The conception of disability that currently prevails in philosophy construes it as a philosophically uninteresting and value-neutral biological trait, that is, as a self-evidently natural and deleterious characteristic, difference, or property that some people embody or possess. Insofar as philosophers hold this naturalized and individualized conception of disability, they assume that disability is a prediscursive […]
My Presentation to the Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change Conference, Online, December 9th, 2020
I have copied below the text of the presentation that I delivered on Wednesday, December 9th, the first day of the enormously successful Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change conference. The chair of the session was Eric Winsberg who did a fantastic job. The presentation copied here is an abbreviated draft of an article that will […]
Abstract for Arché Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory Seminar, St. Andrews, Wednesday, November 4th, 2020
Some readers/listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY have asked about the direction of the argument in my presentation to the Arché Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory Seminar at University of St. Andrews next week. So, I have copied the abstract for the presentation below. The seminar runs from 2-4pm GMT. If you would like to join the […]
Philosophy’s Disability Problem
That disability is naturalized and depoliticized in philosophy and beyond is one of the central reasons why philosophy of disability remains marginalized in the discipline and why disabled philosophers, especially disabled philosophers of disability, continue to be excluded from philosophy departments in Canada and elsewhere. For more than fifteen years, my research and writing have […]
The Nursing Home-Industrial-Complex
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 […]
