistemology.” Feminist standpoint epistemologies variously postulate that people in subordinated social positions have, in virtue of their subordinated social status, understandings of social relations that are superior to—that is, more complete and objective than—the understandings of these relations that members of privileged social groups have (see Harding 1986, 1991, 2015; Hartsock 1983; Code 1991; Dotson 2011, 2012). Standpoint theory, Alison Wylie points out, is an explicitly political social epistemology whose “central and motivating insight is an inversion thesis” (2003, 26). As Wylie explains:
Those who are subject to structures of domination that systematically marginalize and oppress them may, in fact, be epistemically privileged in some crucial respects. They may know different things, or know things better than those who are comparatively privileged (socially, politically) by virtue of what they experience and how they understand their experience. Feminist standpoint theorists argue that gender is one dimension of social differentiation that may make a difference epistemically. Their aim is to both understand how the systematic partiality of authoritative knowledge arises—specifically, its androcentrism and sexism—and to account for the constructive contributions made by those working from marginal standpoints (especially feminist standpoints) in countering this partiality. (2003, 26)
The work that feminist epistemologists Miranda Fricker, Kristie Dotson, and Nora Berenstain have respectively produced variously builds upon and extends the insights of early feminist standpoint epistemologists, introducing notions—such as “epistemic injustice” (Fricker 2007), “epistemic oppression” (Dotson 2014), and “structural gaslighting” (Berenstain 2020)—to the corpus of feminist epistemology that thoroughly politicize the subfield of epistemology. In a variety of articles and books, autistic feminist philosopher Amandine Catala (2025a, 2025b) has built upon Fricker’s claims about epistemic injustice and Dotson’s work on epistemic oppression, elaborating and extending their work to the contexts of neuroableism and neurominoritized populations, whereas disabled feminist philosopher of disability Tremain has drawn upon Berenstain’s arguments about structural gaslighting to enhance her arguments about “the mystique of bioethics” and the underrepresentation of disabled feminist philosophers in the profession (Tremain 2024a). Bioethicists, Tremain maintains, are deeply attentive to the preservation and maintenance of the norms that guide their profession, including norms that—through processes of structural gaslighting and mystification—involve attribution to the profession of a distinctly unique expertise and ethical authority, policing the borders of the profession and reinforcing it internally (Jaggar 1975).
Feminist philosophy has, nonetheless, not been limited to standpoint and other epistemologies or philosophy of science. Rather, feminist philosophers have had a lasting critical and transformative influence on every subfield of philosophy, demonstrating that the discipline of philosophy has traditionally advanced the interests and concerns of a socially privileged sector of society (namely, nondisabled cisgender white men) and is historically and culturally specific. For example, Teresa Brennan, Judith Butler, and Kathleen Lennon have articulated noteworthy feminist analyses in the realm of phenomenology; Kathryn Sophia Belle has elaborated a unique Black feminist philosophical critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminism and existentialism; Adrian Piper and Anne Eaton have produced provocative feminist aesthetics; Young and Elizabeth Anderson have made significant feminist contributions to work on social justice and political philosophy more generally; Talia Bettcher, Asta, Perry Zurn, and Katharine Jenkins have contributed feminist insights to (social) metaphysics; Samantha Brennan and Virgina Held have made notable feminist contributions to the field of ethics and moral philosophy; and Sally Haslanger and Ishani Maitra have both drawn upon and politicized the tools of conventional philosophy of language to produce ameliorative work in feminist philosophy of language.
Beginning in the Enlightenment, dominant strains of Western philosophy have assumed as their fundamental premise that for a given entity, state of affairs, or relation to be worthy of philosophical investigation, it must be universal, objective, and immutable. Thus, Western ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and political philosophyꟷthe so-called “core” elements of philosophyꟷhave been concerned with an ostensibly universal subject who allegedly transcends the vagaries of contingency and subjectivity through an unyielding faculty of reason, pledges allegiance to no tribe, is born of no mother, and can be found nowhere, but nevertheless is every man existing everywhere (Benhabib 1987). Since the mid twentieth century, however, feminist philosophers have endeavored to show that sexism and other systemic relations of power have generated and conditioned many of the foundational claims of Western philosophy, that the allegedly universal and unencumbered subject of the Western philosophical tradition has always been socially situated and interested, and that, as situated and interested, this subject and its claims have reflected the assumptions, biases, and perspective of its social positioning. In addition, feminist philosophers have endeavored to demonstrate that the set of cultural, theoretical, discursive, and institutional practices that comprise this philosophical tradition have, in their own ways, contributed to the very constitution of the social and political categories (such as sex and race) into which subjects in the West have been divided.
Indeed, identification of a set of interrelated dualisms that have historically structured (and continue to structure) Western intellectual thought has been at the heart of these feminist arguments. For example, Aristotle (Physics II) argued that the principles of generation and motion are internal to natural entities, whereas artefacts, insofar as they are artefacts, are generated by external causes, that is, by human aims and forms in the human soul. For Aristotle, that is, natural products— animals and their parts, plants, and the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire—move, grow, change, and reproduce themselves in accordance with inner final causes, that is, the purposes of nature motivate them. By contrast, artefacts, for Aristotle, cannot reproduce themselves but rather require human attention and intervention without which they lose their artificial forms and decompose into natural materials (Franssen, Lokhorst, and van de Poel, 2018; Tremain 2025b).
Among the dualisms that feminist philosophers have identified are these: nature-culture; reason-emotion; mind-body; objectivity-subjectivity; form-content; public-private; male-female; masculine-feminine; subject-object; impartiality-partiality; and fact-value. In the terms of this dichotomous thinking, feminists have argued, the former term of each respective pair is privileged and assumed to provide the form for the subordinate latter term (the content) of the given pair, whose very recognition is held to depend upon (indeed, require) the transparent and stable existence of that former term. On this dichotomous thinking, the significance of anythingꟷincluding, and indeed especially, the latter term of a given pairꟷthat threatens to undermine the transparent and stable existence and dominance of the former term of a given pair, or to reveal its artefactual character (and, hence, the artefactual character of the opposition itself), must be marginalized, obscured, or nullified. Thus, women, feminist have noted, are both depreciated and disqualified within the terms of the binary thinking that has conditioned Western philosophy, while men are elevated within it. Feminist theorists have pointed out, furthermore, that given the interrelations between the terms on each side of these dualisms, women have, since time immemorial, been tendentiously associated with the already depreciated body, emotions, the feminine, the private realm, partiality, and subjectivity, while men have been associated with the venerated mind, reason, the masculine, the public realm, impartiality, and objectivity (Tremain 2001).
Because binary thinking has been seemingly inescapable in Western intellectual thought, feminist philosophers have inadvertently engaged in it, deriving the distinction between sex and gender that conditioned decades of feminist scholarship from de Beauvoir’s famous claim that “one is not born but rather becomes a woman” and the distinction between nature and culture that was foundational to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. Although many feminists criticized the Eurocentrism of the nature-culture distinction early on, identifying binary thinking as a dimension of the domination of entities and organisms that inhabit so-called “natural” categories (white women, people of color, non-human animals, and the non-human environment), their critiques did not extend to the sex-gender distinction that derived from it. As Donna Haraway puts it, the sex-gender distinction was too useful a tool with which to advance claims designed to explain why sexism and male supremacy seem to be universal and transhistorical in their existence yet are radically diverse in their configurations across historical periods and cultures (Haraway 1991, 134).
Insofar as feminists conferred epistemic authority upon the sex-gender distinction, the category of sex itself remained an inert fact-of-the matter, conceived as prediscursive, prior to culture, and hence devoid of political import until the 1990s. The work of Judith Butler, Hazel Carby, Anne-Fausto-Sterling, Haraway, Sandra Harding, and other feminist philosophers and theorists variously denaturalized the category of sex, rendering sex too an object of critical inquiry. These (and other) feminists have argued that the political and explanatory value that can be derived from the category of gender depend precisely upon the extent to which the category of sex is relativized and historicized, as well as the denaturalization of the categories of biology, body, race, and nature. Although each of these categories has been understood as foundational to gender, none of them is an objective entity with a transhistorical and transcultural existence.
In this regard, disabled philosopher of disability Julie Maybee has done important work on differences between African conceptions of disability and Western conceptions of disability, differences rooted in divergent ontologies. For example, Maybee has drawn on the writing of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí to argue that the categories of sex and gender do not bear the significance in Yoruba culture that they hold in Western cultures. In Western society, Oyěwùmí has written, “the body is the bedrock on which the social order is founded” (Oyěwùmí 1997, 2, in Maybee 2024, 139). As Oyěwùmí explains it, Maybee notes, Western “society is constituted by bodies and as bodies—male bodies, female bodies, Jewish bodies, Aryan bodies, black bodies, white bodies, rich bodies, poor bodies”—where the term bodies,” Maybee says, refers to both physicality and biology (Oyěwùmí 1997, 1, in Maybee 2024, 139). Outlining Oyěwùmí’s claims in this context, Maybee writes, furthermore:
Unlike in Western “body-reasoning” or “bio-logic” (Oyěwùmí 1997, 8), [Oyěwùmí] argues, the traditional Yoruba social order was “not focused on the body” (14) or was not based on the body (36, 42). Traditional Yoruba did not employ a biological conception of sex, for instance. They recognized, of course, that people had different roles in the process of human reproduction, and they had words to distinguish those roles: obinrin (the ones who have babies) and okùnrin (the ones who do not have babies). Insofar as children have no role in reproduction, however, these words applied only to adults, and never to children (33–34). The Yoruba word for “offspring,” ọyọ, was also sex- and gender-neutral (40–41), as were most other nouns and pronouns, and even proper names (40–42). (Maybee 2024, 139)
Traditional Yoruba society, rather than define people in terms of bodies or biology, defined them in terms of social relations. Maybee explains that “The most important determinant of someone’s identity in traditional Yoruba society was seniority, which was defined in terms of when someone joined (came inside) the compound or lineage, either through birth or marriage. Because one could come inside the compound either as a child or an adult, this conception of seniority was not linked to age,” that is, was not bodily or biological but rather was relational and situational (Maybee 2024, 139, paraphrasing Oyěwùmí 1997).
In short, as Sara Ahmed (2025) has remarked, “Feminists from many different intellectual traditions have suggestedthat the division between the sexes is a social division that is mostly masked as a natural one.” In Gender Trouble, for example, Butler argued that if the category of sex is itself a gendered category—that is, if sex is politically invested and naturalized, but not natural—then sex and gender are not ontologically distinct. In other words, Butler has explained, the category of “sex” cannot be thought as prior to gender as the sex-gender distinction assumes, since gender is required in order to think “sex” at all (Butler 1990, 143). In their now-famous formulation, Butler argued that the performance of gender is the means through which sex is materialized as natural, prediscursive, and a politically neutral surface on which culture acts (10-11).
As noted, the Western association of the body with women and its subordination to the mind with which men have been associated, as well as the exclusion of both the body and women from political and public discourse, from the civic realm, and indeed from history, were central to early feminist critiques of dualistic thinking. Thus, at one time feminist philosophers regarded the promotion and elevation of women as inextricably interwoven with the re-evaluation of the body and embodiment and endeavored to bring an allegedly prediscursive female body to the center of critical discussion from the excluded social position it hitherto occupied. They variously focused their efforts on events and embodied experiences claimed to be distinct to the female body that had previously been omitted from philosophical and critical discourse, events and experiences such as menstruation, pregnancy, having breasts, and menopause. In other words, these early feminist efforts tended to assume allegedly prediscursive sex and sexual difference as foundational to “women’s experience,” an assumption that Butler’s work on gender performance was designed to undermine. Feminists who argue in this way have in large part been responsible for the recent emergence of new materialist feminisms and feminist materialisms, as well as recent feminist uses of phenomenology. Nevertheless, many of the claims of these feminist materialists, material feminists, and feminist phenomenologists have been undermined, if not imploded, by emerging research and writing in trans philosophy and trans studies in general.
The anti-essentialist claims of feminist philosophers of science and others such as African American feminist legal scholar Dorothy Roberts bolster the challenges that trans philosophers such as Bettcher, Gen Eickers, Tasmin Kimoto, Pitts, and Zurn pose to the work of essentialist trans-exclusionary feminist philosophers such as Kathleen Stock who maintains that sex is binary, that there are two mutually exclusive sexes, and that gender identity is an ideological fiction. Roberts (2016) has convincingly argued—that is, especially with respect to the social, economic, political, and scientific constitution of sex and race—that there is no natural, prediscursive human body; that the natural human body does not exist; that human genes do not, by themselves, determine anything; and that human brains are ineluctably plastic and modifiable with social and cultural experience. Human biology, Roberts points out, is not an entity distinct from the environment, interacting with it and relating to it, but rather is constituted by and through social interactions and relations. Insofar as biology, the body, human nature, and even materiality itself are the products of these innumerable social relations and interactions, Roberts remarks, critical analyses of race, disability, gender, and other subjectifying inequalities must, therefore, consider how claims that naturalize these ostensibly “biological” phenomena emerge, in what contexts these claims are mobilized and advanced, and for what social, economic, and political purposes.
State-of-the-Art Feminist Philosophy of Disability
Feminist philosophical insights, including feminist philosophical insights about epistemic standpoints and situated knowledges, contribute to the background of feminist philosophy of disability, especially given the commitment of feminist standpoint theorists who—however much they otherwise disagree—concur that standpoint theories must not “presuppose an essentialist definition of the social categories or collectivities in terms of which epistemically relevant standpoints are characterized” (Wylie 2003, 26). Nevertheless, disabled feminist philosophers and disabled feminist philosophers of disability have repeatedly pointed out that the benefits which directly and indirectly accrue to feminist philosophers and women philosophers due to improvements within the discipline and profession with respect to hiring, tenure, publishing, leadership, and epistemic justice have not been distributed equally among them. Disabled feminist philosophers have argued, for instance, that nondisabled white women philosophers (and those who pass or have passed as such) have been the almost exclusive beneficiaries of these developments. Disabled feminist philosophers point out, moreover, that by virtue of their disability and race privilege, many nondisabled white feminist philosophers continue to implicitly and explicitly construe gender as prior to, more fundamental than, and separable from other matrices of subjecting power, even if and when they claim to endorse and uphold the political, theoretical, and discursive value of intersectionality. In other words, many feminist philosophers continue to presume that “women” share so many experiences by virtue of their (conventional) gender that an analytic focus on gender—in isolation from, say, disability, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, and nationality—constitutes a legitimate project.
Disabled feminist philosophers of disability have also argued that insofar as disability is naturalized in feminist philosophy, analysis of disability is even routinely and systematically left out of intersectional feminist philosophical analyses. These feminist analyses, feminist philosophers of disability point out, have been preoccupied with, and restricted to, the trilogies of “gender, race, and sexuality” and “gender, race, and class.” Many feminist philosophers have received a large portion or even all of their philosophical training in areas and sub-fields such as mainstream ethics and political philosophy, bioethics, and cognitive science, where individualized and medicalized conceptions of disability are especially prevalent and explicit; thus, many of these philosophers have not been informed (and have likely not informed themselves) about social-political conceptions of disability. Indeed, many (nondisabled) feminist philosophers continue to organize conferences and other events that are inaccessible to disabled feminist philosophers, fail to incorporate disabled feminist philosophers and feminist analysis of disability into their edited volumes and special journal issues of feminist philosophy, or otherwise exclude disabled feminist philosophers in other ways. Furthermore, few feminist (and other) philosophers understand disability as an axis or apparatus of power on par with and inextricable from gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, class, age, and nationality, among other axes and networks of power. In feminist philosophy and elsewhere in philosophy, that is, disability (unlike gender or race) is generally not conceived as a relation of social power in which everyone is implicated, but rather, is still widely regarded as an unfortunate and politically-neutral characteristic (pathological property) that some individuals possess and embody and about which there is little, if anything, for an intersectional, politically-informed feminist philosophy to analyze and interrogate (Tremain 2013).
That gender remains predominant in Western feminist philosophy is of course due in part to the continuing underrepresentation of certain groups of people in the profession. Extant institutional and professional exclusions notwithstanding, however, the omission of critical philosophical work on disability from (Western) feminist philosophy is in part also due to what Tremain calls “ableist exceptionism” in philosophy— that is, due to the endurance in philosophy of the assumption that disability (unlike other categories of social identity and subjection) is a nonaccidental, biological human characteristic that certain people naturally embody or possess. Tremain has introduced the term ableist exceptionism to refer to the phenomenon whereby disability, because it is assumed to be a prediscursive, (i.e., prior to the influence of culture) natural, and politically neutral characteristic (difference, attribute, or property), is uniquely excluded from the production and application of certain values, beliefs, principles, and actions that circulate in political consciousness (Tremain 2017). In short, Tremain and other feminist philosophers of disability argue that an astute feminist philosophy would denaturalize and de-biologize disability by arguing that disability is a historical artifact.
Throughout the last decades of the twentieth century, some feminist (and other) disability theorists called for greater attention to be paid to the category of impairment. These theoretical shifts in disability theory and activism have in some respects mirrored the conceptual shifts in feminist philosophical and other theoretical discourses on the (alleged natural and universal) female body. These disability theorists have variously done so largely as an antidote to the exclusive focus that the British social model of disability (BSM) has given to the social disadvantages that accrue to disabled people. In short, the BSM relies upon a structuralist distinction between impairmentꟷunderstood as a natural, biological, and hence politically neutral human characteristicꟷand disabilityꟷunderstood as the social and political disadvantages that accrue to “people with impairments.” The authors of the BSM’s key principles explicitly relied upon the assumptions of historical materialism to make their distinction between impairment and disability; thus, Michael Oliver (one of the first proponents of the BSM in academic contexts) wrote, for example, that the “cultural production of disability” is dependent on a variety of factors, including the type of economy in a given cultural context, the size of the economic surplus, and the values that influence the redistribution of this sur plus. In more concrete terms, proponents of the BSM argued that disability is comprised of the innumerable aspects of social life that impose restrictions upon people with impairments, including personal prejudice, inaccessible public buildings, unusable public transportation systems, segregated education, exclusionary workplace arrangements, and so on (Oliver 1990). Proponents of the BSM have held that the restricted opportunities that disabled people confront are not the inevitable consequences of their impairments but rather are created by social and economic arrangements and conditions that can be transformed. As Oliver put it, “disablement is nothing to do with the body” (Oliver 1996, 35).
The claim that there is no causal connection between impairment (construed as a neutral human characteristic) and disability (construed as a form of social oppression) has been hailed as the important innovation of the BSM. Lauded by disabled activists internationally, the BSM appeared to both divorce disability from the notion of “natural disadvantage” and redefine disability as an entirely contingent set of social circumstances. Indeed, Oliver and other proponents of the BSM were adamant that their model severed the causal connection between impairment and disability that the medical model of disability deemed inevitable; moreover, proponents of the BSM claimed that it circumvented how the medical model collapsed any distinction whatsoever between so-called natural disadvantage and recognizably social circumstances. This claim and the masculinist demeanor of many early proponents of the BSM led to a host of criticisms, including criticisms from disabled feminists and Black disabled people who argued that the BSM obscures the ways that disabled people are racialized and gendered in collusion with the ways that they are disabled and that insofar as the BSM focuses exclusively on social oppression that disabled people confront, it does not account for impairment; that is, some critics sympathetic to the BSM have argued that due to its exclusive focus on structural and institutional factors that cause disability, the BSM neglects the lived experience of impairment—including the lived experience of pain—and the ways that impairment is shaped by and shapes other human “characteristics,” such as gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, thus presenting an incomplete picture of disabled people’s lives. Disabled feminists such as Jenny Morris (1999) and Liz Crow (1999) have been central to critiques of the BSM according to which it denies corporeal experiences, rendering them private subject matter and, in doing so, reinforces a division between the public and the private spheres which is especially oppressive to certain disabled people and effectually (re)privatizes contexts in which many disabled people are subjected to violence, abuse, and neglect.
In British disabled feminist theorist Carol Thomas’s materialist attempt to repair the BSM, she introduced the term impairment effects to refer to aspects of “living with impairment” that she and other sympathetic critics of the BSM argued that it ignores. In Thomas’s view, a materialist perspective on impairment would explain how morphological, anatomical, and genetic differences and bodily variations that are pathologized and thus get defined in Western medical discourses as “impairments” are shaped and changed both temporally and spatially through the interrelationship between human bodies and social and physical environments (Thomas 1999). What is assigned to the category of impairment, Thomas remarked, is neither transhistorical nor universal in character, but rather is “historically and spatially specific:” “what is and what counts as impairment is always socially located, situated in time and place” (132-133). Tremain (2015) has pointed out that insofar as Thomas argued in this way, she implied that the category of impairment itself is transhistorical and transcultural and thus effectively retained the spurious foundationalism of the BSM. By contrast, feminist philosophers of disability (such as Hall and Tremain) who draw on Michel Foucault’s genealogical method investigate the epistemological and ontological status that the category of impairment has achieved, that is, investigate how the belief has taken hold that impairment is a transhistorical and transcultural human category that exists prior to culture, is prediscursive, and thus is politically neutral and somehow part of the fabric of the universe.
Like Thomas, Crow, and proponents of the BSM, most philosophers of disability assume a conception of disability that conforms to Aristotelianism, distinguishing between the natural and the artefactual. In “On the Government of Disability” (2001) and other publications, Tremain has undermined the Aristotelian/structuralist distinction that motivates their claims by elaborating an argument about the discursive constitution of impairment according to which the idea of impairment is historically specific and performative, providing the justification for the expansion and multiplication of disabling practices. By drawing on Foucault’s and Butler’s respective insights about the producive and performative character of power in the contexts of gender and sexuality, that is, Tremain has argued that impairment is not a “natural” (i.e., biological), value-neutral, and objective human characteristic or aspect of human existence that certain people possess or embody, the signification and significance of which may vary from one historical era to the next and from one culture to another. Rather, impairment, Tremain argues, is the naturalized and materialized outcome of a classification initially generated in certain culturally and historically specific medical, administrative, and juridical contexts to facilitate normalization. Indeed, Maybee points out that “Today’s concepts of disability and impairment belong to a pattern of thought, developed later in the West, in which people are defined primarily in terms of their bodies” (Maybee 2024, 139).
Recall that Foucault—in keeping with his conviction that the most effective exercises of power are productive rather than merely repressive—indicated that the practices in which psychiatrists engaged to find sexual deviants actually produced them. For Foucault, Allen explains, sexual perversions were not medical discoveries about human nature but rather were artifacts implanted among us by the so-called experts who “know” (Allen, 2015, 94). Allen points out, furthermore, that Tremain has articulated this sort of claim about the artifactual character of impairment in an argument that, as he writes, “undercuts the assumption that impairment is a physiological condition distinct from (yet somehow underlying) disability” (ibid.). In short, Allen sums up Tremain’s use of Foucault to denaturalize impairment and disability thus: “Impairment, like perversion (and disability), is not something missing, nor a lack or absence,” but rather “is something added, an unasked-for supplement contributed by disciplinary knowledge and power” (ibid.). As Allen states, the identification of a person as impaired always occurs with reference to a statistically constructed “normal case,” as the identification of a person as criminal always occurs with reference to the law. All norms, as Allen notes, are artifacts of the disciplines that measure them and do not exist apart from these practices. Impairments are real but only as artifacts of the knowledge that measures their deviation from relevant norms (ibid., 95; also, Tremain, 2001, 2015b, 2017).
In the 2001 article, Tremain pointed out what proponents and critics of the BSM alike misunderstood, namely, that although proponents of the BSM explicitly argue that disablement is not a necessary consequence of impairment and that impairment is not a sufficient condition for disability, an unstated premise of the model is that impairment is a necessary condition for disability. In other words, the BSM implicitly assumes that impairment is the natural, i.e., prediscursive, foundation of disability. For on the terms of the BSM, only people who have or are presumed to have an impairment get to count as disabled. Thus, Tremain showed that the strict division between the categories of impairment and disability, which proponents of the BSM claimed to institute, was in fact an illusion, an illusion that the apparatus of disability generates. As Tremain explained, certain culturally and historically specific technologies of normalization—and the discourses that embody them—have been complicit in the historical emergence of the category of impairment and contribute to its persistence. Tremain argued, furthermore, that before the articulation and elaboration of the classification in these contexts, by and through these technologies of normalization, impairments did not exist. Impairment, Tremain asserts, has been disability all along (2001, 2017). As she writes, a state-of-the-art feminist philosophy of disability would historicize and relativize the category of impairment and its allegedly natural foundationꟷthat is, disabilityꟷin this way, construing them as historically and culturally specific instruments of an apparatus of powerꟷnamely, the apparatus of disabilityꟷrather than as an inherent personal flaw and its inevitably detrimental consequences and effects.
Epilogue
Many of the claims that disabled feminist philosophers Tremain, Hall, Ciurria, and Gauthier-Mamaril produce about feminist philosophy of disability are developed on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, the groundbreaking group blog that Tremain and Hall established in January 2020 to which Ciurria and Gauthier-Mamaril contribute. BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY was created to elevate members of underrepresented groups in philosophy and to spotlight their work, as well as to identify forms of structural injustice in philosophy more generally. The “About” page of the blog states,
[BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY] provides up-to-date information and cutting-edge critical analysis of biopolitical asymmetries and other mechanisms and effects of power in philosophy and beyond, especially with respect to disability and other apparatuses (such as gender, race, class, nationality, and sexuality) with which disability is co-constitutive; showcases the insights of members of underrepresented constituencies in philosophy and work done in marginalized areas of specialization; [and] offers a venue for disabled and other underrepresented and marginalized philosophers to gain the experience and skills required to both engage in philosophical discussion and contribute to the profession of philosophy more generally.”(BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, n.d.)
The centrepiece of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY is Dialogues on Disability, the critically acclaimed series of interviews that, since 2015, Tremain has conducted with disabled philosophersꟷmany of whom are disabled feminist philosophers of disabilityꟷand posts to the blog monthly. Tremain’s Dialogues on Disability 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 exclusion and personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy and academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive “ (BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, n.d.)
Thanks to the Dialogues on Disability series and the BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY blog that hosts it, as well as to the efforts of Tremain, Hall, Ciurria, Gauthier-Mamaril, Douglas, Eickers, Jenkins, Pitts, Rodier, and other disabled feminist philosophers, feminist philosophy of disability is now a burgeoning area of the discipline that draws on a range of approaches, including Foucauldian genealogy, analytic philosophy, care ethics, historical materialism, and phenomenology. The far-reaching and provocative work of these disabled feminist philosophers of disability can be found in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability and throughout this encyclopedia.
Further reading:
Berenstain, Nora. 2025. “Structural Gaslighting.” In Gaslighting: Philosophical Approaches, edited by Hanna Gunn, Holly Longair, and Kelly Oliver, 23-63. Albany: SUNY PRESS.
Berthelot-Raffard, Agnès. 2024. “From Capacitalism to Disability Justice in Academia: A Philosophical Manifesto.” Equity in Education and Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/27526461241307326
Branch, Haley, Louise Griep, Sara-Jane Finlay, Pam Ratner, Elsie Achugbue, Linda Leathley, Asmin Chen, Tora Oliphant, Julia Barnham. 2021. Canada Research Chair Equitable Research Productivity Assessments: Final Report and Recommendations. University of British Columbia. updated-equitable-research-productivity-assessments-final-report.18.10.21-1.pdf
Chapman, Robert. 2023. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
Hall, Melinda C. 2016. The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Pitts, Andrea J. 2021. Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance. Albany: SUNY Press.
Tremain, Shelley. 2015. “This is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like.” Foucault Studies 19 (1): 7-42.
Tremain, Shelley L. 2017. Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Tremain, Shelley Lynn. 2024. “Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics.” In The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Zurn, Perry. 2024. “Rethinking Cisgender within a Disability Critique.” The Journal of Philosophy of Disability 4, 5-24. doi: 10.5840/jpd202412228
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