The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics
(FAB)
Newsletter
Volume 14, Issue 1
A review of Foucault and the Government of Disability, ed. Shelley Tremain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. ISBN cloth: 0-472-09876-4; paper: 0-472-06876-8.
In an interview first published in the French geography journal Hèrodote, Foucault welcomes geographers to make use of his work to investigate the "conflicts of power which traverse [the domain of geography], to confront them and construct the instruments that will enable [geographers] to fight on that terrain."1 Foucault wants his histories, theories, and methods to be "of service" in the analysis of other domains, and he tells the geographers and us: "If one or two of these 'gadgets' of approach or method that I've tried to employ with psychiatry, the penal system or natural history can be of service to you, then I shall be delighted. If you find the need to transform my tools or use others, then show me what they are, because it may be of benefit to me."2 In Foucault and the Government of Disability, editor Shelley Tremain and her contributors have made use of Foucault's "'gadgets' of approach or method," and have sometimes transformed them, through their analyses of disability and its multiple struggles over power and knowledge. Disability studies scholars, disability rights activists, and anyone interested in further examples of how Foucault's gadgets might be put to use in new domains will be interested in this volume.
Tremain's introduction suggests that the gadgets in which she is most interested are Foucault's concepts of "biopower" and "governmentality." For Foucault, biopower is exercised through the "numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations."3 The medical model of disability, which understands disability as a negative attribute that needs to be fixed through various normalization strategies, including surgery, rehabilitation, and education, demonstrates the exercise of biopower in both its disciplining mode and its regularizing mode, that is, the effort undertaken by the medical model to mold disabled bodies and populations to more closely resemble a particular norm.
Foucault's concept of "governmentality" emerges in his later work on the "technologies of the self" or the "arts of existence," and as Tremain notes, the term "government" refers "to any form of activity that aims to shape, guide, or affect the conduct of some person or persons"(8). Like biopower, government is comprised of a set of practices enacted at both the macro and micro levels: government refers to "not only state-generated prohibitions and punishments, and global networks of social, economic, and political stratification..., but also normalizing technologies that facilitate the systematic objectivization of subjects as deaf, criminal, mad, and so on, and techniques of self-improvement and self-transformation such as weight-loss programs and fitness regimes, assertiveness training, botox injections, breast implants, psychotherapy, and rehabilitation"(8). Subjects are not prior to these macro and micro practices of governmentality; rather, we become subjects through these very practices.
Many scholars and activists have challenged the medical model of disability with a social model that analyzes the multiple ways people with impairments are dis-abled by the attitudes of others, social conventions, and the physical and built environments in which we live. The social model insists that disability is not a stable category throughout history and across cultures; it emerges through particular discourses, practices, institutions, and environments. Tremain uses Foucault and his concept of governmentality to take this analysis one step further. She argues that, "the category of impairment emerged and, in many respects, persists in order to legitimize the governmental practices that generated it in the first place"(11). Impairment is not, then, an essential foundation on top of which disability is socially constructed; it too emerges and is enacted through particular practices of governmentality.
It is clear that Tremain recognizes the rich resource that Foucault's work provides for disability studies, and many of the essays in this volume demonstrate that disability, like sexuality, is "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power."4 The experiences and events of disability are multiple: the essays here cover the multiple experiences of disability, including autism, paraplegia, learning disabilities, mental retardation, and gender dimorphism within the multiple domains of disability, including a rehabilitation facility for people with spinal cord injuries, inclusive education discourses and institutions, the law, public facilities, and the internet. These multiple experiences and events of disability also provide a useful lens through which to uncover the richness of Foucault's thought. Many of the essays bring Foucault and disability together in ways that illuminate more clearly both disability and Foucault.
One essay that I found particularly effective in this regard is Licia Carlson's "Docile Bodies, Docile Minds: Foucauldian Reflections on Mental Retardation." In her essay, Carlson explores the "tremendously problematic and complex category that bears the name 'mental retardation'"(133) . To do this, she turns to Foucault, because "his work is historically, conceptually, and methodologically relevant to a critical analysis of the classification of mental retardation, and provides the occasion for a philosophical reorientation toward the category"(133). Through analyses like Carlson's, Foucault and the Government of Disability demonstrates the many ways Foucault's gadgets might help us to do disability otherwise, historically, conceptually, and methodologically.
Occasionally, however, Foucault and the Government of Disability disappoints, because it sometimes offers readings of Foucault that are clichéd or not very nuanced. It's not that I feel the need to defend Foucault against critique, but I do want to suggest that the regard will be greater for disability studies scholars and activists if we explore Foucault's histories, theories, and methodologies as presented in his own work, not in formulaic renderings of his work. Such renderings include my own personal favorite: Foucault's theory of power leaves no room for agency. For me, this is an odd reading of Foucault, who was from the very beginning engaged in looking for and at the conditions of possibility for agency. Indeed, Foucault's genealogical method is interested in bringing into being the "insurrection of subjugated knowledges," that are buried and disqualified knowledges of struggles.5 In some of the essays, Foucault drops out of the analysis. While I understand that the object of this edited volume is the experiences and events of disability, and not Foucault, the whole point of the book seems to be that Foucault offers us a framework through which to analyze this multiple object. So, what precisely is that framework, or theory/method, that Foucault provides? How does this supplement or challenge other frameworks? Getting at these questions necessarily requires close readings of Foucault. Still, I'm excited to use and transform this new gadget that Foucault and the Government of Disability helps to bring into being: Disability/Foucault.
Lisa Diedrich, Women's Studies Program, Stony Brook University
Footnotes
1 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, trans. by Colin Gordon, et. al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 65.
2 Ibid.
3 Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. (New York: vintage, 1978), 140.
4 Ibid., 103
5 I discuss Foucault's genealogical method and his concept of subjugated knowledges in more detail in Lisa Diedrich, "Introduction: Genealogies of Disability," Cultural Studies Vol. 19, No. 6 (November 2005), 649-666.