This return to a post of January 2019 is a reminder that the use of ableist language is not merely about a certain choice of words but rather produces (and reproduces) certain ableist ontologies and epistemologies. Some philosophers and theorists of disability continue to employ the ableist term people with disabilities which has been dubbed […]
Whose Academic Freedom? (Feminist) Bioethics, MAiD, and the Professionalization of Ableist Exceptionism
Since the last months of 2020, I have written numerous posts about MAiD and Bill C-7 at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY in order to inform its international readership about these events in Canada and to explain the links between the events, the disproportionate influence of bioethics in Canadian philosophy, and the eugenic culture in Canadian philosophy that […]
Feminist Philosophy of Disability, Women’s History Month, and IWD
March is Women’s History Month and March 8th is International Women’s Day (IWD). In recognition of these occasions, the University of Michigan Press has applied a discount to a number of its publications relevant to women and feminism, including to my book, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. My book, the manuscript of which won […]
Microaggressions and Implicit Bias
In two previous posts (here and here), I consider the tactics of force relations that have come to be referred to as “microaggressions”. In the first post, I discuss ableist language and ableist exceptionism as examples of microaggressions. In the second post, I discuss microaggressions as “intentional and nonsubjective” practices (tactics). I point out in […]
Ableist Language and Other Everyday Assaults on Disabled People (or, Stop Talking About “People with Disabilities”!)
Language, a ubiquitous sociopolitical mechanism, operates intentionally and nonsubjectively, and can produce microaggressions whose effects are far-reaching. Language, Lane Greene remarks, is a genius system with no genius. “Bound by rules, yet constantly changing,” Greene notes, “language might be the ultimate self-regulating system, with nobody in charge” (Greene 2018). In systems of language, words and […]
Perfect You
I still can’t decide which is better: a book of feminist philosophy, such as Kate Manne’s Down Girl (2018), that disregards disability almost entirely, or a book of feminist philosophy, such as Heather Widdows’s Perfect Me (2018), that seems to add disability to its analysis as an afterthought and does so in a way that […]