Tremain calls for a genealogical method of studying disability: one that traces the historical conditions and discursive shifts that produced it as a category. Genealogy, for Tremain, is a tool of resistance—it destabilizes taken-for-granted truths and exposes how they serve existing power structures. Through this approach, disability studies can uncover new ways of thinking about identity, justice, and embodiment that are not bound by ableist norms.

Toward a Genealogy of Disability 

Tremain critiques philosophy itself as a discipline that reproduces ableist norms. Canonical philosophy often assumes a rational, autonomous, able-bodied subject as the default human being. By excluding disabled thinkers—both literally through inaccessibility and figuratively through epistemic exclusion—philosophy perpetuates a hierarchy of whose minds and bodies are considered capable of reason.

Arizona State University

Tremain introduces the concept of the apparatus of disability, borrowing from Foucault’s idea of an apparatus (or dispositif). This refers to the interconnected systems—laws, medical classifications, cultural narratives—that bring disability into being and sustain it. Understanding disability as an apparatus shifts the focus from individual impairment to the power structures that make certain bodies “disabled” within particular social orders.

The Apparatus of Disability 

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

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