In a post at the beginning of April, I addressed the way that vulnerability was naturalized in reports in the mainstream press, on bioethics blogs, and elsewhere about the dramatically increasing number of COVID-19 outbreaks in nursing homes in Ontario, across Canada, and elsewhere. My argument in the post drew attention to the systemic ageism […]
What’s Ahead: Against Natural(izing) Disability
Much of my writing, teaching, service, and activism in philosophy has been designed to undermine a cluster of assumptions about the relation between nature and nurture, that is, a cluster of assumptions about the relation between biology and society, assumptions that remain embedded in philosophical discourses, variously naturalizing disability, gender, race, and other apparatuses of […]
Writing Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability
I enjoyed reading Sarah Tyson’s recent guest post about why she wrote her new book, Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better. Since, in preparation for the Pacific APA, I have been thinking about my reasons for writing Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, and, furthermore, because I think that […]
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 […]
