Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the third-anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
During the past year, for the third year in a row, I conducted landmark interviews with disabled philosophers who are variously situated with respect to disability, race, gender, institutional status, age, culture, nationality, and sexuality and whose philosophical work covers a wide range of specializations and research interests. This third-anniversary installment of the series highlights insights and lessons that these philosophers offered the philosophical community, reflecting upon the implications of the contributions to philosophy that their interviews have made.
I am delighted that Audrey Yap, whom I interviewed in July 2016, and Devonya Havis, whom I interviewed in June 2017, have returned to Dialogues on Disability to assist me with this celebratory anniversary installment of the series, bringing continuity to the series and expanding it in thought-provoking ways.
I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. Audrey acknowledges that she lives and works on the traditional territory of the WSÁNEĆ, Lkwungen, and Esquimalt peoples. Audrey, Devonya, and I offer this anniversary installment of the Dialogues on Disability series with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.
Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Audrey and Devonya! We are indebted to you for taking the time to produce this anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability with me.
Devonya, in a moment, you and I will turn to reflect back on your interview from June of last year; first, however, I would like us to consider Quayshawn Spencer’s interview which led off the third year of the series.
Like many of my interviewees in the past three years, Quayshawn, although he was initially a student in the sciences, switched to a major in philosophy after a philosophy course made an indelible impression on him. Quayshawn has established himself as an authority in the philosophy and science of race. In his interview with me, I asked Quayshawn whether he was worried about how his work on race might be perceived. In one part of his answer to the question, Quayshawn said:
I don’t believe that the term race is anything like, say, tiger in American English. If you randomly grab a few hundred American English speakers, take them to China or India, and ask them to point out the tigers, there will be near unanimity on what they point out. You can also ask them what are the superficial properties that almost all tigers share, and you’ll get largely overlapping answers. However, there’s plenty of empirical work that’s been done that shows that American English speakers don’t share that sort of agreement about what “the races” are or what “the features” are that makes something a race …Of course, there are non-pluralist ways of dealing with these experimental results. …Sally Haslanger has argued, for instance, that we should ignore “the ordinary person’s ideas about race” because “the very social processes that create the divisions of privilege and advantage also obscure their workings.” However, I’m not convinced that experimental data about what ordinary people think about race is entirely worthless. Ordinary people should be reliable indicators of their own racial memberships. So, if racial self-reporting data are all over the place—which they are—then pluralism is a live option. Some other philosophers of race who have embraced racial pluralism, or something close to it, are Lionel McPherson and Michael Hardimon.
Given your own work on Black ancestral discourses, Devonya, what do you think about Quayshawn’s insights on the metaphysics of race?
[Description of image below: Coloured photo of Devonya, a Black woman, who stands at the front of a classroom, beside a media station on which an open Apple laptop sits. She is wearing glasses, a gold necklace, earrings, and ring, and a patterned, button-down shirt. Her left hand is in motion and she seems to be in full teaching or lecturing mode with people in the seats in front of her who are beyond the frame.]
Shelley, I very much like the idea of racial pluralism and agree that our seemingly “common sense” notions of race, at least in the North American context—especially in the United States—are not as fixed as one would think. Students often begin studying “race” with a sense that the boundaries are very clear. They soon discover that many of the traditional ways of ascribing race to persons and groups fray under closer scrutiny. Such fraying is not simply a matter of unsettling the biological essentialism that haunts us from the nineteenth century, but rather also involves understanding the inconsistencies associated with attempts to legally and socially fix racial categories.
Given this slippage, Shelley, it seems prudent to make room for the ways that racial identities and racial ascriptions are produced not only within larger systemic mechanisms but also through everyday encounters, that is, through the production, re-production, and performance of “race” in mundane situations. It also seems important to maintain some conception of racial pluralism to allow additional spaces for people to re-create racial meanings and to expand how one might conceive what have come to be described as particular races. So, I would agree that there are things to be learned from the racial claims made by “ordinary people”.
The deep work, however, concerns how we parse these claims in light of existing power relations. Despite the slippage across seeming racial categories, Shelley, it is critical to note that, historically, racial ascription and reporting have been externally conditioned for those who are marked as raced—complicating racial self-reporting. It, too, is the case that many also choose race as a form of empowerment that honors traditions of ancestral struggle and creation. The opening of these interviews, which evokes respect and the spirit of reconciliation, strikes me as an example of honoring such struggles and noting how creation happens even in the midst of challenge.
At one point in my interview, Shelley, I highlighted the ways that seemingly disempowered and powerless social groups have generated resources that disrupt injustices and how Foucault’s ideas can enable these interventions. I said:
When working through Foucault, I embrace his notion of subjugated knowledges to clear an academic space where I can lay claim to those traditions that fashioned me into the thinker I have become. ... I have deep concerns about social justice. Consequently, I have been increasingly convinced that the path to justice must be by way of theorizing injustice. It seems to me that such theorization is part of what is at stake when one undertakes genealogy. Interventions into injustice require strategies and tactics informed by history, context, and power dynamics. My reflections on parrhesia in “The Parrhesiastic Enterprise of Black Philosophy” were an effort to demonstrate some of the ways that Black people have generated resources for disrupting injustices despite occupying social/political positions that seemingly give them access to very little power. In this respect, the article blended Foucauldian insights about power with Black traditions that have exercised resistances in many creative ways.
Shelley, I am interested to know your thoughts on the use of Foucault’s ideas of subjugated knowledges and genealogy as forms of resistance to ableism and other injustices that disabled people confront.
As I indicate in my recent book, Devonya, I think that Foucault’s claims about subjugated knowledges and about genealogy as a method to uncover them have enormous subversive potential for disabled people and other social groups whose insights and perspectives are excluded from philosophical and other academic discourses, as your work on Black ancestral discourses vividly illustrates.
Unearthing subjugated knowledges about the apparatus of disability, especially with a genealogical method, can enable philosophers of disability and disability theorists to show the contingency and historically and culturally specific character of the medicalized conception of disability that prevails in both intellectual and everyday understandings of disability. In Melinda Hall’s interview with me, Devonya, Melinda talked about how she uses Foucault’s work to undermine prevailing arguments about disabled people that bioethicists in particular have advanced. As Melinda explained it:
I discovered Foucault and started reading (or trying to read) him. I became interested in ethics like it was a second skin …. I took every elective and course offered on the topic and started to read bioethics. … I noticed immediately that bioethics was absolutely derisive about disabled people, disability rights, and well-being among disabled people. I couldn't believe the lies and distortions about disabled people and their capabilities, as they were demonstrably false and offensive. …It is clear to me that bioethics as a discourse is a place where disability is framed and produced—reality following and framed by language and concepts.
… In graduate school, I became interested in transhumanist literature as a primary example of the foibles and disturbing power over public opinion on disability that I observed in bioethics literature more generally.…The Bioethics of Enhancement primarily focuses on transhumanists, the human enhancement enthusiasts whom I critique. But, I claim that transhumanist arguments are continuous with, not aberrations of, arguments elsewhere in bioethics; and so, they can highlight the biopolitical assumptions at the heart of it—that is, that disability is connected to risk is connected to death. In the early chapters of the book, I engage in a Foucauldian analysis of the last century of enhancement enthusiasm and more moderate bioethics literature in order to support these arguments.
Devonya, the understandings and argumentative claims about what disability is and how it is produced that Melinda, I, and other philosophers of disability generate remain marginalized in philosophy. Not given authoritative status, they are instead systematically subordinated to the productive power relations of medicalized bioethical accounts of disability, as Melinda’s work on transhumanism and disability forcefully demonstrates. Hence, the articulation of counter-hegemonic understandings and claims about disability that we make should be regarded as subjugated knowledges, in Foucault’s sense.
Ladelle McWhorter also drew attention to the importance of Foucault for the insurrection of subjugated knowledges and the production of new forms of knowledge that genealogies precipitate, Devonya, emphasizing Foucault’s conviction that no claim, practice, or institution should be regarded as inevitable, unquestionable, or sacrosanct. At one place in the interview, Ladelle put it thus:
[T]he hallmark of Foucault’s work is that he refuses to assume that there is an unchanging given. Whatever presents itself as such—whatever exercises power on the basis of its supposed naturalness or logical necessity or inevitable teleology—arouses Foucaultian skepticism and suspicion. Foucault never said that there are no logical necessities, that nothing is natural, that inevitability and teleology are illusions; he never made generalizations like that. Instead, he investigated. His investigations offer plausible accounts of the historical origins for concepts, practices, and institutions. The consequence of these investigations is that the concepts, practices, and institutions lose power over us—not completely, perhaps, but to the extent that their power depended on them remaining unquestioned. The weakening of these concepts, practices, and institutions can allow us to exercise our imaginations, to consider alternatives, and to create new possibilities. I experience this destabilization of entrenched ways of thinking and behaving as freeing.
What are your thoughts on Ladelle’s remarks in this context, Devonya?
For me, Shelley, Ladelle’s comments are very provocative. She suggests a series of tactics that may be invoked to challenge tyrannical assumptions about disability, as well as race. Operationalizing an approach that embraces a productive skepticism—one that demands interrogating what is assumed to be “given,” “natural,” “fixed”—holds a kind of promise.
Shelley, I suggest “promise” because challenges to the given are also, for Foucault, challenges to what one implicitly accepts as authoritative. So, we return to your earlier point in which you noted that “counter-hegemonic understandings and claims about disability…remain marginalized in philosophy, ....not given authoritative status.” By taking Foucauldian-inflected tactics and strategies seriously, one might weaken the concepts and practices that produce hegemonic views and claims about disability as authoritative.
Unsettling and questioning the prevailing authoritative voices concerning disability draws upon the genealogical work that you, Melinda, and others take up in explications of the apparatus of disability. Shelley, I like to think that such explications will ultimately lead to an insurrection of subjugated knowledges within the discipline of philosophy. Disruption of entrenched ways of thinking and behaving—especially within philosophy—may actually make a difference in society at large by creating new possibilities for how we might imagine ourselves and our relations to others.
This is the kind of philosophical promise that does not use hope as an evasion of the present, but instead, understands the present in a way that prompts its rethinking. I would suggest that your recent book, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, invokes a similar understanding of “the present” to disrupt the seemingly given association between impairment and disability, Shelley.
By looking at disability "as a historical artifact,” your work “denaturalizes and debiologizes” the ways that philosophy, and by association other disciplines, account for disability. Shelley, your work offers an important challenge to what you describe as the “naturalized foundation of disability” by “indicat[ing] how a certain historically and culturally specific regime of power has produced certain acts, practices, subjectivities, bodies, relations, and so on as a problem for the present, as well as [indicating] the role that philosophy has played and continues to play in the elaboration of this problem.” The challenge to what has been accepted as “natural” strikes me as one of the critical roles that philosophy can take up in fights against injustice.
Shelley, it seems to me that this type of critical engagement through philosophy that Lissa Skitolsky centers in her interview works to denaturalize conditions that we have come to accept as deplorable, but standard, such as racialized oppression in the United States. Near the beginning of her interview, Lissa notes that historic understandings of the term genocide have excluded systematic racism in the United States as an example of genocide. She goes on to assert that using the term genocide marks important moral, as well as legal limits, for state inflicted violence. She notes:
I have no use for analytic definitions of genocide that misrepresent and so distort the real, historical occasions of state violence still directed against the flourishing of particular populations as such. In the United States, the status quo is not livable, but instead produces versions of unlivable life. … I follow [Claudia] Card’s understanding of genocide as the infliction of suffering on a targeted group that produces social death and so undermines the social vitality of that group and the ability of its members to live a decent life and experience a decent death.
Shelley, given the broader ways in which genocide can be conceived, how do you think such a denaturalized notion of genocide might be useful in fighting injustice in general, and in analyzing some of the particular forms that injustice has taken?
Devonya, that’s a great question. I think that when the sort of broader, denaturalized conception of genocide that Lissa recommends is assumed, that is, when genocide is understood as a calculated production of unlivable life and, furthermore, if criteria that have traditionally been used to define genocide are unhinged from it—such as the criterion that a genocide is an “event” that can be located in a discrete time and place—then we can recognize myriad forms of genocide in the present, including ongoing genocides of indigenous peoples globally, escalating destruction of the environment, and the extinction of a growing number of nonhuman species, as well as the extermination of various populations through the normalization of technologies such as genetic testing and screening and practices such as physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.
Philosophy can play a significant role in the articulation of an expanded understanding of genocide and its instrumental production of unlivable lives, as well as offer resistance to these forms of systemic exclusion and social elimination. Indeed, some philosophers already do this work and related work. For instance, Kyle Powys Whyte makes vital contributions in this regard with his historically informed insights about settler colonialism and the environment. To take another example, Chris Lebron’s recent work crystallizes the historical origins and philosophical importance of the Black Lives Matter movement as a force of resistance to both social and biological death. You, Devonya, use Foucault to articulate the richness of Black histories, including in your philosophically informed histories of jazz and the Black vernacular, that is, in histories that defy the social death of Black people. To take one last example, Melinda Hall uses Foucault to articulate how novel technologies and discursive practices render some lives unlivable and hence disposable, as well as how these technologies and practices can be resisted and refused.
Nevertheless, Devonya, as both you and Audrey know, philosophy and the academy itself have increasingly become instruments in the production of forms of social death, undermining the vitality of certain populations, especially employees in precarious working conditions.
In October of 2017, I interviewed Brian Montgomery who talked about the lack of self-confidence he felt in his philosophical prowess, undermining his own flourishing. I asked Brian how he negotiates these self-perceptions and his status as an untenured faculty member. Brian’s response was remarkably candid. He said:
While in counseling, I made several key breakthroughs of self-discovery. One of them was a general feeling of inferiority amongst my peers. Whenever I walk into a room of fellow academics, I cannot help but think to myself that I’m the least intelligent person there. Instead of focusing on what I’ve achieved, I measure my worth in comparison to what others have achieved, and always find myself coming up wanting. I tend to expand this worry into a general concern that others recognize my own shortcomings and consequently despise me….This general low self-esteem has led to some problems career-wise. Like most of those on the market, I’ve struggled to find a permanent position over the last few years, and I know that I’m not helping my case with publications. I have a few that I’ve gotten in decent sources, but I am quick to abandon a given paper after one or two rejections. The process of hearing criticism is so brutal to me that nagging self-doubt has me convinced that it’ll never be published and I’d be best off if I just give up. …Would I have a tenure track job today if I had pursued publications more vigorously right out of the gate? Possibly, but I’ve seen many of my other colleagues with impressive CVs go without permanent jobs as well. I would be lying if I said that I haven’t found this experience demoralizing. …I don’t know how to solve this, but going through it with major depression and anxiety makes the situation even worse.
In your interview in July 2016, Audrey, you described your own experiences of depression. Do Brian’s remarks resonate with you in any way even though you are tenured faculty?
[Description of image below: A coloured selfie of Audrey who is wearing a hoodie and holding her beloved dog Eddie close to her. Eddie has a coat of long black and white hair. They are sitting on a mountaintop. The breeze sweeps strands of Audrey’s long dark hair across her forehead. Trees and other mountains can be seen under a clear sky in the background of the shot.]
Yes, definitely, Shelley. I certainly don’t think that the hyper-competitive nature of the job market and the precarious employment of many academics is doing anyone any favours. So, my remarks aren’t intended to suggest that precarity isn’t a problem. But I think that, to some extent, impostor syndrome is independent of this. I often find, in speaking to more senior and more accomplished academics, that their issues with self-image and insecurity are quite similar to mine. I suppose what this really points to is that depression doesn’t magically go away (obviously) once you get promoted to Full Professor, get tenure, get a TT job, or whatever.
Sometimes the solution offered to depressed academics or prospective academics is to try to depersonalize the criticism so that it doesn’t become so internalized or such a part of our self-conception. For me, Shelley, it’s less a matter of fixing ourselves—whose psychologies are such that adversarial or extremely critical interactions are more of a strain—as it is a matter of offering alternatives. I’m generally less invested in doing the kind of philosophy that primarily deals in criticizing the arguments of others, and more invested in doing the kind that considers how we can best use our philosophical tools to understand and improve our lives.
Shelley, your amazing interview with Kit Connor touched on some other issues about living in academia with disabled bodies. I found this passage about engagement with cure particularly striking:
Overcoming, disorder, diagnosis, and cure form the walls and walks of our institutions; they give it shape, hold together the spaces in which academic philosophy flourishes. I stand tentatively on the sidelines of such spaces—hesitant, unsure. What could it mean to live within the institutional walls of academic philosophy in ways that do not seek to make example, eradicate, transform and obscure disabled bodies? What would it look like to celebrate disability without restoration?
In moving through the landscapes of institutional horizons, these questions cling to me as an inheritance, an echo of the silence, anger, outcries of the bodies pushed and moving differently to the sides. These questions are asked within and outside the feminist philosophy community, but sometimes receive only certain kinds of uptake.
I know that you’ve talked and written about ways in which some feminist philosophy perpetuates the ableism of mainstream philosophy—or at the very least ignores the relevance of disability, Shelley. What do you make of Kit’s remarks about limited uptake within feminist philosophy?
Thanks for asking this question, Audrey. I think Kit very diplomatically articulated the frustration and anger that many disabled feminist philosophers feel with respect to nondisabled feminist philosophers who, like mainstream philosophers, do not critically analyze ableism and the apparatus of disability nor engage in self-reflection about them, especially analysis and self-reflection about how these operate in philosophy. Such disregard is produced time and again.
In my work, I have attempted to identify the mechanisms through which ableism and the apparatus of disability are reproduced in both feminist philosophy and mainstream philosophy. In my article “Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability,” for instance, I identify (among other things) how disabled philosophers, especially disabled philosophers of disability, are excluded from employment in the profession, as well as from feminist conferences, publications, and professional organizations.
In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I zero in on the ways through which the apparatus of disability and ableism are left out of feminist analyses of intersectionality, power, oppression, and so on. Disability is depoliticized in much feminist philosophy, understood as appropriately and adequately addressed in the domains of feminist ethics of care and feminist bioethics. There is also a persistent lack of knowledge and understanding about the apparatus of disability in feminist philosophy. Analyses of the apparatus of disability and ableism are precluded from many considerations of power and oppression through what I call “ableist exceptionism,” a tactic that works in concert with the depoliticization of the apparatus of disability.
Ableist exceptionism is the term that I have coined to refer to the process whereby disability, because it is assumed to be a prediscursive, natural, and politically neutral human characteristic, difference, attribute, or property, is uniquely excluded from the production and application of certain values, beliefs, principles, and actions that circulate in political consciousness. In my book, Audrey, I illustrate ableist exceptionism with the example of how ableist language is depoliticized, even by feminist and other philosophers who regard all other speech acts as political machinery, as politically potent, and value laden.
Ableist exceptionism can also be frequently identified in feminist-oriented practices that present themselves as inclusive and diverse yet exclude analyses of disability or disabled philosophers. The recent initiative to develop a code of ethics for publication comes immediately to mind. Although the initiative seems to have been designed especially to advance issues of representation, diversity, and inclusion in publication, Audrey, no disabled philosopher is involved on either the project team or the advisory board. Nor, furthermore, are resources with respect to disability and publication, accessibility and publication, etc. offered in the extensive bibliography available at the project site. I could find only one article in the bibliography that addresses disability and ableism. None of the work that I have done here on the blog and elsewhere with respect to the mechanisms that currently operate to exclude both disabled philosophers and analysis of disability in philosophy, including in publishing, appears in the bibliography.
Kit Connor was not the only interviewee last year who expressed frustration about the ableism of feminist philosophers. In my interview with her, Grace Joy Cebrero also expressed frustration and anger about the ableism and disregard for disabled students that she experiences and witnesses, drawing attention to the urgent need for changes to both institutional structures and interpersonal communication, changes that she intends to initiate. In one place in her interview with me, Grace said:
It is not the case that the problem of our underrepresentation in philosophy will magically fix itself. As you have experienced, and as I am now, it seems like an epic battle just to reach the front door. I believe philosophy, of all disciplines, can, through dialogue, implement necessary changes to correct for and prevent injustice, in individuals and collectives, cases and systems. If I want to contribute to this work, I need to be within the discipline to participate. If I leave, I won’t help. I need to stay, succeed, and dig my heels in to insist on change. … When I read or hear stories of how other disabled scholars are treated, especially in philosophy, I am filled with a healthy righteous indignation that fuels me to stay and help change the status quo. Many of my classmates with invisible disabilities are remarkable thinkers, unbeknownst to them. But professors are not traditionally welcoming or encouraging to students who seem to operate outside norms, for a variety of reasons.
Audrey, you are involved in social justice initiatives at your university and in the profession. What advice do you have for Grace and other students who feel invested in changing the institutional structures of both their universities and the discipline of philosophy?
Shelley, the main bit of practical advice that I have for marginalized students, including disabled, racialized, indigenous, and queer students is to survive. Sometimes survival requires protest and demanding the things that you need to thrive. But in all too many cases, I think that there is a period of having to bear the excess of emotional labour that is required to minimize the discomfort of others in the face of your embodied existence. The main bit of practical advice that I have is really advice for those who, like me, are in positions of relative power, and are advising and teaching students.
I think that while there seems to be an increased awareness of both a mental health crisis among students and a lack of representation of disabled philosophers, many securely employed folks don’t seem to be doing a lot about it. So, I think that I might turn this comment into advice for teachers and advisors so that the responsibility is not solely on disabled students to advocate for themselves. Shelley, the main thing that I would want to say in that regard is that teachers and advisors should recognize in our pedagogical practices that there is a lot of variation in both bodies and life circumstances.
Rather than gatekeeping, or forcing our students to go through gatekeeping processes, Shelley, we need to design our classes and programs with accessibility in mind. I think that many of us have internalized ideas about what normal course or program requirements consist in, without realizing that many of these requirements rest on background assumptions that all of our students are nondisabled.
It’s not even as difficult or taxing as people might suppose to be flexible or to try to keep issues of accessibility at the forefront when we design our programs and courses. As you know, Shelley, sometimes conflicting access needs might arise or issues of accommodation that we hadn’t anticipated might be presented, but these, like other unexpected situations, can be managed.
Megan Dean addressed many of these issues in her interview with you when she talked about her work on coordinating accessibility for Georgetown events. But, I actually want to ask you about another aspect of Megan’s interview: remarks that she made about research on embodied experience. In talking about the extent to which our experiences of our bodies can be shaped by social systems and practices, she said:
understanding experiences in this way enables us to recognize that the problem isn’t just with ourselves and that “fixing” ourselves isn’t the only way to respond to our suffering. I think that’s hopeful. It means that if we can figure out how the experiences are produced, we can work to undermine the ones that we don’t endorse.
That’s one reason why work in this area is so important. Unfortunately, the systems that structure some of our embodied experiences, including capitalism and white supremacy, or, as Ladelle McWhorter discusses in Bodies and Pleasures, sexual normalization, are incredibly well-entrenched. Nonetheless, I think that this way of understanding our experiences is empowering, that is, this understanding of our experiences offers both an empowering way to relate to the experiences and a grounding for useful strategies of resistance to their naturalization.
Shelley, this reminds me of your argument, articulated most recently in Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, that disability is an apparatus of power, not a personal characteristic, property, or difference. What do you think of the connection between Megan’s remarks here and your own arguments about the nature of disability?
Audrey, I certainly think connections can be drawn between Megan’s remarks in this context of her interview and my argument that disability is an apparatus of power, not least because Megan’s own work is influenced by Foucault whose idea of an apparatus I have adopted. Megan wants to reconcile embodied and phenomenological experiences with the sort of analysis of power and the body that Foucault advanced.
I think the identification of disability as an apparatus enables us to bring together elements of various approaches to the body that are claimed to be opposed. Foucault didn’t deny the body, as many feminist philosophers and theorists have argued. Rather, Foucault argued that the body can never be analysed or experienced apart from the historically contingent practices that bring it into being. Indeed, the idea that there is “a” body—that is, a singular corporeality and experience of it—is an idea that Foucault rejected, as his writing on the abnormal body, the body of the criminal, the body of the homosexual, the intersexed body, and so on demonstrates.
These observations about Megan’s work, my work, and Foucault’s claims seem to be a nice entry point into consideration of remarks that Jesse Prinz made in his February 2016 interview with me that I reposted in February of this year. At one point in this fascinating interview, Jesse discussed the centrality, in his work in philosophy of mind and theories of emotions and embodiment, of assumptions about experience and its social construction. At one point in Jesse’s interview, he said:
I think that the case of disordered emotions has much to teach us, because once we recognize the impact of social forces with respect to disordered emotions, it becomes possible for us to think that all emotions are influenced in this way. I think fear, anger, disgust—even hunger, thirst, and sexual desires—are socially conditioned. We may have brain circuits that have homologues in other creatures, but we are also far more susceptible to social learning than other creatures are. As a result, our biological machinery is co-opted from the start.
In short, the causes, effects, and embodiment of every one of our emotions and drives are culturally conditioned. Thus, we find different anxieties across cultures and different elicitors of moral repugnance. We also find different triggers of rage and rage gets embodied in different ways. At the individual level, such conditioning can mark the difference between someone who silently broods when provoked and someone who lashes out violently. Emotional training of this kind also reflects power relations. One strategy of oppression is to condition the oppressed to experience emotions that are not conducive to liberation. For example, many women are conditioned to be meek and fragile, to sulk when angry, and to turn their anger inward on themselves, rather than to use outrage as an instrument of change. Often moments of liberation occur when members of an oppressed group take the reins of their emotions.
Audrey, I think that Jesse’s insights about experience, social construction, and resistance to power complement the work that I have done on disability as an apparatus of power that produces identities, bodies, discourses, and practices, which can be mobilized as instruments of resistance and subversion. Indeed, I think that social constructionism—an approach that has been reviled and dismissed in some corners of philosophy—holds the key to social change and to the transformation of philosophy itself. What do you think?
I think you’re right, Shelley, about the value of social constructionism and its potential to transform philosophical inquiry. Such approaches are gaining traction though, at the very least in considering socially constructed concepts. For instance, some of Sally Haslanger’s work on metaphysics helps link work on, say, philosophy of race and gender, to analytic metaphysics. This move needs to be pushed further, as you suggest, and I think the move in this direction can counteract a certain kind of universalizing tendency that presumes a uniformity to human experiences. Rather than treating difference as pathological—as many philosophers implicitly do—we need to attend to the social structures that produce such differences. Until we do more of that work, we will fail to understand the extent to which western philosophical perspectives have been shaped by the experiences and knowledges of those occupying very particular social locations.
This disregard for difference, I think, contributes to the alienation that a lot of people feel in philosophical discussions. For instance, when philosophical work so clearly treats disabled people as objects of inquiry, and not as inquiring philosophical subjects in their own right, is it any wonder so many disabled philosophers feel out of place in the discipline? Christine Wieseler makes some of these points in her interview, about the need for phenomenology to look more at the roles of social structures in shaping individual experiences. She also discusses her research with respect to the role of imagination in understanding disabled people’s lives. She said:
I have observed that many nondisabled people who have not spent time meaningfully engaging with a disabled person tend to think in terms of narratives that are dominant within movies, books, and news articles; namely, their perspectives tend to be informed either by the idea that disability is tragic and disabled people are to be pitied, or by the overcoming narrative which frames disabled people as inspiring due to what we’re able to accomplish “in spite of” being disabled. Disability theorists such as Eli Clare, Alison Kafer, and Tobin Siebers characterize imagination as an obstacle to understanding due to the influence of ableism, but they also intimate that there are ways in which imagination can serve as a means for alternate conceptions of disability.
I agree that imagination informed by ableism is often treated as a substitute for knowledge, but I do not think this is necessarily the case. Clare calls into question the ways that the ideology of cure obscures our collective ability to imagine disabled people’s lives as fulfilling. In Disability Theory, Siebers makes a distinction between “individual imagination” and “cultural imagination,” and suggests that we need the latter rather than the former. [...] I am drawing on Amy Kind’s work on philosophy of imagination to explore the potential benefits that imagination can have when it is shaped in particular ways. For example, imagination may have utility for understanding when it is grounded in actual disabled people’s experiences and when it takes sociopolitical context into account.
Shelley, I’d love to know some of your thoughts about the potential for imagination to have a beneficial role in working against ableism. Do you think that the Dialogues on Disability series can serve as an aid to imagination, at least for the collective ability of philosophers to develop a richer understanding of disabled people’s lives—particularly disabled philosophers’ lives?
That’s a great question, Audrey. I think of the work that imagination can do in political terms, of opening up discursive spaces for the articulation of previously marginalized and excluded perspectives, understandings, experiences, and knowledges, the subjugated knowledges that Devonya and I discussed at the outset of this installment of Dialogues on Disability.
I think, as Christine suggests, that most people, including many philosophers, have very constricted ideas about disabled people, ideas that traffic in stereotypes of disabled people, ideas derived from films such as “Million Dollar Baby” and “Forrest Gump,” as well as other media, literary, and cultural representations of us.
Philosophy contributes to these cultural misunderstandings of disabled people, amplifying and formalizing them. Although bioethics and cognitive science are the most evident spheres in which the articulation and formalization of misunderstandings about disabled people are fostered, Audrey, biases and lack of understanding about disabled people traverse across the discipline. I find myself repeatedly surprised that so many philosophers seem unwilling to acknowledge and address how these misunderstandings and biases have shaped and continue to shape the discipline and profession.
We must continue to work to transform the current state of affairs. Indeed, because of engaging interviewees like you and Devonya, Audrey, the Dialogues on Disability series has established itself as a hub for the production in philosophy of new kinds of knowledge about disability and, in this way, is shifting relations of power-knowledge about disability and ableism in philosophy and the university more widely.
Devonya and Audrey, I want to end this anniversary installment by conveying my sincere thanks to both of you for your involvement in its production and preparation. Your insightful remarks breathe new life into the past year’s interviews. Personally speaking, I am so grateful for your ongoing support of the Dialogues on Disability series and the work of the Discrimination and Disadvantage blog more generally.
Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to our remarks, ask questions about the interviews we've highighted, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.
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Please join me here again on Wednesday, May 16th at 8 a.m. ET for the thirty-eighth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.
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