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Disability & Society

ISSN: 0968-7599 (Print) 1360-0508 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cdso20

Foucault and the government of disability


Tillie Curran
To cite this article: Tillie Curran (2016): Foucault and the government of disability, Disability &
Society, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2016.1141572
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1141572

Published online: 24 Feb 2016.

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Download by: [Universidad Nacional Colombia]

Date: 17 May 2016, At: 12:15

Disability & Society, 2016


http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1141572

BOOK REVIEW

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Foucault and the government of disability, by Shelley Tremain, Ann Arbor, University
of Michigan Press, 2015, enlarged and revised edition, 440 pp., $35.00 (paperback),
ISBN 978-0-47-203638-7
In this second edition of Foucault and the Government of Disability there are four new chapters in
Part V, Disability and Governmentality in the Present, but it is a book worth reading from the start
for the first time and for the second time. This review cannot cover Foucaults work but aims to
convey something of its value and impact that the authors offer in their highly engaging chapters.
Tremain introduces Foucaults work by explaining bio-power and the mode of governmentality
that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. Bio-power differs from sovereign
power and repression; the growth of social institutions, work, insurance systems, and so on, are
normalising strategies, individualised and taken up by individuals. Liberalism, she states, occurs
though auto-critique; its oppositional mode is its form of governmentality:
One of the most original features of Foucaults analysis is the idea that power functions best when it is
exercised through productive constraints, that is, when it enables subjects to act in order to constrain them
(Tremain 2001, 2002). (13; original emphasis)

Analysis entails examination of what is seen as natural, social, ethical and liberatory. Chapters
identify the ways that disabled people experience and resist the effects of bio-power and show
how normalising strategies link to wider discourses such as legal and welfare systems, the democratic nation-state, patriarchy and colonialism. We see how violence can occur, not as a result of
a top-down power, but as an effect of bio-power where disability and ability define citizenship,
human and unthought human.
In Part I, Epistemologies and Ontologies, analysis is not limited to ideas or language but the
accounts, practices, places, subjectivities produced and resisted. Sullivan examines the everyday
experience of people in a centre for paraplegics where individuals are subject to medical and
moral discourses towards the self-caring para. Yates discusses the experience of microphysics of
power in a care service where individuals know what you have to do, what you are not permitted
to do. Both chapters show how individuals recognise the effects such as pain and punishment
and become docile or resist. These ways of being and understandings of reality show us that
these are not examples of poor practice or types of individual but the effects of continuous
normalising strategies that contribute to wider societal discourses. Erevelles presents two court
scenarios over a century apart in which evidence of the free and autonomous subject is sought
to determine culpability. Similarly the category of autism is constantly contested and yet the
label flourishes as the basis for education programmes. Kumari Campbell explains that the free
and autonomous human, the legal citizen, is in a duality with the terror of the Other, unthought
human; disability is supplementary to ability.
In Histories, Part II, chapters highlight the ways these discourses operate as multiple, constantly changing practices that can appear linear and progressive. Carlson examines the turn from
institutionalising people deemed feebleminded in the nineteenth century to measurement of
IQ in the twentieth century, and suggests that when we see the incoherence and effects of such
classification, we can no longer speak for people. Berger reminds us that institutionalisation was
unheard of prior to the period of Enlightenment. In her history of nineteenth-century institutions

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Book Review

for deaf children in America, she discusses the links between prestigious buildings, science, God
and nation-state discourses and docile subjects deserving of charity or resisting and still contributing to that productive life. Snigurowicz examines how being exhibited or exhibiting was
banned in France in the 1800s as medical discourse prevailed over superstitious and religious
discourses around disability. Performers moved from stage to streets to cafes according to the
proliferation of permits and laws. Their art gave way to displays of accomplishment as a self
made man; an ideal core to meritocracy.
In Part III, Governmentality, analysis of the links between the individual and the totalising
practices shows individual freedom to be a social matter. Waldschmidt discusses new techniques
and rationalities of human genetics. Categories of risk and individuals in that group become the
risk to population security. The genetic counsellor does not advise the mother; as an autonomous
individual she will make a decision as if risk had been detected, rather than the probability calculation, as the only normal act. Simons and Masschelein discuss inclusion in education not in terms
of disabled childrens inclusion but the inclusion of all as stakeholders in a diverse democratic
society. Matching the unique individual with good instruction is the education enterprise with
skills in participation a key focus:
Social relations are now regarded as the outcome of enterprising activities of individuals. (216)

Individual and totalising practices are also found in Drinkwaters study of supported housing in
the Valuing People UK policy context. Staff valued behaviour, sharing their entries in the book
as a team to persuade behaviour compliance:
Perhaps it is in the very moment of valuing the person (the instance of greatest ethical commitment) that
support services exert their greatest subjectifying force, the end of which is the production of a citizen well
integrated into the given constitutional framework of rights, responsibilities, and equal opportunities. (234)

Description of the tactics of power and strategies of freedom is advanced to open up a critical
space.
From a different angle authors identify the multiple practices that do exclude disabled people.
Anderson examines the American sports stadium and despite requirements in equality legislation
and successful lawsuits, what is deemed normal and deviant is built into routes in, types of tickets, view from seats, booking notice required, and so on, separating those deemed normal and
deviant. Goggin and Newell analyse the proliferation of telecommunications and convergence
of media tracing its spread, its inaccessibility and its normative marketing purpose. Again despite
again legal requirements and successful lawsuits, successive laws have endorsed add on technology rather than demanded investment to determine accessibility individualising disability.
The practices of bio-power are made visible and strategies of resistance and transgression are
recognised as vital and dangerous. In Part IV, Ethics and Politics, Allan outlines an ethical project
as a conversational work in progress for inclusive education. Rather than non-disabled students
developing sympathy and social skills as voiced in her study, they would be using skills to question themselves as would staff. Disabled students would also undertake ethical work together
to develop their desires. Morgan tells us the true story of Gender DiMorph Utopia, a story about
extensive and multiple, intimate micro practices and totalising macro practices. Speaking out
about naturalizing theories that justify violent patriarchy (319) and publishing subjugated knowledges (that are also discursive but not of that episteme) is key, and also dangerous as hostility
and further disciplinary techniques can proliferate.
In Part V, Disability and Governmentality in the Present, Peers provides a genealogical
auto-ethnography of the supercrip narrative and its practices:
I learned, trained, and paid to move like a hyper-able inspirational athlete, and both this movement and
this training became components of my very embodiment and subjectivity. (338)

She rejects this inspirational docile subjectivity and takes up that of the revolting gimps, the
non hyper-able disabled relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy:

Disability & Society

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Practices of empowerment lead us to believe that the activist path to social change involves even greater
engagement with the disciplinary practices and the liberal empowering regimes that subject us. (345)

McGuire also alerts us to the dangerousness of advocacy drawing commonalities between the
war on autism and the war on terror in the United States. The militaristic turn enshrined in US
law on autism makes all aware of its terror, its prevalence and its spread. Despite immediate
opposition from the autistic community, awareness material is replaced by film of parents and
children endorsing the message. The war on terror also uses dividing statements of civilised life
and terror. The spread of both epidemics must be stopped at airports or prenatal screening for
normative life is to be secured.
In the final two chapters the authors explain why they refuse to engage with questions about
the value of life. When the status of human is questioned with regards to learning disability,
Taylor explains that violence goes unrecognised and grief is unexpected. She shifts attention
to the conditions in which such questions emerge and suggests suspension of universalising
judgement as an action to take in the midst of such debates. Kolarova analyses how choosing a
good death has emerged (over good health) and suggests we ask what is the impact of practices
such as assisted suicide for disabled people and examine the white supremacist rationality in the
outsourcing of care services in paradise in the Global South.
The book includes debates about Foucaults work around what some see as the absence of the
material and the body. In his chapter, Hughes is critical of what he sees as Foucaults non-material
view of the docile body. He favours phenomenology where the body is both subject and object
and argues that disability politics requires emancipatory conception of power. Other chapters
do not present this view, as already shown. Allen states that Foucaults work is all about the body,
power is deployed directly to the body, but he argues both discourses and the subject are social.
Goggin and Newell identify longstanding repressive forms of power and are critical of the view
that there is no central oppression.
For me, Foucault and the Government of Disability demanded that I question ethics, empowerment and inclusion. It also demands that I think about how I do that. I do have a question about
duality. While chapters highlight the incoherence of disability and ability, the book does seem
to leave staff, counsellors and coaches as non-disabled, but perhaps that is a different book.
Tillie Curran
Department of Social Work, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
Tillie.curran@uwe.ac.uk
2016 Tillie Curran
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1141572

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