Tremain argues that mainstream bioethics and liberal humanist philosophy are grounded in ableist assumptions about autonomy, rationality, and the “good life.” In both frameworks, disability is treated as a personal or medical deficit rather than a product of social and political structures. By positioning disabled people as problems to be managed or fixed, these traditions obscure how institutions and cultural norms actually produce disablement. Tremain calls for a shift away from these individualizing views toward analyses that expose how ideas of health, normalcy, and moral worth are historically and socially constructed.

Critique of Bioethics & Liberal Humanism 

Tremain challenges the idea that disability is a universal or biological condition. Instead, she frames it as something historically produced—constructed differently across times, places, and political systems. What one society deems a disability may not be seen that way in another. This view dismantles the assumption that disability simply exists “out there” in bodies and insists that it must be analyzed in its historical and cultural context.

Arizona State University

Shelley Tremain argues that disability should not be understood as a fixed biological condition or a stable identity, but as a product of historically specific relations of power and knowledge. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of discourse and governmentality, she contends that disability is continually produced through social, political, and institutional practices that define what counts as normal, valuable, or functional. Tremain challenges liberal and bioethical approaches that assume disability merely needs to be accommodated, showing instead how such frameworks reinforce ableist norms by naturalizing them. Ultimately, she calls for a historicist and feminist genealogy of disability—one that exposes how philosophical and scientific traditions have governed disabled bodies and minds through the very act of defining them.

This Is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like

Tremain, S. (2015). This Is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like. Foucault Studies, (19), 7–42. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i19.4822

This Is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like Reference

Disability as Historically Contingent 

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion that power and knowledge are inseparable, Tremain explains that power doesn’t only repress—it creates knowledge systems that define what counts as truth. Institutions like medicine, psychology, and education generate categories of “normal” and “abnormal” that shape people’s lives. Through this lens, disability is not just identified by power—it is produced by it.

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