: This essay examines the possible systematic bias against the disabled in the structure and practice of genetic counseling. Finding that the profession's "nondirective" imperative remains problematic, the authors recommend that methodology developed by feminist standpoint epistemology be used to incorporate the perspective of disabled individuals in genetic counselors' education and practice, thereby reforming society's view of the disabled and preventing possible negative effects of genetic counseling on the self-concept and material circumstance of disabled individuals.

I show how much psychiatric disability is informed by trauma, marginalization, sexist norms, social inequalities, concepts of irrationality and normalcy, oppositional mind-body dualism, and mainstream moral values. Drawing on feminist discussion of physical disability, I present a feminist theory of psychiatric disability that serves to liberate not only those who are psychiatrically disabled but also the mind and moral consciousness restricted in their ranges of rational possibilities.

Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...) and affective) dispositions. Frames thereby guide how we interpret, respond to, and navigate the world. I show that these perspectives are epistemically powerful and indispensable. I argue that flawed perspectives, and the distorting frames that produce them, are deeply pernicious and I examine their relationship to oppression. (shrink)

This is the introduction to the inaugural issue of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability.

Nossa seleção de verbetes parte do interesse de cada pesquisador e os dispomos de maneira histórico-cronológica e, ao mesmo tempo, temática. O verbete de Melissa Lane, “Filosofia Política Antiga” vai da abrangência da política entre os gregos até a república e o império, às portas da cristianização. A “Filosofia Política Medieval”, de John Kilcullen e Jonathan Robinson, é o tópico que mais demanda espaço na nossa seleção em virtude das disputas intrínsecas ao período, da recepção de Aristóteles pelo medievo e (...) da tensão entre poder Papal e Civil. No verbete “Liberalismo”, de Gerald Gaus, Shane Courtland e David Schmidtz, vemos as fontes fundantes da Filosofia Política da modernidade. As ideias de liberdade negativa e positiva se coadunam com a Ética Liberal e sua influência sobre a abrangência do valor fundamental da liberdade individual diante das políticas públicas. O texto de Ian Carter, “Liberdade Positiva e Liberdade Negativa”, expõe o paradoxo da liberdade em suas concepções valorativas e neutra, muito úteis para compreender os problemas políticos que enfrentamos hoje. Por fim, Bas Van Der Vossen no texto “Libertarianismo” trata das noções tensas entre Estado e indivíduos. A concepção de “liberdade de si”, genuinamente negativa, ganha destaque justificatório. Jackie Scully, no verbete Bioética Feminista, exemplifica o valor da influência dessas correntes no âmago de todos os contemporâneos. Sua escrita homenageia postumamente Anne Donchin com um apanhado histórico da luta de inserção de políticas feministas na pesquisa acadêmica global. No verbete “Democracia”, os professores brasileiros Gustavo Dalaqua e Alberto Ribeiro Barros acrescentaram tópicos importantes ao tema geral, respectivamente: “Construtivismo Representativo vs. Representação Descritiva” e “Democracia Contestatória de Philip Pettit”. O texto de Thomas Christiano perpassa os principais argumentos de justificação política contra e a favor da democracia ocidental, com foco central nas concepções de liberdade e igualdade. Os verbetes dispostos nessa seleção de textos são tendenciosos na medida que expressam o interesse genuíno de cada pesquisador com os assuntos relevantes em suas pesquisas. Em virtude disso, a escolha “adota um lado” em detrimento de outros – mais especificamente: de outro que poderia ser mais “progressista”. Por si só, o livro já nasce reclamando um segundo volume, que será providenciado. Colocamos de lado qualquer exigência de “imparcialidade”, algo que não existe na Filosofia, muito menos na Filosofia Política. Sobressai, nesse aspecto, o caráter reflexivo que o assunto exige e a importância do assunto, sem o qual não teríamos a modernas concepções de representatividade, as teorias da justiça ou mesmo as ciências sociais. Um outro volume, portanto, se faz imperativo, por conta da abrangência da própria SEP e do respeito a seu projeto inicial, genuinamente um plano plural. (shrink)

The so-called Disability Paradox arises from the apparent tension between the popular view that disability leads to low well-being and the relatively high life-satisfaction reports of disabled people. Our aim in this essay is to make some progress toward dissolving this alleged paradox by exploring the relationship between disability and various “goods of life”—that is, components of a life that typically make a person’s life go better for her. We focus on four widely recognized goods of life (happiness, rewarding relationships, (...) knowledge, achievement) and four common types of disability (sensory, mobility, intellectual, and social) and systematically examine the extent to which the four disability types are in principle compatible with obtaining the four goods of life. Our findings suggest that that there is a high degree of compatibility. This undermines the widespread view that disabilities, by their very nature, substantially limit a person’s ability to access the goods of life, and it provides some guidance on how to dissolve the Disability Paradox. (shrink)

Most work in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics begins by supposing that the virtues are the traits of character that make us good people. Secondary questions, then, include whether, why, and in what ways the virtues are good for the people who have them. This essay is an argument that the neo-Aristotelian approach is upside down. If, instead, we begin by asking what collection of character traits are good for us---that is, what collection of traits are most likely to promote our own (...) well-being---we find a collection of traits a lot like the traditional slate of virtues. This suggests an egoistic theory of the virtues: the virtues just are those traits of character that reliably promote the well-being of their possessor. In addition to making the positive case for character egoism, I defend it from anticipated objections. I argue that character egoism doesn't inherit the problems of ethical egoism, and conclude by offering character-egoist accounts of two virtues traditionally thought to be fundamentally other-regarding: honesty and justice. (shrink)

Drawing upon the practice of caregiving and the insights of feminist care ethics, I offer a phenomenology of caregiving through the work of Eva Feder Kittay and Emmanuel Lévinas. I argue that caregiving is a material dialectic of embodied response involving moments of leveling, attention, and interruption. In this light, the Levinasian opposition between responding to another's singularity and leveling it via parity-based principles is belied in the experience of care. Contra much of response ethics’ and care ethics’ respective literatures, (...) this dialectic suggests that they are complementary in ways that productively illuminate themes of each. I conclude by suggesting that when response and care ethics are thought together through the experience of caregiving, such labors produce finite responsibility with infinite hope. (shrink)

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. I argue that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identification of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and “cure” of disabilities.

Disability theory privileges masculinist notions of presence, visibility, material “reality,” and identity as “given.” One effect of this has been the erasure of “sensibility,” which, it is argued, inscribes, materializes, and performs the critique of binary thought. Therefore, sensibility must be re-articulated in order to escape the “necessary error” of identity implicit in accounts of cultural diversity, and to dialogue across difference in ways that dislocate disability from its position of disvalue in feminist thought.

The importance of emotions is supported by many authors of the ethics of care in contrast to the rationalistic paradigm of justice. However, the reference to the emotions remains generic. By focusing on three paradigmatic typologies, I propose to investigate this aspect further, and distinguish between the different emotions that motivate care. I will try, first, to offer a reflection on which emotions are likely to motivate ethical action within an ethics of care; second, to survey different potential obstacles to (...) these emotions and propose how they might be overcome to more successfully achieve good care and ethical action. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the “expressivist critique” of the use of prenatal testing to select against the birth of persons with impairments. I begin by setting out the expressivist critique and then highlighting, through an investigation of an influential objection to this critique, the ways in which both critics and proponents of the use of technologies of genetic selection negotiate a difficult set of dilemmas surrounding the relationship between genes and identity. I suggest that we may be able to (...) advance the debate about these technologies by becoming more aware of the ways in which this debate is itself in part a political contestation over this relationship. Ultimately, I will argue, the real force of the expressivist objection lies in its capacity to draw our attention to political questions about the role of the state and about relationships between different social groups rather than between parents and prospective children. That is to say, crucial issues, when evaluating the force of this criticism, turn out to be: the nature of the institutions which determine how decisions about prenatal selection are made; and how we think of each other, that is, what we take to be the defining characteristics of human beings. Paradoxically, arguments about the ethics of the “sorting society”, both supportive and critical, are an important arena in which these institutions and these ideas about identity are contested and shaped. An increased awareness of the reflexive nature of the process of debating these issues may assist us in better negotiating them. (shrink)

Through narrative reflections of Jack?s story of inclusive recreational sport, the meaning of dignity in professional practice is explored. Jack?s story is one of respect, strong humiliation and embarrassment, and vulnerability. Through the lens of relational ethics, the aggression of a stranger illustrates how the lack of mutual respect, compassion and knowledge creates experiences of indignity. Jack?s story highlights how relationships can shape, constrain and enable lives. Understanding that which constitutes a dignified recreational sport context for instructors and participants opens (...) opportunities for authentic social relationships based upon respect of oneself, as well as others to emerge. Jack?s narrative further reinforces the need to create pedagogical spaces for discussions of various forms of dignity and ethical professional practice in inclusive recreational sport contexts. (shrink)

This article surveys recent feminist contributions to moral philosophy with an emphasis on those works which engage with debates within mainstream ethics. The article begins by examining a tension said to arise from the two criteria a theory must meet if it is to count as feminist moral theory: the women's experience requirement and the feminist conclusion requirement. Subsequent sections deal with feminist relational theories of rights, feminist work on responsibility and feminist contractarian approaches to ethics. A final section looks (...) at the application of some feminist moral theories to the problem of abortion. (shrink)

I argue that the lived experience of disabled people should be validated instead of a facile categorization. Thus far, a disabled sensibility is reduced to a categorical interpretation. Through my examination of a theoretical performance I illustrate how a disabled/able persona negates a disabled sensibility and allows an audience to experience the exotic disabled without examining their own `ableism'. Sobchack's and Clark's examinations demonstrate how both the techno-body and the cyberbody continue to devalue a disabled embodiment and sensibility. In the (...) final section of the article I explore how Deleuze's concept of `difference in itself' can free disabled people from the concepts of identity, hierarchy, representation and categorization that have been employed to devalue their embodiment and sensibility. Moreover, I believe that Deleuze's alternative theory of `difference in itself' can validate a disabled embodiment and sensibility. (shrink)

This article engages critically with issues surrounding the theorization of the self and body relation, where the body is interpreted as material increasingly open to human intervention and choice. It is argued that this theorization rests upon a mind/body split that limits an understanding of embodied identity. The significance for feminism of undermining representational practices that rely upon this dualism are outlined and criticized for reproducing the logic of representation they set out to destabilize. An alternative strategy is examined and (...) the argument is made that to understand embodied identity the question must not be what do bodies mean but what can they do. Here feminist approaches that rely upon a radically different ontological position in order to move beyond the mind/body split are utilized. These theoretical debates are made meaningful through the lens of self narratives produced by young women–a context which demands the development of strategies for theorizing lived bodies. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungBei der Bemühung um die Emanzipation von körperlich oder geistig beeinträchtigten Menschen kommt es häufig zu einer vehementen Kritik an einem "medizinischen Konzept" von Behinderung. Diesem wird aus Sicht einer "Bürgerrechtsperspektive" entgegengehalten, es gelte nicht, die Menschen zu korrigieren, sondern die Umwelt so zu verändern, dass Betroffene ungehindert am gesellschaftlichen Leben teilhaben können. Nach Auffassung der "Normalisierungskritik" sind es Stereotypen und Stigmata, die es Behinderten erschweren, ein selbstbestimmtes Leben zu führen. Beide Ansätze ignorieren oder bagatellisieren jedoch aus systematischen Gründen die (...) Art und Weise, in der Betroffene ihre physische oder psychische Schädigung subjektiv erfahren. Deshalb kann auch nicht auf die erheblichen Unterschiede reflektiert werden, die zwischen verschiedenen Formen der Behinderung bestehen. Es ist jedoch verfehlt, die Feststellung, dass Behinderte häufig in spezifischer Art bedürftig sind, mit paternalistischer Herablassung gleichzusetzen. Gerade für ein zuträgliches Verhältnis von Medizinern und Behinderten ist es wichtig, exakt jene Differenzen zu berücksichtigen, die zwischen akuten Krankheiten und verschiedenen Formen chronischer Beeinträchtigung bestehen. Nur so können Ärzte dazu veranlasst werden, von einer allzu "interventionsfreudigen" Haltung Abstand zu nehmen. (shrink)

This paper argues that luck egalitarianism, especially in the guise of equality of opportunity for welfare, is in tension with the ideal of fair equality of opportunity in three ways. First, equal opportunity for welfare is compatible with a caste system in employment that is inconsistent with open competition for positions. Second, luck egalitarianism does not support hiring on the basis of qualifications. Third, amending luck egalitarianism to repair this problem requires abandoning fair access to qualifications. Insofar as luck egalitarianism (...) cannot support fair equality of opportunity, it cannot do justice to the claims of the disabled. Indeed, in the absence of fair equality of opportunity, disabled people are likely to be marginalized. (shrink)

Disability activists influenced by queer theory and advocates of “human enhancement” have each disputed the idea that what is “normal” is normatively significant, which currently plays a key role in the regulation of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Previously, I have argued that the only way to avoid the implication that parents have strong reasons to select children of one sex (most plausibly, female) over the other is to affirm the moral significance of sexually dimorphic human biological norms. After outlining the (...) logic that generates this conclusion, I investigate the extent to which it might also facilitate an alternative, progressive, opening up of the notion of the normal and of the criteria against which we should evaluate the relative merits of different forms of embodiment. This paper therefore investigates the implications of ideas derived from queer theory for the future of PGD and of PGD for the future of queerness. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between disability and “queerness.” I argue that the hostility frequently expressed against both disabled and queer individuals is a function of fear of the undecidability of the body. I draw on feminist, queer, and disability theory to help us understand this phenomenon and suggest that these different kinds of theories have a complementary relationship. That is, feminist and queer theory help us see how this fear works, disability theory helps us see why it exists.

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

In 1998, the US Supreme Court first held that asymptomatic HIV infection constituted a disability when it ruled on the case of Bragdon v. Abbott. The use of yet another label to identify women living with HIV has been rarely questioned. While we do value the use of this label as an anti-discriminatory strategy, we believe that there is a need to examine how language and more specifically, the use of words such as disability, limitation, and impairment may create new (...) forms of identities for women living with HIV. Using this legal case as a starting point, the goal of this paper is to critically examine the 'fabrication' of asymptomatic HIV infection as a disability. Grounded in a feminist poststructuralist perspective, this paper exposes the relationship between language, social institutions, subjectivity, and power in the construction of difference. By doing so, it addresses the identification of women living with HIV/AIDS as disabled and the self-differentiation process that they must go through in order to live as normally as possible. (shrink)

In this paper, I look at several examples that demonstrate what I see as a troubling tendency in much of mainstream bioethics to discount the views of disabled people. Following feminist political theorists who argue in favour of a stance of humility and sensitive inclusion for people who have been marginalized, I recommend that bioethicists adopt a presumption in favour of believing rather than discounting the claims of disabled people. By taking their claims at face value and engaging with disabled (...) people in open dialogue over impairment and disadvantage, bioethicists may take to heart an important lesson about human fragility and resilience. (shrink)

: The author explores disability in K-12 schools where attitudes, beliefs, and practices shape the school culture and influence enduring perceptions about disability among school professionals, students, and their families. Drawing on recent conversations among moral philosophers who view disability as a central feature of human life that has yet to enrich understanding of ourselves and others, the author encourages the practice of reform grounded in a process that begins with a "suspicion of the self" and a willingness to risk (...) the personal. (shrink)

: Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between "sex" and "gender" and "impairment" and "disability" as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases (among others) that (...) form disabled women's oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives. (shrink)

: Disability theory privileges masculinist notions of presence, visibility, material "reality," and identity as "given." One effect of this has been the erasure of "sensibility," which, it is argued, inscribes, materializes, and performs the critique of binary thought. Therefore, sensibility must be re-articulated in order to escape the "necessary error" of identity implicit in accounts of cultural diversity, and to dialogue across difference in ways that dislocate disability from its position of dis-value in feminist thought.

In this paper, I explore the terrain of craft knowing as an area of expansion for feminist relational theory toward materials, instruments, and design work. I argue that an un-developed attent...

In a world where technologies often serve to amplify the persistent rendering of disability as an undesired deficit, what we need are empowering utopias concerning bodies, disabilities and assistive technologies. Specifically, I use Barad's article ‘Transmaterialities: Trans*/matter/realities and Queer Political Imaginings’ to illustrate how we might speculate on technologies that understand disabled bodies as affording potentials. The Transreal Tracing Device reimagines our bodies as surfaces of possibility, encouraging explorations into how disabled bodies do and could look like. The speculative device (...) offers an opportunity for positive renegotiations of disabled bodies as malleable and desirable – as ontologically indeterminate and transcendent. In traversing theoretical approaches and using them to design queer-feminist utopias centring disabled people, the concept challenges dominant notions of disabilities and assistive technologies alike. I close by discussing implications for ability-based, participatory but even more so self-determined design, and how to shift the focus of disabled technologies towards potential, from support to appreciation, from isolation to kinship and, ultimately, from shame to pride. (shrink)

This article experiments with multimedia storytelling to re-vision difference outside biomedical and humanistic frames by generating new understandings of living dis/artfully with illness. We present and analyze seven short videos created by women and trans people living with illness as part of an arts-based research project that aimed to speak back to hegemonic concepts of disability that create barriers to healthcare.1 We call for a welcoming in of disability studies’ disruptive and re-imaginative orientations to bodily difference to unsettle medicine’s humanistic (...) accounts. In turn, we advance medical post-humanistic approaches that call on disability studies to re-embody its theories and approaches. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the analysis of two documents (the Council of Europe's Bioethics Convention and the Additional Cloning Protocol) inasmuch as they refer to the relationship between human dignity and human genetic engineering. After presenting the stipulations of the abovementioned documents, I will review various proposed meanings of human dignity and will try to identify which of these seem to be at the core of their underlying assumptions. Is the concept of dignity proposed in the two documents coherent? (...) Is it morally legitimate? Is it, as some might assume, of Kantian origin? Does it have any philosophical roots? (shrink)

Using Judith Butler's notion that bodies are materialized via performances, “resig-nifying” disability involves a “democratizing contestation” of staircases because they exclude those in wheelchairs. Paleoanthropologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone shows how consistent bipedal locomotion, together with the knowledge that we will die, are ingredients of our pan-hominid speciation, not contingent constructions. As axiologically important as contestation is, it forecloses the possibility of achieving a mutuality with others that is wonderfully possible.

This article discusses the acquisition of a physical impairment/disability through voluntary body modification, or transability. From the perspectives of critical genealogy and feminist intersectional analysis, the article considers the ability and cis*/trans* axes in order to question the boundaries between trans and transabled experience and examines two assumptions impeding the conceptualization of their placement on the same continuum: 1) trans studies assumes an able-bodied trans identity and able-bodied trans subject of analysis; and 2) disability studies assumes a cis* disabled identity. (...) The perception of transsexuality and transability as mutually exclusive phenomena results from a nonintersectional analysis of transsexuality as an issue of sex/gender, but not of ability, and of transability as an issue of ability, but not of sex/gender. Difficulty recognizing continuities between these phenomena thus stems from an ableist interpretation of sex/gender and a cisnormative* interpretation of ability. This article aims to: 1) enrich intersectional analysis in trans and disability studies and transability scholarship; 2) complicate disability studies, in which disabilities are often presumed to be “involuntary,” and encourage the decentering of a cis* subject; 3) encourage trans studies to decenter an able-bodied subject; and 4) advocate for increased dialogue and the creation of alliances between trans and disability studies and movements. (shrink)

This article suggests increased attention to how medical discourses of gastrointestinal (GI) disorder and distress are fraught with social assumptions and consequences by examining nineteenth-century and contemporary medical texts focused on chronic constipation and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). I suggest that these medical discourses present what I call the “gastrointestinal woman,” who is characterized as having unjustified anxiety and is to blame for her condition. My approach to understanding, and ultimately revising, the representation of the gastrointestinal woman is shaped by (...) disability studies scholarship, which encourages intervention in problematic medical discourses and more active shaping of discourses of chronic pain and illness by those who have these conditions. (shrink)

: Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. I argue that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identification of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and "cure" of disabilities.

British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning, and sex. This article considers the future of gender-related equality protections in relation to ‘decertification’—an imagined reform that would detach sex and gender from legal personhood. One criticism of decertification is that de-formalising gender membership would undermine equality law protections. This article explores how gender-based equality law could operate in conditions of decertification, drawing on legal thoughtways (...) developed for two other protected characteristics in equality law—religion and belief, and disability—to explore the legal responses and imaginaries that these two grounds make available. Religious equality law focuses on beliefs, communities, and practices, deemed to be stable, multivarious, and subject to deep personal commitment. Disability equality law focuses on embodied disadvantage, approached as social, relational, and fluctuating. While these two equality frameworks have considerable limitations, they offer legal thoughtways for gender oriented to both its hierarchies and its expression, including as disavowal. (shrink)

I show how much psychiatric disability is informed by trauma, marginalization, sexist norms, social inequalities, concepts of irrationality and normalcy, oppositional mind-body dualism, and mainstream moral values. Drawing on feminist discussion of physical disability, I present a feminist theory of psychiatric disability that serves to liberate not only those who are psychiatrically disabled but also the mind and moral consciousness restricted in their ranges of rational possibilities.

This paper demonstrates how the problematic kinds of epistemic power that physicians have can diminish the epistemic privilege that pregnant women have over their bodies and can put them in a state of epistemic powerlessness. This result, I argue, constitutes an epistemic injustice for many pregnant women. A reconsideration of how we understand and care for pregnant women and of the physician–patient relationship can provide us with a valuable context and starting point for helping to alleviate the knowledge/power problems that (...) are symptomatic of the current system and structure of medicine. I suggest that we can begin to confront this kind of injustice if medicine adopts a more phenomenological understanding of bodies and if physicians and patients—in this case, pregnant women—become what I call “epistemic peers.”. (shrink)

The growing field of feminist disability studies explores how human bodies are interpreted through cultural values and expectations surrounding physical and mental ability. This paper contributes to and expands upon this conversation by examining how the ideal of “able-mindedness” functions to maintain racial divisions and inequalities through attributions of cognitive and psychiatric disability to bodies of color. Drawing upon contemporary examples from popular social media, public policy, and academic discourse, the author shows how racialized and nonnormatively gendered bodies are identified (...) and interpreted through norms of able-mindedness and used as markers against which the ideal of the able mind is upheld. This “discourse of pathology” operates insidiously within academic theorizing by remaining largely invisible because it tracks our deeply ingrained assumptions about the undesirability of cognitive and psychiatric disability. The author argues that because of the entanglement of race with disability, so long as the normalizing and privileging of the ideal of able-mindedness goes unchallenged and we maintain the myth that there exists a normal mental state, both racism and ableism remain very much alive, including within the academy. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, ob eine Behinderung immer als Form von Leid betrachtet werden muss. Mit Hilfe einer Unterscheidung zwischen absoluten und komparativen Einschränkungen des Wohls wird aufgezeigt, dass die bloße Tatsache einer vorliegenden medizinischen Schädigung nicht hinreicht, ein Urteil über das absolute Wohl einer Person zu treffen. Es werden verschiedene Argumente geprüft, warum Behinderung dennoch generell negativ bewertet werden sollte. Diese werden zurückgewiesen. Abschließend wird eine Überlegung eingeführt, wonach gleichwohl bestimmte Formen der Behinderung als objektive Beeinträchtigungen (...) des Wohls zu gelten haben, nämlich dann, wenn basale Fähigkeiten betroffen sind. (shrink)