Tremain rejects the search for an essence or definition of disability. Instead of asking what disability is, she suggests we examine how disability happens—through discourse, policy, and institutional practice. By refusing essentialism, she prevents disability from being reified as a fixed identity category and instead reveals it as dynamic, socially negotiated, and politically contested.

Rejection of Essentialism 

Tremain’s feminist relativist approach resists universalizing claims about disability or justice. She emphasizes that disability must always be understood in relation to gender, race, sexuality, and class, since these axes of identity co-produce forms of oppression. This intersectional stance allows for a richer, more situated understanding of how different people experience disablement and exclusion.

Arizona State University

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, 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

Learn Before

Related

Learn After