Yesterday was International Day of Persons with Disabilities, or International Day for Persons with Disability, or International Day for Disabled People, depending on where one is located on the world map. I don’t disparage disabled people who work to have the day recognized, though I think that it largely operates to service the public perception of large corporations and multilateral NGOs.

Nevertheless, I did feel compelled to write here yesterday about the ongoing exclusion of disabled feminist philosophers and outright ableism that I witnessed in philosophical circles during the past week. In a Facebook comment that responded to one manifestation of flagrant ableism in which dozens of nondisabled philosophers participated on various posts at that site, I wrote: “I think rather that disability and disabled women are almost entirely excluded from this analysis, which focuses on nondisabled women.” This, then, is the quote of the week (though it’s only Thursday).

My comment responded to the suggestion that a TED talk by philosopher Serene Khader offered a way to incorporate disability into class discussion. As I have previously indicated in a post on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, Khader’s “inclusive” feminism both excludes analysis of disability and does not represent disability, race, class, and gender intersectionally: Khader referred to “disabled people” only once in the talk, namely, as the recipients of “women’s” care work. Yet none of the many (nondisabled) feminist philosophers who unequivocally praised this TED talk, sharing it on social media and promising to use it in their feminist philosophy seminars, gave any indication that they noticed that by doing so uncritically, they would reproduce ableism in feminist philosophy.

It has been absolutely exhausting and incredibly disabling to repeatedly confront the unacknowledged and unaddressed ableism of feminist philosophers for literally decades. Virtually nothing has changed in this regard: disabled feminist philosophers still can’t get jobs, nondisabled feminist philosophers still put little or no effort into examining their ableist practices, and disabled feminist philosophers who object to this treatment continue to be ignored/vilified/or mistreated in other ways. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a budding disabled feminist philosophy student who sits in an undergraduate feminist philosophy class or a feminist philosophy graduate seminar and is confronted with this ableist exclusion for 13 weeks, knowing that I, Mich, Élaina, Andrea, Stephanie, and other disabled philosophers persistently and consistently produce work that challenges, undermines, and improves upon what their nondisabled feminist philosophy professors routinely teach them at present.

Instead of writing a post for BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY yesterday, I worked to revise my article that will appear in “Foucault and Feminist Philosophy: Other Perspectives and Approaches,” the commemorative special Issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly that I am guest editing. I have copied part of the introduction to the article below so that you might get a feel for what I do in this piece. Some of the writing will likely seem familiar. I posted an earlier version of some of it that was initially written as a chapter for a collection whose publication has been delayed, largely because of reactionary events in the United States. I believe that the revisions to the chapter have made its argument more explanatory and better suited for the issue of FPQ devoted to Foucault and feminist philosophy/theory. The referencing remains incomplete because the chapter used a different style than the journal and I haven’t yet made all the reformulations. Nevertheless, I offer this writing as a reprieve from the onslaught of ableism in (feminist) philosophy. Yours in struggle and solidarity, Shelley

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Notes For a Feminist Abolitionist Genealogy of Bioethics

Shelley Lynn Tremain, Ph.D.

Conceptual Needs of the Argument to Abolish Bioethics

1. Situating the Argument

In this motivational article, I employ Michel Foucault’s ideas about genealogy, power, and the subject to provoke a problematization of the subfield of bioethics, reiterating my argument—an argument situated at the intersection of Foucault studies and (feminist) philosophy of disability—that this subfield of philosophy is a strategy and mechanism of neoliberal eugenics that must be abolished if philosophy is to genuinely promote social justice for disabled people. In my view, the anti-foundationalism of Foucault’s genealogical method, his formulation of power as productive, and his prescient arguments about the contingent character of the subject provide the most philosophically sophisticated tools with which to accomplish this aim; that is, Foucault’s genealogical method is the best approach with which to examine how the subfield of bioethics (1) contributes to the production of the problem of disability (and its naturalized foundation, impairment)–that is, contributes to the production of disability as both a problem and a problem of a particular kind; and (2) is designed to hasten its elimination, that is, to resolve the problem that the production of disability (and impairment) as this problem poses for the (neo)liberal control and management of societies.

A wide 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 them that advocate for their putative improvement (Davis, Dent, Meiners, and Richie 2022). In this article, I rely on the reflections of these abolition feminists both to reinforce my critique of reformist responses to the eugenic impetus of bioethics and to outline the “prefiguration” (Walia 2013) that requires us to abolish this subfield of philosophy altogether. As Harsha Walia explains: “Prefiguration is the notion that our organizing reflects the society we wish to live in—that the methods we practice, institutions we create, and relationships we facilitate within our movements and communities align with our ideals.” For Walia, decolonization is a framework that exemplifies a “positive and concrete” prefigurative image of the future.

I argue that just as we must prefigure a decolonized future for society without prisons or police, so, too, we must prefigure an equitable and inclusive future for philosophy without bioethics. Yet philosophers, including feminist philosophers, tend to ignore, eschew, or outright dismiss my imperative that bioethics must be abolished, variously regarding it as unrealistic, unnecessary, and uncollegial. They regard the imperative as unrealistic because bioethics (and bioethicists) seems indispensable for the resolution of a certain type of issue in particular contexts; in addition, they regard the imperative as unnecessary, if not extreme, because (they argue) reforms of bioethics are routinely advanced now and (they argue) will continue to be advanced, and even increasingly advanced, in the future; furthermore, they regard the imperative as uncollegial and unprofessional because (they claim) it constitutes an inappropriately adversarial expression of one’s convictions, an attack on nice people and their work, and a violation of professional norms amongst colleagues.

One of my aims is to undermine these assumptions as grounds for dismissal of the imperative. In another context, I argue that the tacit profession-wide ableist contract to quash systemic critiques of bioethics is the most consequential, entrenched, and obfuscated scandal in philosophy with respect to academic freedom, while certainly the most lucrative (Tremain 2024, 23). In this context, I want to point out that efforts to abolish policing and incarceration, too, are routinely discredited in these ways, that is, are routinely cast as unrealistic, idealistic, and disrespectful rebukes of authority, the law, and one’s fellow members of society. Nevertheless, abolitionists have responded to these dismissals. For example, Anna Terweil (2025), drawing on the work of Foucault, Davis, and Liat Ben-Moshe, responds to the charge that abolition of prisons is unrealistic by considering how criminal legal institutions actually function in practice and the limitations of reformist approaches to them, while “tak[ing] seriously lived experiences of violence, and informal responses to it, improvised by people with varying outcomes and perceptions of success.” Likewise, my argument in what follows is designed to further a discussion that I initiated in my 2017 monograph on Foucault and feminist philosophy to show how bioethics functions in nonideal practice, how it detrimentally affects real disabled people (among others), and why its end must therefore be imminent. As Davis and coauthors state, it is crucial that we forge a critical space for “what we have not yet been able to imagine” (Davis et al., 26).

Bioethicists generally believe that they are uniquely trained to apply the universalizing and ahistorical principles of deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics to dilemmas and events that arise in biomedical contexts, such as the extent to which genetic screening and other genetic technologies should be researched, developed, and subsequently employed. That is, bioethicists presuppose that medical encounters provide distinct opportunities for the expression and application of extant values such as autonomy, well-being, and liberty in these contexts (Beauchamp and Childress 2012). Insofar as I endorse Foucault’s insight that power is productive, however, I maintain, by contrast, that the very articulation and purported application of these values—through, say, the use of genetic technologies and the decision-making procedures that surround them—contributes to the production and configuration of the values in the first place (Tremain 2017; also, Hall 2015). In other words, the field of bioethics actually produces the “bioethical” problems that it is claimed to merely reflect (upon) and resolve.

Within bioethics and philosophy in general, disability is predominantly construed as a philosophically uninteresting and value-neutral biological trait, that is, a self-evidently natural and deleterious characteristic, difference, or property that some people embody or possess. On this individualized understanding of disability, 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. By drawing on Foucault, nevertheless, I have articulated a different understanding of disability according to which the ontology of disability, the production of the ontological status of disability, and the supposed application of philosophical principles and theoretical frameworks to the phenomena of disability are performative and co-constitutive. In the terms of my 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, relativized, and de-medicalized. This understanding of disability politicizes the metaphysics of disability insofar as it reconfigures disability as a product of power, specifically 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 (Tremain 2015).

In Foucault’s terms, an apparatus is an ensemble of discourses, institutions, scientific statements, laws, and administrative measures directed at a perceived social requirement deemed urgent in a certain historical moment (Foucault 1980a, 194). 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. The urgent requirement to which the apparatus of disability is directed in this historical moment is biopolitical normalization of populations and individual subjects to ensure the expansion of neoliberalism as a form of governmental reason; for such biopolitical homogenization renders populations and the subjects that they constitute and comprise more cost-effective and manageable. 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 position. The apparatus of disability is, in other words, a historically specific and dispersed system of force relations that produces and directs practices towards certain strategic political ends. Claims according to which disability (and its allegedly natural foundation, impairment) 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 short, the naturalized ontological status that philosophers and bioethicists attribute to (the apparatus of) disability is a political artifact all the way down. As Barry Allen has pointed out with respect to impairment, “there can be no notion of impairment without reference to a statistically ‘normal case,’ just as there can be no criminal except by reference to the law” (Allen 2015, 94). Allen asserts that “A discourse about biomedical norms, scientific though it may be, is no more true to nature, or physically true, than a discourse about criminals. Any norm is an artifact of the discipline that measures it: it has no physical being or reality apart from that practice” (ibid.). Allen’s argument about the artifactual character of biomedical norms presupposes Foucault’s nominalist position according to which there is no such thing as nature, if nature is posited as independent of historically contingent discourse. Nor does the world come divided into categories that humans must discover; rather, humans themselves organize and classify the world, constructing “facts” about it and subsequently verifying statements about these facts (99). Identity and structure, like their representation, are artifacts of discourse; are artifacts of a certain regime of true and false; are discursive practices.

A (neo)liberal governmentality—in support of which the apparatus of disability and other apparatuses of (for instance) racialized and gendered force relations have amalgamated—undergirds the academic field of bioethics, precipitated its emergence, and made possible its expansion, including the incessant production within some areas of the field of questions and concerns about impairment and the refinement of positions that rationalize its prevention and elimination. In this regard, Foucault’s remarks about the three major forms that technologies of government take in their development and history can serve as an apt characterization of the emergence, institutionalization, and expansion of bioethics as a biopolitical subfield of philosophy (which itself is a thoroughly political enterprise). Foucault argued: first, a given technology of government takes the form of a principled dream or utopia; then, the dream of the technology of government develops into actual practices or rules to be used in real institutions; finally, the practices and rules of the technology of government become consolidated in the form of an academic discipline (Foucault 1988, 145-62; Hall 2015, 166-69).    

A genealogy of how the academic subdiscipline of bioethics has functioned as a strategy and mechanism of modern eugenics would thus trace the materialization and consolidation of this subdiscipline—as well as trace its establishment as a profession onto itself—through its production of a range of notions that biopower has generated and on which the subdiscipline has come to depend, including normality, quality of life, wellbeing, risk, statistical knowledge, and probability (Dean 1999; Hacking 1991 181-195). Note that all these biopolitical constructs have played a central role in the government of disability (Tremain 2017). Bioethics is, in other words, an institutionalized vehicle for the biopolitics of our time; it is a technology of government that provides intellectual resources designed 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 Canadian philosophy and Canadian society more widely through their concerted production of arguments that uphold individual autonomy as means to rationalize medically assisted suicide and euthanasia—euphemistically known as “medical assistance in dying” or “MAiD” (Tremain 2017, 2024).

Indeed, bioethics—a product of biopower and, like biopower, ultimately a product of liberalism and capitalism—implicates the discipline of philosophy in the apparatus of disability and the social and political subordination of disabled people in more ways than, and to a greater degree than, any other subfield of philosophy, or, for that matter, any other discipline of the contemporary university. Bioethicists serve as gatekeepers, guarding the discipline from the incursion of critical philosophical work on disability and shielding the profession from an influx of disabled philosophers. In particular, the implicit and explicit governmental tenor of bioethical discourses and the naturalized, medicalized, and individualized conception of disability on which these discourses rely contribute in formative ways to the hostile environment that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy, where intransigent beliefs persist according to which disabled people are suboptimal, defective, and unreliable, and hence, not viable colleagues. Exceptions to this exclusion do occur and serve to legitimize both the subfield of bioethics and the discipline of philosophy in general, typifying the polymorphism of the (neo)liberal governmentality from which the subfield of bioethics has emerged and enabling philosophy to proceed under the guise of political neutrality, objectivity, and disinterest.

A case in point is the foray into public philosophy that a popular feminist bioethicist made in 2024 by publishing an article whose thesis pathologizes certain acts and behaviours to which some neurominoritized people typically refer in their self-descriptions, a thesis that revolves around pernicious assumptions and claims about “theory of mind” that these acts and behaviours allegedly confirm (Gotlib 2024). As autistic philosophers and theorists repeatedly argue, these assumptions and claims—which are regarded as representative of state-of-the-art work in philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and cognitive science—demean autistic people insofar as they variously combine to postulate that (1) the capacity to hold a theory of mind and thus attribute mental states to others is a uniquely human characteristic, that is, contributes to what uniquely defines the human; and (2) autistic people “lack” a theory of mind, that is, are unable to conceive of other minds (and thus are less than human) and therefore “lack” the capacity to (among other things) empathize with other people. While autistic authors in particular have vigorously disputed both hypotheses and their combination (Yergeau 2013; Yergeau and Huebner 2017), disabled philosophers more generally have pointed out that the drive to identify allegedly prediscursive and inherent characteristics and capacities that supposedly signify the distinctiveness of the human being is speciesist, as well as ableist, and licenses the mistreatment and subordination of nonhuman animals, as well as disabled people in general (Jenkins 2024; Tremain 2024).