The writing below is the text of my (online) keynote presentation to FEMINIST RE-READINGS OF FOUCAULT, Sciences Po, Paris, November 7, 2025.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

A Feminist Re-Reading of Foucault Through the Apparatus of Disability/A Feminist Re-Reading of the Apparatus of Disability Through Foucault

SECTION I: Why Foucault?

My philosophical work is centrally concentrated in philosophy of disability, the emerging as marginalized subfield of philosophy that I initiated quite a few years ago. In the last several years, I have been concerned to elaborate a robust feminist extension of this subfield, namely, feminist philosophy of disability. In my presentation today, I will outline the motivational assumptions of these two oppositional subfields and distinguish them from dominant and mainstream philosophical approaches to disability, as well as indicate how I have used the writing of Michel Foucault to elaborate a conception of disability that is distinct from dominant and mainstream approaches to it.

On the eve of the centennial anniversary of Foucault’s birth, I welcome the opportunity to underscore the crucial importance of Foucault for feminist philosophical work on disability and the significance of his insights for feminist philosophy in general. Indeed, one of the aims of my work on disability has been to invigorate feminist employments and deployments of Foucault’s insights about the productive nature of power, the constitution of the subject, and the problematization of seemingly self-evident and natural phenomena, especially in the context of resistance to institutional and discursive ableism. I have tried to show disabled people and both our allies and oppressors the “contingency that has made us what we are,” as Foucault put it, by uncovering that which is, as he wrote, “singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints [in] what is given to us as universal, necessary, [and] obligatory.”

Now, of course, not all philosophers of disability agree with my assessment that Foucault’s body of writing has remarkable value for analyses of disability. In my presentation that follows, therefore, I address concerns that some philosophers and theorists of disability have raised with respect to the alleged inadequacies of Foucault’s analyses of power, embodiment, and the subject for transformative social movement in general and the advancement of social justice for disabled people in particular. These criticisms, I contend, rely upon misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Foucault’s rebellious ideas.

As a feminist extension and politicized expansion of the field of philosophy of disability, feminist philosophy of disability is a critical 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 of philosophy of disability, encompassing a more comprehensive understanding of the political realm and its constitution than philosophical work on disability that is not feminist. Feminist philosophy of disability recognizes that Euro-American, or “Western,” philosophy is 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. In this respect, feminist philosophy of disability operates in political and epistemological solidarity with other subordinated philosophies and their practitioners.

For the last several decades, feminist philosophers and various other social groups previously marginalized in and excluded from the central arenas of mainstream philosophy 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 groups have, for example, increasingly articulated discourses and situated knowledges that run counter to the entrenched homogeneity and exclusionary nature of Euro-American philosophy, enlarging 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 indeed had noticeable influence on both the demographics and subject matter of philosophy, as well transformed the self-understandings of philosophers and self-representations of the profession of philosophy itself.

Philosophy of disability–one example of this kind of ameliorative discourse–has emerged as a critical response to the structural, discursive, and interpersonal ableism of philosophy, that is, insofar as the dominant and widely accredited tradition and practices 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 taken-for-granted ideas, argumentative claims, methodological assumptions, and structural injustices with respect to research and knowledge on disability.

In other words, philosophy of disability comprises novel ways in which to conceive problems of power, inequality, inclusion, and distribution with respect to disability; constitutes critiques of the medicalized and individualized solutions that philosophers have proposed to resolve these problems; and evinces innovative approaches to the ontology, epistemology, and phenomenology of disability. In short, politically and theoretically astute (feminist) philosophy of disability does not simply derive from the application of allegedly pregiven and foundational philosophical principles to a self-evident category of disability, as philosophers and bioethicists postulate; rather, a cutting-edge (feminist) philosophy of disability takes 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 and questioning how they contribute to that very constitution.

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”. The vital nature of this co-constitutive association between normality and power must not be underestimated; that is, this relation has enormous implications for our understanding of disability, as well as gender, race, sexuality, nationality, and age, among other axes of social power.

An example of this “intermingling” of power and knowledge is illustrated by Foucault’s description of “the perverse implantation” in volume one of The History of Sexuality. “Medicine,” Allen 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,” he notes, “were deviations or abnormalities in the operation of this sexual instinct, which was itself defined by a medical perception of normality.” Foucault—in keeping with his conviction that the most effective exercises of power are productive rather than merely repressive—demonstrated that the greater was the extent to which psychiatrists looked for sexual deviants, the more of them that they found. For Foucault, sexual perversions were not medical discoveries about human nature, but rather were artifacts implanted among us by the so-called experts who “know.”

In several articles and books, I have drawn on Foucault’s claims about the constitution and implantation of normality and abnormality to elaborate how impairment and disability are generated in feminist discourses about reproductive freedom; through feminist charges about Foucault’s use of the apprehension and incarceration of Charles Jouy; in bioethicists’ claims about stem cell research and euthanasia; and by the exclusionary institutional mechanisms of professional philosophy. In these contexts, that is, I have critically examined how disability—as an apparatus—has coalesced by and through the production of these discursive practices and thus how the perspectives and experiences of disabled subjects have been variously constructed, subjugated, and obscured by and through the practices. With respect to the case of Jouy, furthermore, I pointed out that feminist misrepresentations of Foucault’s work on the constitution of abnormality in the juridical and medical examinations of Jouy have led feminist philosophers to hastily disavow Foucault and to prematurely reject the relevance of his work for feminist philosophy and theory. Indeed, the vicious character of some of these disavowals effectively functioned in feminist contexts to disqualify Foucault’s pathbreaking and illuminating endeavours to expose the apparatuses of disability and abnormality.

Section II: The Apparatus of Disability

My claim that disability is an apparatus of power is designed to institute a conceptual revolution. Foucault described an apparatus as an ensemble of discourses, institutions, scientific statements, laws, and administrative measures directed at a perceived social requirement deemed urgent in a given historical moment. To understand disability as an apparatus is to conceive of it as a far-reaching and systemic matrix of power that contributes to, is inseparable from, and reinforces other apparatuses of historical force relations. On this understanding, disability is not a metaphysical substrate; a natural, biological category; or a characteristic that only certain individuals embody or possess, but rather is a historically contingent network of force relations in which everyone is implicated and entangled and in relation to which everyone occupies a social position; that is, to be disabled or nondisabled is to occupy a certain subject position within the productive constraints of the apparatus of disability.

The conception of disability as an apparatus is premised on an understanding of the relation between power and causation that runs counter to most extant work in philosophy of disability and disability studies. For this conception of disability does not rely on some variation of the assumption that impairment and disability could be taken up as politically neutral and value-neutral objects of study were it not for disabling practices and policies of exclusion that the requirements of power place on them. This assumption is fundamental to a dominant sociopolitical conception of disability —namely, the British social model of disability—according to which impairment is a politically neutral human characteristic on which disability (construed as social oppression) is imposed. With the conception of disability as an apparatus, by contrast, no domain of impairment or disability exists apart from relations of power. Impairment and disability can never be freed from power, nor, furthermore, can there be a phenomenology that articulates these supposedly prediscursive domains. Power relations are not external to impairment and disability and their nexus in the apparatus of disability, but rather are integral to this relationship, constituting the knowledge and objects that these historical artifacts affect, as well as the artifacts themselves.

This understanding of disability as a historically and culturally situated apparatus of power relations constitutes an insurrection against the conception of disability that predominates within bioethics and the field of philosophy in general. For in the subfield of bioethics in particular and the tradition and discipline of philosophy in general, disability has been construed as a value-neutral biological trait, that is, a self-evidently natural and deleterious characteristic, difference, or property that some people embody or possess. Philosophers who hold this naturalized and individualized understanding of disability take for granted that disability is a prediscursive entity, with transhistorical and transcultural properties, that medicine and science can both astutely recognize and accurately represent and to which universal principles can be applied. Thus, the subfield of bioethics has been effectively naturalized as the appropriate philosophical domain within which to consider disability.

Nevertheless, I maintain that bioethics is a technology of “racism against the abnormal,” a modern form of eugenics which ought to be abolished. A Foucauldian examination of how the academic subdiscipline of bioethics and its extension, feminist bioethics, have functioned as strategies and mechanisms of eugenics would trace the emergence and consolidation of bioethics through a range of relatively recent notions that biopower has generated and on which this subdiscipline depends, including the notions of quality of life, well-being, risk, statistical knowledge, probability, and of course, normality. Each of these biopolitical constructs has, in its own ways, played a strategic and constitutive role in the generation and government of disability. In short, the field of bioethics is an institutionalized vehicle for the biopolitics of our time, a technology of government that provides intellectual resources to facilitate the “strengthening” (fitness) of a certain population and the elimination of others. In Canada, for instance, bioethicists have incrementally created a eugenic culture in both Canadian philosophy and Canadian society more widely through their concerted production of arguments that mobilize the notion of individual autonomy to rationalize medically assisted suicide and euthanasia (“MAiD” for short), while dismissing the objections to this regime of eugenics that disabled, Indigenous, trans, racialized, and poor people advance.

A different understanding of disability is available—namely, the understanding of disability as an apparatus—according to which the ontology of disability, the production of the ontological status of disability, and the so-called application of philosophical principles and theoretical frameworks to the phenomena of disability are performative and co-constitutive. On this understanding of disability, the ontological status of disability is always already a contingent political and, hence, value-laden, state of affairs that should be historicized and relativized. Indeed, my politicized understanding of disability assumes, as I have noted, that disability emerged and coalesced as an apparatus of biopower, which Foucault identified as a relatively recent form of power that operates primarily through productive forms of coercion and control to maximize the conditions conducive to “life:” the life of the species and the life of the individual. Claims according to which disability is a personal characteristic, biological difference, or property of individuals naturalize and individualize a culturally and historically specific phenomenon, rendering it as an ahistorical and universal fact of the matter rather than a historically contingent and culturally relative artifact of force relations. In other words, the naturalized ontological status that philosophers and bioethicists attribute to disability is a sociopolitical artifact all the way down.

SECTION III: Situating the Apparatus of Disability in Philosophy

Foucault notwithstanding, philosophers have largely ignored disability and its politically potent and artifactual social character, deeming it to be a straightforwardly prediscursive property of individuals which is thus philosophically uninteresting. Indeed, 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 on distributive justice in mainstream political philosophy. This discussion, purportedly about disability and social justice, began with John Rawls’s argument according to which concerns about disability are not relevant to questions about “the basic structure of society” and “normal” people; thus, these concerns need not be considered in a theory of justice nor political philosophy more generally. For Rawls, questions about disability are not concerns of social justice but rather should be sequestered in a certain medicalized domain, namely, the realm of “healthcare.” In a critical response to Rawls, Ronald Dworkin 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 so-called “handicaps.” Yet Dworkin’s theory, too, reproduced assumptions about disability that naturalize, individualize, and depoliticize it, as Rawls’s theory does; 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 so-called natural disadvantages.

In other words, these prominent frameworks in mainstream political philosophy, even though they are opposed to each other in certain ways, rely upon shared assumptions about disability that produce it as a naturalized, medicalized, individualized, and decontextualized phenomenon, assumptions that inevitably condition the proposals for social justice that the theories ultimately recommend. Feminist philosophers such as Nancy Fraser and Iris Marion Young have argued that 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 of rights and duties, a conception that homogenizes human beings and human societies, obscuring structural injustices and forms of oppression, as well as formative aspects of human existence—including infancy and childhood, emotion, disability, pregnancy, and old age. Eva Feder Kittay has argued, furthermore, that Rawls’s account, which stipulates that people in “the original position” 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, conflict with how Indigenous cultures understand the character of disability. For example, Sandra Yellowhorse (of the Diné nation) 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 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, and Indigenous people (which are not mutually exclusive groups) as beyond both the scope of justice and the humanity that the theories are alleged to actualize.

Indeed, Rawls’s political philosophy, the political philosophy of Dworkin, and the political philosophies of other mainstream philosophers do not merely report on the conception of disability that prevails in mainstream society and philosophyꟷa conception according to which disability is a detrimental biological property of individualsꟷbut rather, they effectively bring disability into being as that kind of thing. For example, the well-known bioethicist Norman Daniels took 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. Thus, Daniels, employing Christopher Boorse’s spurious notion of “species-typical functioning,” claims that the goal of healthcare should be to restore subjects to “normal” species-typical functioning, an argument that has enabled the intermingling of power and knowledge in this context to be obscured and the eugenic impetus of the subfield of bioethics to operate openly.

Dominant ideas about the relation between disability and technology can serve as additional examples to illustrate how disability is depoliticized, individualized, and medicalized in philosophy. For philosophers of technology, too, largely accept and reproduce 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. 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 produce and 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 allegedly 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. 

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 Foucauldian work on prenatal testing and risk; Johnathan Flowers’s work on ADHD, AI, and technology in general; and Mich Ciurria’s 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 representations of it that predominate in philosophy.

In my contribution to a recent collection on technology and equality, I argue 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. Indeed, 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 Foucault, and other philosophers such as Ian Hacking, Linda Martﭐn Alcoff, and Andrea Pitts is now acknowledged as philosophically significant. 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 that the human and phenomena that constitute the human have emerged into being and have histories, that is, are artefactual. Furthermore, 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. Let me point out that Camisha Russell has made this claim with respect to race, that is, she argues that race ought to be understood as a technology rather than an identity, difference, or personal attribute.

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. 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. As Ciurria remarks, “Most philosophers do not see moral responsibility as a political practice structured by apparatuses of power,” but rather have been concerned with the relation between responsibility and metaphysical determinism, an analysis that abstracts away from the political sphere.

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.” 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.” 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.” Indeed, 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. In Strawson, that is, the parameters of the moral domain are delineated, established, and secured through the exclusion of disabled people.

SECTION IV: Critical Defenses of Foucault’s Philosophy of Disability

This overview of the ways in which the apparatus of disability is simultaneously naturalized, decontextualized, and ignored by mainstream philosophers enables me to distinguish them from Foucault’s own varied investigations of it. In Foucault’s genealogical studies of abnormality, madness, perversion, deviance, and sexuality, he was concerned with the “problematization” of phenomena, that is, was concerned to show how these phenomena became thinkable as problems to which solutions came to be sought. In an explanation of this work that has not yet been suitably acknowledged, Foucault stated that a “conditional imperative” underpins each of his genealogical inquiries, for he recognized that every theoretical or analytical discourse is in some way reliant upon or permeated by something like an imperative discourse.

Foucault characterized the imperatives that underpin his restrained genealogical inquiries in this way: “If you want to struggle, here are some key points, here are some lines of force, here are some constrictions and blockages.” In other words, Foucault maintained that the conditional imperatives on which his genealogical work relied were “no more than tactical pointers [to] tactically effective analysis [in] the circle of struggle and truth, that is to say, precisely, philosophical practice.” The conditional imperatives (or imperative discourses) that support Foucault’s genealogies are contingent strategies to understand given phenomena in particular ways and to make the phenomena be understood as such. Thus, Foucault’s remarks about conditionally imperative discourses and their tactical efficacy provide additional ways in which to address the sort of criticism that feminist philosopher Fraser and bioethicist Joel Michael Reynolds have advanced, according to which Foucault’s genealogical approach lacks normative instruction, challenges, or repudiation.

Genealogy, Foucault once wrote, is “the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.” Genealogies, he pointed out, are not positivistic returns to a form of science that more accurately represents phenomena. Genealogies are, rather, antisciences. What characterizes genealogies as a form of critique is not that they reject knowledge, or appeal to or celebrate some immediate experience that knowledge has yet to capture. Genealogy is an “attempt to desubjugate historical knowledges […] to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse.” Thus, genealogies require the excavation and articulation of subjugated knowledges, which are knowledges that “have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naїve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.”  

Criticism performs its work, Foucault stated, by uncovering and restoring these subjugated, unqualified, and even explicitly disqualified knowledges. Indeed, a broad range of critically engaged philosophers and theorists attest to the value of Foucault’s genealogical method for social movement and transformation. In Abolition. Feminism. Now., for example, Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie identify Foucault’s genealogical method and claims about subjugated knowledges as among the best critical devices with which to advance an abolition feminism that both refuses naturalized—and hence, ahistorical—assumptions about carceral institutions and eschews reformist approaches to these institutions that advocate for their putative improvement.

In short, genealogies are historical ontologies that exhume subjugated knowledges, obsolete and even archaic discourses, events, and institutional practices in order that the historically contingent character of the self-understandings and self-perceptions that we hold in the present can be discerned. In other contexts, I have begun to develop a genealogical critique of bioethics that comprises a historical ontology meant to motivate an insurrection against the centralizing power effects of this subfield of philosophy and its coercive discursive mechanisms, including the notions of personal autonomy, well-being, self-determination, and informed consent. A philosophy of disability that traces a genealogical critique of bioethics comprises a historical knowledge of struggles even as, in effect, it is itself a subjugated knowledge.

Insofar as I employ Foucault’s methodology and tools for the project to abolish bioethics rather than reform it, as other philosophers of disability recommend, my argument runs counter to the claims of so-called disability bioethicists—such as Reynolds— and theorists in disability studies—such as Tobin Siebers—who have disparaged the use of Foucault for critical analyses of disability. Even though I have repeatedly indicated how Foucault’s claims can illuminate the situation of disabled people, these disability studies scholars and philosophers remain unconvinced about the usefulness of these claims for analyses of disability. The various charges that these authors have hitherto made of Foucault can be summed up thus: Because Foucault disregarded personal experiences, denied the foundational subject and its agency, and obscured the body and its materiality, they variously argue, his work is counter-intuitive and inappropriate for disability theory and research that ought to attend to the lived experiences and knowledges of disabled people, including their experiences and knowledges of their own embodiment; they variously claim, furthermore, that Foucault’s genealogies offer few resources with which to articulate social critique and to instigate the social change that disabled people require.  

 A straightforward response to these charges against Foucault is that they misunderstand his work on genealogy, power, the subject, and the materiality of the body; that is, Foucault’s genealogical approach to abnormality, subjectivity, identity, experience, race, sexuality, and the material body has greater explanatory power and transgressive potential for critical examination of disability than his critics in philosophy and theory of disability have thus far recognized. Ladelle McWhorter explains the subversive motivation of Foucault’s genealogical approach to the subject’s body in this way:

Foucault the Nietzschean genealogist never says there is no body; he simply looks at the historical record to see how the concept “the body” has functioned in relation to the political, social, and economic forces in which it appeared. Nietzsche never found a time before evil; Foucault does not find a time before the body, but he does discover that the concept has altered a great deal over the centuries and has functioned very differently in different contexts. This fact … tends to upset the notion that the body exists somehow beneath language as a biological given, but it does not refute it. What it does do is undermine claims to definitive knowledge of the body by creating awareness—some might say a suspicion—that the current claims are no more “untainted” by power relations that the claims of previous generations and that they, too, may pass away.

Despite the charges that some philosophers and theorists of disability have directed at Foucault, he did not in fact abandon the subject and its experiences; rather, Foucault was concerned to show that the subject and its experiences cannot be dissociated from the historical and contingent social practices that constitute the subject by and through its experiences. For Foucault, the subject’s intentions and motives are by-products of apparatuses of modern power which themselves are intentional and nonsubjective. Nor did Foucault eliminate the materiality of the body; rather, Foucault was concerned to show that “the body” cannot be dissociated from the historically contingent and culturally specific practices that bring it into being, that is, bring it into being as that kind of thing: as impaired, as racialized, as material, as mechanical, as developmental, as gendered, as sexed, and so on.

 Indeed, Foucault’s genealogies and his other historical work have provided a wealth of theoretical resources from which feminist philosophers and theorists of disability (among others) can draw, and have drawn, to challenge the status quo. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault explained his genealogical approach to the contingency of the subject, its materiality, and its psychology in this way:

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

SECTION V: Finally, With Foucault

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

On the contrary, I emulated what Foucault did in his own work, that is, I produced critical genealogical analyses that my subjective experiences had motivated. “Each of my works is a part of my own biography,” Foucault stated in an interview that appears under the title “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” In another interview, Foucault remarked, “I haven’t written a single book that was not inspired, at least in part, by a direct personal experience.” In yet another interview, Foucault—himself a gay man who was repeatedly psychiatrized; who participated in public acts of resistance with disabled people, prisoners, and other marginalized social groups; and who died from complications of AIDS at a historical moment when fear and avoidance were the predominant social responses to a positive diagnosis— explained the impetus for his writing in this way:

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

Foucault lived his last years during a time when HIV-positive people and people living with AIDS sought public policy and legislative recognition as disabled people to gain access to the social services and health care resources that they needed. Given Foucault’s activism and the constant attention that he accorded to subjugated knowledges, he and his work likely promoted these efforts. Indeed, AIDES, the largest HIV/AIDS organization in France was created in 1984, shortly after Foucault’s death, by his partner (and beneficiary) Daniel Defert.

In Foucault’s writings (and in my own), subjective experience is generative of critical authorial practices, anticipating Tina Fernandes Botts’s claims about the crucial nature of this complementarity for responsible scholarship on socially embedded problems. In short, both the dismissal of Foucault’s work and the refusal to genuinely engage with the writing of philosophers of disability who use it impose conceptual, discursive, and political limits on philosophy of disability and reinforce the continued marginalization of oppositional work on disability within the field of philosophy itself, ultimately disadvantaging disabled philosophers themselves.

In closing, let me underscore that a great deal of Foucault’s work constitutes significant attempts to challenge the self-evidence of assumptions about disability by persuasively exposing the historical and cultural specificity and contingency of normality and its cognates, the abnormal and the pathological. It is my conviction that Foucault’s problematizations of (ab)normality, deviance, perversion, pathology, sexuality, race, discipline, and madness were trail-blazing and suggest innumerable avenues of investigation along which future (feminist) philosophy of disability can and should proceed. Hence, the enduring and iconoclastic importance of Foucault.