This edition of the Early Career Research Spotlight focuses on the work of Josh Dohmen. He is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy at Mississippi University for Women, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Memphis in 2015. His research uses the philosophical tools provided by Julia Kristeva and feminist philosophers, especially feminist epistemologists, to understand disability oppression. Recently, he published “‘A Little of Her Language: Epistemic Injustice and Mental Disability” in Res Philosophica.
You say in one of your papers that disability should be seen as abject, and cite the work of Kristeva, Ahmed, and Chanter. Can you explain what you mean, and how you draw on the work of these thinkers?
Abjection, for Julia Kristeva, is a developmental stage in which emerging subjects form a first and fragile boundary between themselves and others. They do so through rejecting that with which they do not identify. Kristeva uses vomiting as an illustration, here. In vomiting, a child expels that which is painful or uncomfortable. Sara Ahmed and Tina Chanter have helpfully developed this idea to note the ways in which abjection is always social, and as such it reflects a subject’s social conditions. So as I form an identity by expelling some qualities (and forming identifications with others), that identity is likely to include racial, gendered, classed, and disabled aspects (among others) based on those with whom I most closely interact, those who care for me, those who are presented as desirable, and so on. This is important because insofar as vulnerability is shunned and independence is valorized in our culture or immediate social environment, we are likely to reject our own vulnerabilities and those who are identified as vulnerable while identifying with those who are considered independent and those qualities deemed to contribute to independence. This means that in such a culture, we are likely to reject and avoid others understood to be disabled and form identities that exclude disability.
Importantly, though, abjection is never left behind. When we encounter that which we have excluded from our identity we can be brought back, so to speak. We experience abjection. An example Kristeva gives is smelling or seeing spoiled milk. When I do, my boundaries may dissolve; I may feel the urge to vomit; I may experience the milk as if it were already in my stomach. At the social level, this can be observed in forms of social segregation in which some social groups avoid confrontations with those they have disidentified with. Because vulnerability is such a widely devalued feature of persons, social segregation is especially extreme with those who are understood to be particularly vulnerable, like the ill, elderly, and disabled. Kristeva suggests that at the individual level, this is the result of abjection. When I confront another person who is disabled relative to me, I may experience the dissolution of my boundaries. My own vulnerabilities are called forth despite my attempts to disavow them. I may be reminded, for example, of how I too become winded when I climb stairs, how I am one accident away from losing a valued cognitive ability, how my own anger is less under my rational control than I like to believe, or how cancer, for me, would mean reliance on a social welfare system that I have taken pride in avoiding. This identity that I’ve created and sustained by disavowing certain characteristics must now reckon with what has been disavowed.
One common response to such an experience is to double down, to forcefully reject the disavowed vulnerability, to strenuously (even if unconsciously) avoid interactions with those understood to be vulnerable because such interactions painfully call one’s identity into question. But one could respond differently by taking such interactions as opportunities to form new identifications. I may reflect upon my own vulnerabilities, recognizing them as parts of me that I could acknowledge and even accept rather than disavowing. And if I can succeed, even partially, in such an attempt, I may come to interact with others who are disabled relative to me in more inclusive ways. Ahmed also reminds us that abjection functions at a broader social level. An interaction between those considered non-disabled and those considered disabled, movement between those that typically move away from one another, may alter the social identities of disabled and abled, or dissolve such a boundary altogether.
How do systemic or institutional factors (e.g. laws regarding disability, depictions of the disabled on television) augment the experiences of abjection or identity dissolution you discuss?
This is an important thing to stay aware of since focusing on individual psyches can create the impression that experiencing disability as abject is either a personal, psychological affair or perhaps even natural and inevitable. On my reading, abjection is always social. Indeed, for Kristeva abjection is the process through which one begins to be differentiated from others. But as Chanter points out, that which is expelled in abjection (and that with which we come to identify) is shaped by one’s social surroundings. So segregation along lines of various social differences (such as race, class, sexuality, or disability) will shape what comes to be experienced as abject and that with which one identifies. Ahmed argues that it is not just the individual psyche that is shaped in this way, but the “skin” of the community itself. In other words, the boundaries of a community are maintained by who moves toward whom, and who avoids or moves away from whom. I suggest a way of understanding these processes as mutually reinforcing in the case of disability. So when disabled people are depicted in disparaging ways in the media, this reinforces the tendency to disidentify with disability and encourages one to disavow one’s vulnerabilities. At the same time, these portrayals are permitted and encouraged by the existing psychic investments of viewers and listeners, for whom it is important to disidentify with disabled persons and reinforce their sense of invulnerability. I think we also see this in adult day care, sheltered work spaces, special education classrooms, and other isolated institutional spaces that function to keep certain disabled persons away from others. This separation reinforces the tendency to disidentify with certain disabilities or vulnerabilities since those outside of the institutions are not confronted with disabled people in a way that would allow them to work through their own disavowal of vulnerability. At the same time, this disavowal reinforces the tendency to separate and isolate those who may remind others of their own vulnerabilities.
This is why I believe it is important to simultaneously address abjection at the personal and the social levels. At the personal level, this would mean being open to experiences of abjection that allow people to work-through their disavowals and form new identifications. At the social level, this would involve those considered non-disabled moving toward those who are considered disabled (and vice versa) to reconstruct the skin of the community, to blur social boundaries that reinforce the segregation of disabled from non-disabled persons.
In another paper, you talk about the epistemic injustice of only being known as an object, never as a subject, and apply this to mental disabilities. How does mental disability fit into this notion of epistemic injustice? What suggestions do you have for change?
Mental disability fits into the notion of epistemic injustice in a complicated way. This is because mental disabilities may affect one’s epistemic competence in way that the other social identities largely discussed in epistemic injustice literature (like gender, race, or physical disability) do not. So in the article you’re referring to, I first aim to demonstrate some common sources of epistemic injustice that are fairly straightforward. Those who use technological aides, for example, are often assumed to lack general epistemic capabilities even if the aide helps with physical or communication (and not cognitive) tasks. Generalizations about certain conditions can also lead to epistemic injustices. Licia Carlson notes that in philosophical literature about those who are diagnosed as intellectually disabled, the examples given are often of the most extreme cases of dependence, when in fact there are many intellectually disabled people with a wide range of cognitive abilities who function with varying degrees of independence. So if one discusses whether the lives of pigs are worth any less than the lives of intellectually disabled people in a food ethics or bioethics course, this variety has been collapsed, subsuming all those who are intellectually disabled under a category like, “those whose cognitive abilities are equal to or less than those of pigs.” In other words, intellectually disabled people have been discredited in an unjust way.
Keeping all of these cases and qualifications in mind, I do think it’s important to be attentive to epistemic injustices even in cases where a person has a severe mental disability. So, I make four recommendations for how to respond in such cases. First, whatever a person is able to communicate should be taken seriously. This may be as simple as expressions of pain or pleasure, joy or sadness. Second, we should listen to those who are close to or have similar experiences to those with severe mental disabilities. A caregiver who is with a disabled person for hours every day is likely to have insights into the person’s feelings, preferences, and so on, in a way that a medical professional who sees the person for short, occasional appointments is less likely to have. Third, we should foster the capabilities of mentally disabled people to the greatest extent possible. Indeed, one of the greatest dangers of epistemic injustices suffered by mentally disabled persons is that they can create self-fulfilling prophecies. If I assume people with trisomy 21 lack the intellectual abilities to benefit from mainstream schooling, I’m more likely to hold my child out of school if she has trisomy 21, making it more likely that my child will not develop capabilities that she may have if she were given the right opportunities. Fourth and finally, I recommend what I call “intimate hermeneutical justice,” an attentiveness to an individual’s interpretation of her experiences. A beautiful illustration of this is offered by Eva Kittay. Peggy cared for Eva’s daughter Sesha, and one day she was struggling to get Sesha to accomplish certain tasks. She noticed, however, that Sesha’s eyes seemed to be following a path, and Peggy realized that she was watching a leaf fall. Peggy’s willingness to pay attention to Sesha in this way reveals that she is attentive to and respectful of those things that she finds meaningful.
I also think it’s important to note that those concerned with being epistemically just toward mentally disabled persons should keep in mind broader forms of political justice. It’s easy to ignore or underestimate the ways in which social resources are set up to reward independence and invulnerability. To ask working-class parents to foster their intellectually disabled child’s epistemic capabilities is a much more strenuous demand than to ask the same of wealthy parents. It is important to fight for better social resources for those with disabilities and for their caregivers.
In response to answers 1 and 2, how do you account for the significant amount of diversity within the category of disability into your analyses?
I believe that there is value in considering disability in general, or in the case of my work on epistemic injustice, mental disability in general. First, discussing disability broadly in this way can reveal the common contours of interactions between disabled and non-disabled people. For example, the tendency to disidentify with disabled people reinforces beliefs which are used to justify restricting resources for people with a wide variety of disabilities. By refusing to reckon with my own vulnerabilities, for instance, I enable beliefs like, “that would never happen to me,” or “they brought their disabilities on themselves,” beliefs which support cutting back on funding and programs aimed at enabling disabled people, whether they have physical, sensory, or mental disabilities. I may judge others who appear overweight and who have a mobility impairment, saying things like, “If they lost weight, they’d be able to get around better.” In such cases, I don’t even consider that the person may have gained weight as a result of the impairment and not the other way around, and this enables the avoidance of difficult considerations like, “If I developed an impairment what effect would this have on my weight?” and more fundamentally, “I may develop a mobility impairment.” In a similar way, I may disavow the possibility that I too may develop mental disabilities by suggesting everything would be just fine if the mentally disabled person had simply been safer (and thus avoided a traumatic brain injury) or had just stayed on her medication (and thus avoided the consequences of being unmedicated). Second, I believe that thinking about disability in such a broad way can help us understand just how narrow and limiting our concept of “normal,” “non-disabled,” or “abled” is. Rosemarie Garland Thomson makes this point through the figure of the normate, that narrow range of abilities and attributes against which all others are evaluated as abnormal.
At the same time, such an analysis clearly cannot capture the complexity and specificity of particular persons’ experiences, or particular interactions. For example, scholars who are uncomfortable with intellectual disabilities because they value the life of the mind may not experience the same anxiety in interactions with physically disabled people. To consider another example, I’ve just completed a paper in which I discuss interactions with those believed to be delusional because delusions clearly raise questions about epistemic credibility in a way that not all mental disabilities do. It’s fairly straightforward to say that I should not take a person’s technological or personal aide as evidence of general epistemic incapacity. It’s a different matter to determine how my perception of a person as delusional should affect my assessments of her credibility. As a final example, it’s common for people with speech disabilities to be unjustly discredited since clear, “proper” speech is often taken as a sign of intelligence. On the other hand, a common cultural trope is the white, male, wheelchair user who is in fact brilliant, like Stephen Hawking or Professor X.
What drew you to disability studies as a topic for research?
Between my undergraduate studies and graduate school, I worked for a non-profit organization to assist adults with disabilities in finding employment. While that organization strove to uphold ideals of community interaction and independence for disabled people, I was troubled by many things. For example, in meetings with clients and their multiple service providers, there was an assumption that the client wanted to work as a form of community engagement. Even in cases where this question was raised, it was often posed as “You want to find a job, don’t you?” It seemed to me that in many cases clients’ epistemic authority and autonomy were undermined in such interactions. I was also struck by how business owners talked as if they were doing a favor to disabled employees by hiring them, when in fact they were getting competent workers with tax incentives, external supervision provided by our agency, and sometimes the ability to pay the worker less than minimum wage. As a final example, I was surprised at how much oversight legal guardians had over disabled adults, including a say in their sexual choices. This experience raised all sorts of questions for me, and I am looking to philosophy to help me understand and address the experiences of disabled persons.
What suggestions do you have for teaching disability studies in the classroom?
I’m constantly seeking better ways to teach disability studies myself, so I’m confident there are others who would more helpfully answer this question. Here are a couple things that I try to keep in mind when incorporating disability as a topic in my classes.
First, make it personal. Our experiences with disability are not just intellectual. They are emotional; they involve our identifications; they involve our political commitments. Having students reflect upon their emotional responses, using empathy exercises, welcoming personal experiences of disability or of disabled family members or friends can help discussions of disability be more than an intellectual exercise.
Second, seek out testimonies by individuals with disabilities. There are great compilations of essays by, for example, autistic, intellectually disabled, physically disabled, and mentally ill persons. Online videos or documentaries may be a helpful resource in this way as well.
Third, think intersectionally. Disabilities are not experienced in the same ways by everyone. Think about, and ask students to think about, how class, gender, sexuality, race, religious identity, and so on, influence one’s understanding of and experience of disability.
As I reread this list, I’ve realized I would make the same recommendations about most topics in philosophy courses. Sorry I don’t have more topic-specific advice!
You can ask Josh questions about his work in the comments section below.
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