As I noted in last week’s anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability, Katie Staal, Senior Acquisition Editor at Oxford University Press, recently encouraged me to submit a proposal for a handbook on feminist philosophy of disability. I submitted the proposal, about which Katie was very enthusiastic and has sent out for review, earlier today. It occurred to me that followers of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY might be interested to read/listen to the proposal. Thus, I have copied it below, omitting the prospective Table of Contents of the proposed volume and names of prospective contributors.

Book proposal for Oxford University Press

Submitted by Shelley Lynn Tremain, April 2026

Title: The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Disability

Editor: Shelley Lynn Tremain, Ph.D.

Rationale for This Handbook

Most (nonfeminist) philosophers continue to hold the view that certain subfields of philosophy—metaphysics, ethics, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of language—are foundational to the discipline of philosophy, uniquely distinguishing philosophy from other disciplines of research and teaching and affirming its self-ascription as “the queen of the sciences.” Philosophers who circumscribe the “foundations” of philosophy in this way maintain that these subfields of the discipline are the necessary, essential, and “core” elements of philosophy, while other subfields of philosophical inquiry—such as philosophy of disability, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of race—are (mere) applications and contingent derivatives of these fundamental subfields. Furthermore, philosophers who continue to distinguish in this way between “core” subfields of philosophy and “applied” subfields of philosophy generally regard the questions and concerns that constitute the former subfields as timeless, disinterested, and universal in character, while, conversely, they take the questions and concerns that constitute the latter subfields to be accidental, interested, and partial.

Indeed, feminist, disabled, and anti-racist academics have pointed out that philosophy is the most conservative and homogeneous discipline across the humanities and social sciences with respect to areas of inquiry and specialization. Mainstream philosophy prides itself on its adherence to the putative ideals of neutrality, universality, and objectivity; hence, the institutionally entrenched structure of the discipline ensures that certain ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies will be reproduced as genuine philosophy and other ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies will continue to be cast as merely supplemental to the former allegedly fundamental ways of knowing and doing philosophy, rendering these supposed supplements of the bona fide philosophy as more or less expendable.

Importantly, the homogeneity of the topics and questions studied in philosophy is co-constitutive with and reinforces the homogeneity of the demographics of philosophy. Thus, philosophy is also the most demographically homogeneous discipline in the humanities and social sciences; that is, the profession of philosophy is populated primarily by nondisabled white people, the majority of whom are white cismen. 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 about 27 percent of the general population of North America (Tremain 2013, 2017). Black philosophers make up about 4 percent of full-time philosophy faculty in the United States, although African Americans constitute approximately 14 percent of the US population. At present, there are less than a dozen Black philosophers employed as full-time philosophy faculty in the United Kingdom (Curry and Tremain 2019). Not a single disabled philosopher of disability has been hired for a permanent position in a Canadian philosophy department. Hence, disabled philosophers of disability who earn a Ph.D. in philosophy in Canada must take employment in the United States; leave philosophy to take employment in another discipline; leave academia altogether; are drastically underemployed; or are viciously unemployed.

In short, although critical feminist inquiry into disability has made remarkable inroads throughout the academy, it remains suppressed within and indeed virtually excluded from philosophy, a predicament that should be attributed to a set of interrelated factors, including the historical composition of professional philosophy itself, the narrow concentration of the prevailing subject-matter and techniques of philosophy, the increasingly close association between philosophy and the sciences, the limited theoretical, discursive, and political focus of most feminist philosophy, and the implicitly ableist self-conceptions of mainstream philosophy and feminist philosophy (and their practitioners). For across the various subfields of philosophy, disability is naturalized as a nonaccidental and disadvantageous biological human characteristic, attribute, difference, or property that ought to be corrected or eliminated—as 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.

Feminist philosophers have responded to the homogeneity, sexism, and masculinism of the profession and discipline of philosophy in a variety of ways. Indeed, feminist philosophy has expanded enormously over the past two decades, with work in this subdiscipline now covering the full range of specializations—ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language, aesthetics, logic, and political philosophy—that mainstream philosophy comprises. Feminists located within philosophy departments also draw upon and influence the work of feminist theorists located in other academic disciplines (as well as work written by feminists outside of academia) in order to articulate how gendered power relations are constituted and sustained; how the production of these power relations on the micro-level of the subject contributes to and conditions the production of more systemic gendered relations of power; and how these gendered power relations—on both the micro- and macro-levels—are interwoven with and reinforce (for instance) racism, classism, colonialism, imperialism, and heterosexism.

Drawing on the work of feminists in the social sciences, for example, feminist philosophers have convincingly documented the correlations between the demographics of the profession and the content of philosophical inquiry, demonstrating how they condition (among other things) what questions are prioritized, how they get asked, what kinds of answers are sought, and what methods of investigation are employed. These efforts of feminist philosophers have had lasting and far-reaching effects, raising the consciousness of professional philosophers about gender inequality and sexism (construed as binary relations between men and women) within the profession, discipline, and tradition of philosophy.

The outcomes of these efforts include: the publication of a growing number of anthologies and edited collections of feminist philosophy; the establishment of professional associations for feminist philosophers; the founding and development of feminist philosophy journals; special issues of other philosophy journals devoted to feminist philosophy or topics especially of interest to feminist philosophers; the election of many  feminist philosophers to leadership positions within professional philosophy associations; and the increasing presence of feminist philosophy at large philosophy association conferences, that is, the increasing number of sessions at these conferences that address topics and concerns of interest to feminist philosophers; that highlight gender inequality in the profession; or that focus on the work of a given feminist philosopher.

Nevertheless, as Black feminist philosophers and feminist philosophers of colour, LGBTQIA+ philosophers, first-generation feminist philosophers, and disabled feminist philosophers (which are not mutually exclusive groups) have pointed out, the benefits that have directly and indirectly accrued to feminist philosophers due to these improvements have not been equally distributed to them. Nondisabled white women philosophers (and those who pass or have passed as such) have been the almost exclusive beneficiaries of these developments. By virtue of their disability and race privilege—that is, as the most advantaged constituency of underrepresented philosophers in the profession—many nondisabled white women 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—and are, therefore, “similarly situated” in the most significant ways with respect to privilege and oppression—that an analytic focus on gender in isolation from, say, disability, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, and nationality constitutes a legitimate project. For these feminist philosophers, that is, women are, first and foremost, oppressed as women and oppressed as diverse groups of women—that is, as disabled lesbians of colour, as disabled white women, and as nondisabled heterosexual women of colour—only secondarily and less significantly. Yet the analytical purity of this conception of gender requires that other axes and networks of power with which gender is complicit and co-exists must be obscured, usually through the implicit institution of a nondisabled white norm. Indeed, disability is usually left out of most intersectional feminist philosophical analyses that remain 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 subfields such as mainstream ethics and political philosophy, bioethics, and cognitive science, where individualized and medicalized conceptions of disability are especially prevalent and explicit; thus, these philosophers have almost certainly not been informed (and have likely not informed themselves) about social-political conceptions of disability. Few feminist (and other) philosophers understand disability as an apparatus of power on par with, inextricable from, and co-constitutive with gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, class, age, and nationality, among other axes and networks of power. In feminist philosophy and elsewhere in philosophy, disability (unlike gender or race) is generally not conceived as a relation of social power in which everyone is implicated, but rather, remains 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.

Aims of The Proposed Handbook

The proposed handbook—The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Disability—will intervene at this critical, temporal, material, discursive, institutional, and professional juncture to push the limits of (ableist) feminist and mainstream philosophy in new directions. The central aim of the proposed volume is to carve out a space for feminist philosophy of disability, identifying the distinctness of this new area of inquiry, in addition to its connections to other fields of inquiry in feminist disability studies. Each of the chapters included in the volume will make a path-breaking contribution to the emergence and expansion of feminist philosophy and theory of disability. Taken together, the chapters will (among other things) demonstrate that the relationships between the marginalization of philosophy of disability within feminist and mainstream philosophy, the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers (however gendered or racialized) within the profession of philosophy, and the subordinated status of disabled people in society at large are mutually constitutive and mutually supporting, entangled and entwined.

Although feminist and nonfeminist bioethicists and philosophers (re)define and categorize all (feminist and other) critical philosophical research and writing on disability as “disability bioethics,” “feminist bioethics,” or simply “bioethics,” this volume will be founded on the conviction that disabled feminist philosophers should resist doing so. When feminist and nonfeminist bioethicists and philosophers make the reductive assumption and assertion that all work that pertains to disability is in some sense biomedical or bioethical in nature—even when this work primarily addresses evidently metaphysical and epistemological concerns and questions, for instance—they variously sequester (feminist and nonfeminist) philosophy of disability in the realm of “applied ethics,” depoliticize disability, and re-medicalize it in ways that facilitate its continued omission from complex feminist philosophical analyses. By doing so, furthermore, these bioethicists and philosophers collaborate with the institutionalized, discursive, and structural ableism of the discipline and profession of philosophy, according to which philosophical analyses of disability are “not really” (i.e., not “hard,” not “core,” not “rigorous”) philosophy.

To date, no edited collection has concentrated on feminist philosophy of disability. Yet, a growing number of feminist philosophers write about disability from within a critical, nontraditional, nonconventional approach that challenges the ways that disability has been vilified within the history of the Western philosophical tradition or exiled from it. Hence, the proposed handbook will foreground a critical feminist philosophical approach to disability that resists and runs counter to the dominant conceptualization of disability persistently elaborated within bioethics, cognitive science, and mainstream and feminist political philosophy and ethics especially, according to which disability is variously naturalized as an organic abnormality, a deficit, personal misfortune, or pathology that inevitably leads to the social and economic disadvantages that disabled subjects confront. In the terms of this ableist account, disabled people show up only as recipients of care; burdens on the state; and “marginal,” or “hard,” cases.

The chapters that make up the proposed volume will thus take a critical stance toward the history of philosophy and the contemporary practice of mainstream and feminist philosophy to elaborate new ways in which to think about disability and the current social, political, cultural, and economic position of disabled subjects. To do so, the authors of the proposed volume will critically evaluate these practices and tools through the concepts, political commitments, critical insights, and personal investments that shape feminist, anti-ableist, anti-racist, anti-classist, and anti-heterosexist theory and practice.

Competition for This Handbook

The inter- and transdisciplinary field of disability studies has provided feminist philosophers of disability with a variety of opportunities to present and publish their work; however, few such opportunities have been available to feminist philosophers of disability within the discipline of philosophy and the subdiscipline of feminist philosophy themselves. Although, by now, quite a few edited collections on feminist philosophy and feminist theory have been published, these volumes have usually not included chapters on disability or have included work on disability by nondisabled feminist philosophers only.

For example, although The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy (published in 2021) includes a chapter on disability written by a nondisabled feminist philosopher, it does not include chapters by disabled feminist philosophers of disability. To take another example, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability, published in 2019, contains little explicitly feminist work on disability; is considerably homogeneous with respect to the gender, race, sexuality, and nationality of its contributors; and chapters that offer analyses of how disability complicates these forms of oppression and subjection are virtually absent from the large book.

Shelley Lynn Tremain, the prospective editor of the proposed handbook, published The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability in 2024. Although all the chapters in this edited volume consider how disability relates to other social categories and forms of oppression and, furthermore, comprises a diverse collection of authors, the volume itself is not concentrated on feminist perspectives, analyses, issues, and approaches to philosophy of disability.

Projected Readership and Markets

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Disability will be ideal for use in the following university and college courses: feminist philosophy, feminist theory, philosophy of gender, women’s and gender studies, queer theory, feminist disability studies, cultural studies, anthropology, history, introduction to philosophy, Indigenous studies, critical race studies, Latinx studies, Black studies, global studies, health sciences, and bioethics. The very publication of the handbook is expected to provide feminist department chairs and deans with the motivation to introduce more courses to their curricula that interrogate disability. In addition, the book will be highly relevant to researchers and writers in these areas and others, as well as interest policy researchers, social workers, community organizers, activists, occupational therapists, health practitioners and other service providers, psychologists, and university administrators.

Editor Bio

Shelley Lynn Tremain holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from York University (Canada); has taught in Canada, the United States, and Australia; and publishes on a range of topics, including philosophy of disability, Michel Foucault, feminist philosophy, ableism in philosophy, social metaphysics and epistemology, and biopolitics/bioethics. From April 2015, Tremain has coordinated, edited, and produced Dialogues on Disability, the groundbreaking and critically acclaimed series of interviews that she is conducting with disabled philosophers and posts to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. She is the author of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017), the manuscript for which was awarded the 2016 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities; the editor of two editions of Foucault and the Government of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2005; 2015), the first of which has been translated into Korean; and the editor of The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Shelley Tremain was also the 2016 recipient of the Tanis Doe Award for Disability Study and Culture in Canada; the Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of California at Berkeley and the World Institute on Disability in Oakland, CA; and a Principal Investigator for Canada’s national policy research institute to promote the human rights of disabled people. She is Area Editor for Philosophy and Theory of Disability of The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies and The Oxford Bibliographies Online.

Structure and Format of the Book

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Disability, which will be divided into five sections, will comprise an editor’s introduction, 42 chapters of 7000-9000 words each, a comprehensive index, and contributor bios. The following is a brief description of each of the five parts and a glimpse of the projected content of the chapters:

PART ONE: The chapters in the first part of the volume will identify how feminist analysis of disability alters work produced in various disciplines of philosophy, is left out of these disciplines, and how these disciplines reproduce ableism and the social subordination of disabled people.

PART TWO: This part of the handbook will comprise chapters that demonstrate why feminist philosophy and theory should make more concerted efforts to incorporate analyses of disability and the insights of disabled feminist philosophers, as well what feminist philosophical analyses that do so would look like.

PART THREE: The third part of the handbook will comprise chapters that provide feminist philosophical analyses of disability with respect to certain contexts or issues, especially contexts or issues that feminists have addressed without taking disability and ableism into account.

PART FOUR: Drawing upon the well-known feminist political slogan “the personal is political,” the chapters in the fourth part of the handbook will show how disability and affect are socially enmeshed.

PART FIVE: The chapters in the fifth part of the handbook will grapple with the prospects for disabled feminist futures, especially given the expansion of AI, the destruction of ecosystems, and the expansion of punitive social mechanisms such as prisons.