The Minority Body: a Theory of Disability'

H-Disability Yong on Barnes, 'The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability'

Review published on Sunday, June 24, 2018

Elizabeth Barnes. The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability. Studies in Feminist Philosophy Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xii + 200 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-873258-7.

Reviewed by Amos Yong (Fuller Seminary) Published on H-Disability (June, 2018) Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=52256

Although there have been a growing number of philosophical approaches to disability in the last two decades, especially in interdisciplinary areas like philosophy of law, education, and public policy, engagements with the more conventional areas of philosophy have by and large been limited to the domain of ethics. Not surprisingly, a number of feminist voices also have emerged, bringing with them reconsiderations of bioethics or new thinking in the ethics of care into the philosophy and disability nexus. Elizabeth Barnes is one of these new feminist philosophers, and she is moving the discussion forward in many of these spheres. But the one big difference is that her book is also an intervention directly into what may be considered the mainstream of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, which is the arena of analytic philosophy.

We should pause to note why The Minority Body is a groundbreaking interpolation in this central vein of the contemporary philosophical enterprise. Analytic philosophers have, over the course of the twentieth century, practically copyrighted work in the historically big ideas of the discipline, such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology, but by so doing, these segments of the philosophical landscape have come to be dominated by the kind of abstract argumentation that has not been as welcoming of the subjectivities of the human condition. In fact, Barnes herself has been trained as a metaphysician, teaches courses on that topic at the University of Virginia (where she is a member of the Corcoran Department of Philosophy), and has established her own bona fides in the discipline by publishing therein (including an edited volume,Current Controversies in Metaphysics (2016), in Routledge’s Current Controversies in Philosophy series). Precisely against this backdrop, she confesses that “I used to think I couldn’t philosophize about disability precisely because the topic is so personal” (p. ix). Yet she has been emboldened by the realization that even abstract arguments are generated by persons in history with motivations, and hence that there is a personal dimension to philosophizing in any case, no matter if submerged in much of what has been considered as “real” philosophical writing. In this book, then, Barnes thus presses through the specificities of her experience of disability—and that of others—yet via expert deployment of her analytic repertoire.

So, what exactly is argued here? The theory of disability proposed is to comprehend disability, and disabled physical bodies (Barnes’s focus, being reluctant to extend her analyses to mental and cognitive impairments), not as bad or defective, but as not within the norm or, positively, as being part of a minority group or form of embodiment. The six chapters to the book build the case as follows: that disability is socially constructed (on the one hand) and yet based on objective bodily forms and experiences (on the other hand)—hence her modified social constructionism; that disability is a form of mere-bodily-difference, rather than one of bad-bodily-difference; that such mere-bodily-

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Yong on Barnes, 'The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability'. H-Disability. 06-24-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/4189/reviews/1965401/yong-barnes-minority-body-theory-disability Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Disability differences are value-neutral in that they could be bad in some or even many respects, but they could also be good in other or in overall respects, and how such is construed in either direction depends on many other contingencies and factors external to actual bodily states and dynamics; that the e/valuation of what is otherwise neutral ought to attend to, if not prioritize, the first-person accounts of people with such (mere)-bodily-differences; that such appraisal of disability as being value-neutral warrants neither the causing of disability (since it is arguably bad for us to do anything to others that is unwanted or since such contingent factors as transition from a non-disabled to a disabled state will be costly in the bad sense), nor the prevention of people with disabilities from seeking cures (since the value-neutral view recognizes that under some conditions, disability is experienced as bad and people in those circumstances would be justified in seeking cures); and, finally, to come full circle, that the mere-difference view recognizes and can account for the fact that some people have come to a positive view of their overall well-being or quality of life with disabilities to the point that they have disability pride and are motivated to contribute to the ongoing forging of a more inclusive and just social order that is welcoming of people across the spectrum of abilities. In the end, then, Barnes’s analysis is, as she commends, an exercise in social metaphysics or social philosophy with the goal of assessing and redirecting our common sense—at least for the majority who do not have disabilities—understanding in ways that can embrace those with disabilities as a minority, rather than as a substandard or damaged group.

As I am a scholar of religion and theologian rather than a philosopher (much less one in the analytic mold), I see two major accomplishments in this book, even if both might draw some resistance from specific quarters. First, Barnes has tackled, head on, the perennial challenge to any scholarly engagement with disability—the question of definition—but her doing so at a meta-level will surely dissatisfy some and rankle others. The reason is that this book argues against what, for non-disabled people—those who are norm-al or the majority—is intuitive and common sense: that disability is bad. The meta-claim is that disability, comprehensible at the level of objective bodily states and realities attested to by people joined together in the disability rights movement, does not have to, and should not by default, be presumed to be understood negatively. Those who are committed to the social model of disability will certainly quibble with Barnes’s insistence that bodily differences are measurable as beyond the norm, even as those whose foci are on intellectual or mental disabilities will have to work on their own to see if and how the argument here is extendable. But the meta-level of argument means that Barnes is less interested in these issues than in changing broader (negative) perceptions of, and assumptions about, disability. Given my own prior attempts as a theologian to disentangle disability from sin, blemish, and Satan—no doubt traversing a very divergent terrain from the argument in The Minority Body that draws on sexuality and gender analogies (expected from a feminist philosopher, surely), but one that is still parallel to Barnes in terms of the goals aspired to—I began as sympathetic with the efforts here and along the way and found compelling what I saw as a complementary achievement. If analytic philosophers agree, for instance, that homosexuality, or that males who cannot conceive and bear children, are cases of mere-difference rather than bad- difference—two of the many similar analytical and supportive arguments that appear in the book—then it is difficult to avoid Barnes’s conclusions: that disability is not merely, or is irreducible to, a lack of capacity (it is that) since all human bodies are finite and hence constrained more or less in any respect; but beyond that, under some conditions, including those conditions related to the civil rights movement that have generated our contemporary non-essentialistic but socially negotiated understandings of disability, people with disabilities can and do lead fulfilling lives and hence those

The second attainment is related to the first: that Barnes, the metaphysician and analytic philosopher, succeeds in leveling the axiological playing field so that disability is at least value- neutral (if not also discernible as contributing overall value toward human well-being) or not to be presumably disvalued as tragic or otherwise of only negative significance for the human condition. That is the point of being a minority: not that one is negatively evaluated (devalued), but that one only exists outside the majority norm. Analogously, the argument would be that any minority human experience ought to be received on its own terms, potentially with negative repercussions, but also perhaps with some positive ramifications. Barnes makes both sides of this argument, urging on the one hand that disability is mere-difference, neutral with regard to human well-being overall, but also that the minority character of this social identity has been funded by the group championing its subgroup status, whether in pursuit of civil rights (the fight to correct systems and structures that the majority have enacted, which generate much, even if not most, of what is bad about living with a minority body) or in expressions of disability pride (the positive side of the disability experience). Not being an analytic philosopher, I do wonder how much of the facts-values distinction developed earlier in the history of (modern) philosophy persists into the present so that some might feel uneasy that the metaphysical or ontological is confused—here in Barnes and also in the work of feminist philosophy in general, perhaps—with the ethical ought. In other words, might analyticians be comfortable that Barnes’s argument in the end emerges from out of the social solidarity that those with minority bodies experience even as she reconstructs the mere-difference and value-neutral characterizations in the service of further empowering the work of disability rights and justice? In a post-positivistic world, it makes sense that, if part of the task is to undermine the negativity that persists in “normal” common sense perspectives (in this case: of disability), then such a fundamentally axiological argument is not only personal vis-à-vis the subjective agency of this philosopher (and author) but also normative for how human socialities (including groups of philosophers) ought to both understand themselves as such (ontologically) and thus be intertwined with their being in solidarity with (now ethically) others—including other groups—for the benefit of all. Put otherwise, disability pride is not just a matter of minority celebration but majority appreciation at least (surely not pity!). What the implications are here for analytic philosophers (perhaps the original audience of this book), for disability studies scholars, for people with disabilities, for those who self-identify as part of any minority group, and for any who consider themselves as “normal” in whatever sense, remain open, at least for those who encounter and engage with The Minority Body.

Citation: Amos Yong. Review of Barnes, Elizabeth, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability. H- Disability, H-Net Reviews. June, 2018. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52256

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.