Bioethics (De)Mystified: A Foucauldian Argument For Why Bioethics Must Be Abolished

In “Bioethics as a Technology of Government,” the fifth chapter of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I assert that bioethics emerged as a technology of government to resolve the problem that the production of disability poses for the neoliberal management of societies (Tremain 2017, pp. 159-202). In particular, disability is constituted as a problem […]

Disaster Ableism, Academic Freedom, and the Mystique of Bioethics

Today is the day on which presenters to the Philosophy, Disability and Social Change II conference in December will provide me with (among other information) the titles of and brief abstracts for their presentations at the conference. Thus I expect to receive some exciting emails throughout the day! Indeed, this year’s conference promises to be […]

Philosophy, The Apparatus of Disability, and the #EugenicsSyllabus Project

In the fifth chapter of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I argue that bioethics is a strategy of modern eugenics. In earlier articles—such as “Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment In Utero” and “Biopower, Styles of Reasoning, and What’s Still Missing From the Stem Cell Debates”—I pointed out ways in which the […]

Biopolitics and Coronavirus, or Don't Forget Foucault (How Could We?)

An excerpt from the essay “Biopolitics and Coronavirus, or Don’t Forget Foucault” by Felipe Demetri: “What the coronavirus epidemic shows us is more the strength of Michel Foucault’s explanatory scheme than the current necro-thanatopolitical strain of interpretations. We all know that Foucault saw biopower as a series of events, from theoretical ones to concrete practices, […]

Biopower, Normalization, and Slippery Slopes

[This post previously appeared on the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog which no longer exists. In an upcoming post, I will discuss how the subfield of bioethics has shaped Canadian philosophy and how the predominance of the subfield of bioethics in Canadian philosophy is intertwined with prestige bias. An earlier post on prestige bias in Canadian […]

Is “The Right to Die” Racialized Biopolitics?

[This post originally appeared at the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog which is now defunct In one respect, the title of the post was redundant: biopolitics are always racialized.] _________________________________________________ My post earlier in the week drew attention to the imbrication of the sub-field of bioethics in the workings of biopower and neoliberal biopolitics. I noted how biopolitics […]

The Biopolitics of Bioethics

[This post originally appeared at the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog which is now defunct.] In a chapter of my forthcoming book, I argue that (most of the) claims advanced in the sub-field of mainstream bioethics and even feminist bioethics rely upon an outdated conception of power that manifests in ideas about “choice,” “informed consent,” and […]

Reviews of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability

In the past week, two very positive reviews of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability have appeared (well, if they appeared before last week, I was unaware that they had been published). I was happy to read that, for the most part, the two reviews focus on and draw out disparate aspects of the book. […]

Philosophy of Disability: Present and Future, No. 3

This series is intended to flesh out some of the remarks that I made in a pivotal paragraph of my reply to commentators in the Pacific APA symposium on Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. In the previous post in this series, I returned to the paragraph in order to consider the remark according to […]