Feminism and Disability Theory

This chapter maps out connections between feminist and disability theories to bring into relief the multiple ways that feminist philosophers are partaking in these conversations. It begins with a discussion of what is distinctive about feminist approaches to disability, while recognizing that there is not a single, univocal “feminist philosophy of disability.” It then turns to specific areas of philosophical inquiry in which feminist philosophers address disability, including ontological, epistemological, political, ethical, and bioethical considerations. The final section highlights a number of themes central to work in feminist philosophy and disability: embodiment, identity, intersectionality, and the generative and positive dimensions of disability. The chapter concludes by pointing to more recent directions in feminist philosophy of disability. These include disability aesthetics, explorations of disability in the context of technoscience and ecofeminism, and the problem of ableism in philosophy and the academy more broadly.

Review of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability

Shelley L. Tremain’s Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (2017) builds on the author’s over twenty years of professional labour and scholarly interventions within philosophy to provide a compelling and careful examination of a range of timely issues for researchers and students in disability studies.

Review of Foucault and the Feminist Philosophy of Disability by Shelley Tremain

No abstract available.

Chronic Pain, Bad-Differences, and Disability Variantism

There is an ongoing philosophical debate about the evaluative relationship between disability and well-being. Some philosophers adopt a disability-neutral view while others adopt a disability-negative view. In this paper, I focus on chronic-pain to put pressure on those who claim that disabilities are evaluatively neutral. In making my case, I first survey the literature on chronic pain and its negative effects on both individuals and society (§1). Next, I discuss the philosophy of disability (§2). For the sake of argument, I concede that disability-neutral views can do justice to the nature of some disabilities. I nonetheless suggest that these views can’t adequately accommodate what we know about chronic pain. I conclude with some thoughts about what I call disability variantism—the view that our analyses of disability ought to acknowledge that there are important evaluative differences between disabilities that complicate some of the simplifying tendencies in the literature (§3).

Considering Quality of Life while Repudiating Disability Injustice: A Pathways Approach to Setting Priorities

This article proposes a novel strategy, one that draws on insights from antidiscrimination law, for addressing a persistent challenge in medical ethics and the philosophy of disability: whether health systems can consider quality of life without unjustly discriminating against individuals with disabilities. It argues that rather than uniformly considering or ignoring quality of life, health systems should take a more nuanced approach. Under the article's proposal, health systems should treat cases where (1) quality of life suffers because of disability-focused exclusion or injustice differently from cases where (2) lower quality of life results from laws of nature, resource scarcity, or appropriate tradeoffs. Decisionmakers should ignore quality-of-life losses that result from injustice or exclusion when ignoring them would improve the prospects of individuals with disabilities; in contrast, they should consider quality-of-life losses that are unavoidable or stem from resource scarcity or permissible tradeoffs. On this proposal, while health systems should not amplify existing injustice against individuals with disabilities, they are not required to altogether ignore the potential effects of disability on quality of life.