Philosophy of Disability, Conceptual Engineering, and the Nursing Home-Industrial-Complex in Canada

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intecritdivestud.4.1.0010
• Pages: 10-33
• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Date: 01 June 2021
• Author: Shelley Lynn Tremain
• Subject Matter: carceral,conceptual engineering,nursing home-industrial-complex,philosophy of disability,structural gaslighting

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 4.1 June 2021

Philosophy of Disability, Conceptual

Engineering, and the Nursing

Home-Industrial-Complex in Canada

Shelley Lynn Tremain

BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, Hamilton, Canada

Shelley Lynn Tremain has a Ph.D. in philosophy and initiated the field of philosophy

of disability. She has published widely on a range of topics including (feminist)

philosophy of disability; Foucault; biopolitics; genetic technologies; ableism; and

underrepresentation in philosophy. Tremain is author of Foucault and feminist

philosophy of disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017), the manuscript for

which won the 2016 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities,

and editor of two editions of Foucault and the government of disability

(University of Michigan Press 2005, 2015), an interdisciplinary collection of work

on disability and Foucault that was recently translated into Korean. In 2016,

Tremain was the recipient of the Tanis Doe Award for Canadian Disability Study

and Culture. Tremain has been at the forefront of efforts to increase the diversity

of philosophy, especially with respect to employment of disabled philosophers,

mentorship of disabled students, and attention to critical philosophical work on

disability. She coordinates BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, the philosophy blog

that focuses on issues of underrepresentation in philosophy and which is home

to Dialogues on Disability, the groundbreaking and critically acclaimed series of

interviews that she conducts with disabled philosophers.

ABSTRACT

In this article, I indicate how the naturalized and individualized conception of

disability that prevails in philosophy informs the indifference of philosophers to

the predictable COVID-19 tragedy that has unfolded in nursing homes, supported

living centers, psychiatric institutions, and other institutions in which elders and

younger disabled people are placed. I maintain that, insofar as feminist and other

discourses represent these institutions as sites of care and love, they enact struc-

tural gaslighting. I argue, therefore, that philosophers must engage in conceptual

engineering with respect to how disability and these institutions are understood

and represented. To substantiate my argument, I trace the sequence of catastrophic

events that have occurred in nursing homes in Canada and in the Canadian province

of Ontario in particular during the pandemic, tying these events to other past and

PhIloSoPhy of dISabIlIty, concePtual engIneerIng 11

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 4.1 June 2021

current eugenic practices produced in the Canadian context. The crux of the article

is that the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into vivid relief the carceral character of

nursing homes and other congregate settings in which elders and younger disabled

people are conned.

KEYWORDS

carceral, conceptual engineering, nursing home-industrial-complex, philosophy of

disability, structural gaslighting

Naturalization and Structural Gaslighting in Philosophy

This article is a novel contribution to philosophy of disability that critically examines the

catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic-related events that have unfolded in nursing homes,

long-term care residences, supported-living facilities, and other institutions in which elders

and younger disabled people are confined. It constitutes a novel contribution to philosophy

of disability insofar as it examines the COVID-19 catastrophe that has taken place in certain

residential institutions whose existence philosophers (including philosophers of disability)

have hitherto variously disregarded, condoned, and even promoted. Nevertheless, the argu-

ment of the article may in some ways seem familiar because it extends my genealogical

investigations of the ways in which disability is naturalized in philosophy, that is, expands

my philosophical analyses of how an individualized and medicalized conception of disabil-

ity is naturalized in (for example) bioethics, ethics and political philosophy, philosophy of

mind, and feminist philosophy (Tremain, 2017).

By the end of the article, I will have (1) indicated how this naturalized and individualized

conception of disability informs the notable indifference of philosophers to the predictable

COVID-19 tragedy that unfolded in these institutions; and (2) argued that philosophers must

engage in conceptual engineering with respect to how the ontological status of disability,

vulnerability to COVID-19, and the character of these institutions themselves are understood

and represented. In other words, in addition to its contribution to the burgeoning subfield of

philosophy of disability, the article thus comprises contributions to social metaphysics, social

epistemology, and critical genealogy, as well as articulating a metaphilosophical intervention

into discussion about underrepresentation in philosophy. Throughout the article, I will refer

to these institutional congregate settings in various ways, primarily using the unfashionable

term nursing h ome to refer in general to these institutional settings rather than the more

upbeat phrase long-term care facility. For I contend that the latter phrase is a misnomer, a

euphemism designed to conceal the archaic and barbaric character of these institutions. My

recuperation of the former term – that is, nursing home – is thus intended to make explicit

that these institutions are outdated and should be rendered obsolete. As I will show, these

places are neither “homes” nor sites of “care” (Tremain, 2020b).

Disability and its naturalized foundation, impairment, are typically represented in phil-

osophical and popular discourses as naturally disadvantageous human characteristics,

attributes, or properties that certain people embody or possess, that is, generally represented

as self-evident, natural, and politically neutral phenomena that science and medicine can