Daniele Lorenzini’s landmark collection The Foucauldian Mind was published at the end of July. I’m thrilled that my work on disability is included in the collection, not least because the chapters that it comprises, when taken together, comprehensively demonstrate why philosophers should relinquish their appeal to, and dependence on, self-serving claims and outdated assumptions according to which (objective) science, truth, knowledge, and values exist prior to human involvement with them; that genetics, understanding, love, biological sex, and human impairment are prediscursive “facts of the matter” rather than the technologies and outcomes of human discourse and practice.

As a full-blown and unyielding anti-essentialist, I strongly believe that the arguments of the Lorenzini volume support and advance the anti-ableist work of disabled feminist philosophers far more than the foundationalist claims about intersectionality, power, gender, and disability that “analytic” feminist philosophers articulate or even the essentialist claims that “analytic” philosophers of disability make. Indeed, Foucault’s body of writing poses distinct threats to philosophy in general, as Foucault himself (usually) understood and as the transgressive scholars who have carried his work forth understand.

Several years ago, I noted in a comment on Daily Nous that cancer is a social construction. Frankly, I don’t recall exactly what I said or how I formulated my claim but I do recall that some of the mainstream philosophy bros who regularly dominate that blog made significant effort to mock me and ridicule the claim. I also recall that I subsequently shared the Daily Nous post on Facebook, pointing out the misogynistic and condescending character of this arrogant and disproportionate attack, as well as the ahistorical and foundationalist assumptions on which the mockery relied. Within minutes, an accomplished philosopher of science commented on the post, asserting that “of course” cancer is a socially construction.

Fast forward to last weekend, I wrote a comment on a Daily Nous post that asked whether philosophers should expect payment for the writing that they put on Substack. In the comment, I pointed out that although the Dialogues on Disability series of interviews that I conduct with disabled philosophers has an associated Patreon account that supports it, thousands of “well-heeled,” self-described progressive and radical philosophers feel entitled to read the interviews without subscribing to the Patreon. Not surprisingly, few readers of the Daily Nous were interested in thinking about nor addressing an additional form of exploitation that disabled philosophers confront.

Very shortly thereafter, a philosophy bro who chose the screen name “Dee” (3 guesses who that might be) replied to my comment by asking why anyone should subscribe to the Patreon or read this blog when they can (and I paraphrase) read the “gems” that I write at Daily Nous, such as the claim that dinosaurs never got cancer. Although this snark appeared on the blog for about an hour, it eventually disappeared.

Is it ludicrous to claim that cancer is, in a robust way, socially constructed, as the Daily Nous bros petulantly insist? On the contrary, I propose that we should take a Foucauldian approach to the question of cancer’s social construction.

In a chapter on disability and technology, I argued against the claim that other philosophers of disability advance according to which technology is external to disability; that is, I argued rather 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. My argument is that cancer too is a technology, an apparatus, rather than a biological feature of some human beings that technology is conceived and introduced to dissipate, cure, or eradicate altogether.

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), Linda Martﭐn Alcoff (2006), Ian Hacking (1999), and Andrea Pitts (2021) is now given its due. If the claim that the human is constructed must be taken seriously and if it makes sense to say that the phenomena that constitute the human—such as disability, race, materiality, and identity, and cancer—are thus themselves socially constituted, 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.

If it makes sense to say, furthermore, that the human and the phenomena constitutive of it are artefactual, that is, if it makes sense to say 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. Indeed, an examination of the notions of technology and disability which employed a certain kind of historical methodology—namely, genealogy, in Foucault’s (1997) sense—would trace a conceptual and material path through the vicissitudes of predecessors of our current notions of technology, disability, and the ways in which they relate to each other. This kind of “history of the present,” to use Foucault’s phrase, would lead to the conclusion that disability–like race, materiality, and identity–is itself is a technology. Like other technologies, constructions (technologies) of the human and the phenomena constitutive of it—including disability, race, gender identity, and nationality—do things. They have effects.

Genealogy is a historicised approach to philosophical inquiry, distinct from the ahistorical conceptual analysis, deductive reasoning, and logical argumentation that characterizes mainstream analytic philosophy. Foucault adopted genealogy to critically
inquire into the history of necessity on a given topic and the historical emergence of the necessary conditions for states of affairs, underscoring the importance to such an approach of contingency and questioning that which has been taken for granted as self
evident. Foucault’s genealogies—which he often referred to as “historical ontologies of ourselves”—are concerned with questions about the conditions of possibility for who we are now, that is, questions about how our current ways of thinking and acting came into being (Foucault 1997). A genealogical approach is thus especially apt for an inquiry into how disability and cancer are artefactual technologies rather than immutable human properties.

Other ways in which to argue that cancer is socially constructed are available.

Earlier this month, my younger sister (I have three of them) told me, through tears, that she and my mother have cancer. My mother has skin cancer, again. My sister recently had surgery for a form of breast cancer. Neither of these cancers is “genetic”. Skin cancer is an especially clear illustration of how cancer is a social construction all the way down. Skin cancer is caused by exposure to ultraviolet rays of the sun. The more exposure, the greater the chance that one will develop skin cancer. With each passing year, the rays become more intense. Why? Because we are making them that way with our depletion of the ozone. In short, it’s entirely a human creation. Thus, it seems plausible that in the distant past, that is, before humans began to fill the air with toxic gases, that skin cancer did not exist, that is, that the dinosaurs never got skin cancer.

What about breast cancer? I maintain that if and when we redirect resources to research the historically and culturally contingent and specific origins–epigenetics–of cancers and the environmental racism and ableism on which they depend and reproduce, then we will increasingly learn that breast cancer and indeed all cancers are humanly motivated, constituted, and constructed by our vaporized chemical waste, by toxic landfills, by human ecological degradation and destruction, and by human use of animals for food. None of these elements of our universe preceded human existence. But dinosaurs did.

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