A Feminist Re-Reading of Foucault Through the Apparatus of Disability/A Feminist Re-Reading of the Apparatus of Disability Through Foucault, Sciences Po/Paris, Nov. 7, 2025

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 […]

Quote of the Week (and It’s Only Thursday): Canadians on Conscientious Objection, Trudeau Jr., and Annexing Canada

This week’s quote-of-the-week post (though it’s only Thursday) draws attention, once again, to the bioethicist’s revisionist deployment of the notion of “conscientious objection.” Indeed, the post is designed to bolster my problematization (in Foucault’s sense) of the politically potent way in which bioethicists have mobilized the notion. In my last post of 2024 (here), I […]

The Call is Coming from Inside the House; Or How Bioethics Has Compromised Philosophy and Philosophers

Bioethics and the neoliberal eugenics that motivates it have thoroughly compromised philosophy and philosophers–politically, institutionally, ethically, and economically. That is to say, the neoliberal effects of bioethics have become so pervasive and insidious in philosophy that the discipline and profession have, in many ways, become extensions of the medico-scientific-industrial complex. Indeed, few philosophy departments (in […]

Disabling Bioethics: Notes Toward An Abolitionist Genealogy

I am putting the finishing touches on “Disabling Bioethics: Notes Toward An Abolitionist Genealogy,” my contribution to Genealogy: A Genealogy, edited by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Daniele Lorenzini. (Columbia University Press, 2025). I have copied below the pre-copyedited version of the first section of the chapter which appears under the heading “Conceptual Needs of the Argument […]

How Canadian Philosophy Plays a Vital Role in the Project of Eugenics: Or, Gender, Schafer, and Other Nondisabled White Male Bioethicists

I’m always disappointed when I see Canadian feminist philosophers contribute to and reproduce the significant role that philosophy in Canada and Canadian bioethicists in particular play in the legacy of eugenics in Canada and the exclusion of disabled philosophers and philosophy of disability that this legacy requires and sustains. Given the systemic and structural character […]

Quote of the Week (and It’s Only Thursday): Conscientious Objections, Bioethics, and MAiD

This week’s quote-of-the-week post (though it’s only Thursday) sheds light on how the relatively recent deployment in bioethics of the term conscientious objection enables (neo)liberal eugenic goals. As a philosopher whose thinking has been formatively influenced by Foucault, my philosophical motivations derive in large part from a desire to problematize (in Foucault’s sense) what is […]

Philosophy, Bioethics, and Dirty Hands

In my previous post, I noted that one philosopher in attendance at my Syracuse presentation claimed that I had confused the causal relation between bioethics (and bioethicists) and the popularity and normalization of prenatal testing and screening. As I noted, furthermore, my interlocutor pointed out to me (in a somewhat patronizing fashion) that prospective parents […]

Bioethics and the Reproduction of Power

During the question period following my presentation at Syracuse University, one interlocutor asserted that I had confused the direction of causation between prenatal testing and bioethics. Prospective parents, he said, do not, as he understood me to suggest, avail themselves of prenatal testing because bioethicists tell them to do so. Rather, the technology has developed, […]

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews C Dalrymple-Fraser

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the one hundred and fourth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with […]