“We are everywhere these days, wheeling and loping down the street, tapping our canes, sucking on our breathing tubes, following our guide dogs, puffing and sipping on the mouth sticks that propel our motorized chairs. We may drool, hear voices, speak in staccato syllables, wear catheters to collect our urine, or live with a compromised immune system. We are all bound together, not by this list of our collective symptoms but by the social and political circumstances that have forged us as a group”.

“Having appointed myself as navigator, I should comment on my identity as a disabled woman. The particulars of my condition are not of concern”.

— Simi Linton, Claiming Disability 4, 5

The task taken on by Shelley Tremain, editor of Foucault and the Government of Disability, is daunting: to provide a collection which explores the intersections of Foucauldian and disability theory, while advancing each through the investigation of the challenges they pose to one another. Despite the coincidence of time frames — the sociopolitical model of disability emerged in the 1970s, the same period during which Foucault published The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 — there has not yet been an in-depth examination of the ways these closely entangled approaches intertwine. Foucault and the Government of Disability comprises chapters by an international group of authors, some specializing in Foucault, some in disability studies (DS), and an imagined readership that may specialize in Foucault, DS, both, or neither.

Tremain’s approach is thoughtfully pragmatic. As her introduction specifies, the book’s sections are not merely thematic, but conversant; in other words, each section’s chapters have been arranged to highlight areas of agreement and difference, while across the book as a whole, chapters are arranged in such a way that readers unfamiliar with either Foucault or DS theory can derive important grounding concepts from early chapters. Foucault and the Government of Disability theorizes access in a variety of ways, linguistically and architecturally (though not physically; the University of Michigan Press has yet to make the collection available in non-print formats). Inevitably, this approach includes successes and failures — ones which would, no doubt, be read differently by scholars situated differently than I, or perhaps even by other white, queer, disabled professors teaching at historically black colleges and specializing in rhetoric and DS.¹ But in my reading, one of the book’s most powerful successes is its delicate balancing of the many audiences it imagines, and one of its deepest failures the authors’ in/abilities to imagine themselves.

The “References” pages of these articles don’t read like a typical U.S.-published DS anthology: they’re light on Erving Goffman (Stigma), Simi Linton (Claiming Disability), and other important DS works. Such choices can be read as omissions, but also as indicators of the powerful need for this book. For example, Anne Waldschmidt’s chapter “Who Is Normal? Who Is Deviant? ‘Normality’ and ‘Risk’ in Genetic Diagnostics and Counseling” is at first startling for its failure to consider Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s theory of the “normate” (Extraordinary Bodies) or Lennard Davis’s modern history of normal (Enforcing Normalcy), but its complex analysis of normality, normativity, and “flexible normalism” offers insights that push beyond present work on normality, and introduces readings from sources rarely cited in DS publications in the U.S.

Some articles have an obvious Foucauldian or DS bent. More often the theories are impressively integrated, achieving, as Tremain promises, conversations within and across sections. An example of this “Foucault on the Phone: Disability and the Mobility of Government” by Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell, whose chapter provides a persuasive analysis of the ways that telecommunications produce ability and disability. While noting that telecommunications technologies are often recognized for their assistive and accessible qualities, Goggin and Newall point out that such technologies also tend to pull people with disabilities into positions as “active consumer-citizens” (271), and hence to become ‘a technology of normalization’ (269).This point alone would provide sufficient...