Shelley Tremain, “Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability” (U Michigan Press, 2017)
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What motivates Shelley Tremain to write a feminist philosophy of disability?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps, so I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the Best Education Podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast online.
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Welcome to New Books and Critical Theory. On this episode, I'm talking to Shelley Tremayne, who's a philosopher, about Foucault and the feminist philosophy of disability. So welcome to the podcast.
Hello, Dave. Thanks for inviting me to be interviewed.
So this is an incredibly interesting book. It's both, you know, once kind of philosophically rich, really detailed. It also speaks to a range of, you know, really kind of important real world examples. And it deals with, I think, an area that is really kind of chronically important. under-researched or certainly under-philosophized, which is disability. And I guess the place to start is kind of your motivations behind writing the book and where the book kind of fits in with your thought more generally.
Well, the preface of the book begins with an anecdote of a conversation that I had with an accomplished philosopher during my first year in a temporary teaching position. And in the course of that conversation, she told me that if I didn't stop working on disability, I'd never get a job in philosophy. And that was quite upsetting because it, well, for one thing, it was, it sort of, it was articulation of this idea that, you know, the articulation of the idea that philosophy operates under the guise of neutrality, objectivity, and universality when really it promotes particular epistemologies, particular ontologies, particular perspectives. And so the anecdote really crystallizes what I'm doing in the book and how my career has been shaped
by this, by these ideas that these assumptions that philosophy does operate with neutrality and objectivity and universality. And also that, and, and so the, so the, and the anecdote really crystallized not only how my career has changed, you know, unfolded. But it also, when I thought back upon it, when I was thinking about this book and when I was thinking about, you know, what is going on here, it really, you know, because I had been working, my work had really developed or unfolded in really what seemed like two separate and distinct spheres. In the one sphere I was doing this work on um, you know, examining the, um, constitution of impairment in, in various discourses, bioethical discourses, feminist discourses, and other philosophical discourses.
And in the other sphere, I was, you know, um, doing this, I w I was doing this empirical work on, you know, why, you know, that was really sort of examining what the, what the obstacles were to, um, disabled, uh, philosophers, um, to getting adequate employment, you know, what was keeping us excluded from philosophy, from the professional philosophy and keeping our work marginalized in the discipline. So I was looking at, you know, here I was getting all these rejections from these bioethics journals and I mean, getting really hostile
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Chapters
2 chaptersSpeakers
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