A Reply to Massimo Pigliucci’s ‘ The perils of “audism” and of speaking on behalf of a group’
by Emma Moormann, Leni Van Goidsenhoven, Jo Bervoets, Gert-Jan Vanaken, Kristien Hens (NeuroEpigenEthics research team)
Perhaps it is a bit much to say that we were ‘stunned’ by Massimo Pigliucci’s article on audism and speaking on behalf of a group. It is safe to say, however, that we were disappointed by its lack of nuance; a lack of nuance towards deafness as well as a lack of nuance towards Appiah’s text, ‘Go Ahead, Speak for Yourself’, which he uses to discuss the topic of ‘speaking on behalf of a group’.
We take issue with Pigliucci’s description of deafness as “a disability with respect to normal human standards of health”, because we do not subscribe to the underlying normative naturalism. But unfortunately, alternative understandings of disability, such as those developed in disability studies and deaf studies in the past few decades, are ignored by Pigliucci. “This isn’t an opinion, it’s a fact of nature”, he writes as if this settles any normative debate and as if experiences self-evidently do not refer to facts of nature.
It is a mistake to assume that facts of nature automatically lead to normative conclusions, or can help guide answering questions such as ‘Should this phenomenon be cured or prevented?’. Assuming that deafness is a disability to be prevented, seems epistemically arrogant. It doesn’t sufficiently take into account the knowledge and opinions of those with various experiences with the subject at hand. Pigliucci notes that Sarah Katz introduces her article with the phrase “As someone who was born deaf…” and interprets this as follows: “This is meant to imply that she has a special status that allows her to talk about deafness not just as someone who has experienced it, but on behalf of an entire class of people, the deaf community. (It also implies that people outside such community have less of, or no right at all to speak on the matter, since they haven’t experienced it.)” He argues that there is no place for identity-based ‘as a’-statements in a frank exchange of ideas — what then, we wonder, are all those qualitative research scholars working with the concept of ‘lived experiences’ doing? What is the value of opinions based on one’s own position?
Pigliucci backs up his claims by referring to a New York Times editorial by philosopher Anthony Appiah, but we believe his representation of this opinion piece is unfair. Appiah points out that the phrase ‘speaking as a’ is often used to affix an identity to an observation or argument. It thus functions mostly as an easy (and misleading) assertion of authority: “As a member of this or that social group, I have experiences that lend my remarks special weight. The experiences, being representative of that group, might even qualify me to represent that group.” This presumably also means we are not to take Pigliucci’s assertions made ‘as a biologist’ as definitive for the debate (nor even as a definitive statement speaking for all biologists!). If so, it may be worthwhile to have a closer look at the ‘as a …’ move with reference to scholarly research focused on giving a voice to those suffering discrimination in our society, in short: to those speaking without (societal) authority.
The value of mentioning your identity before contributing to a debate or conversation can’t really lie in its accuracy to point the hearer towards a set of specific experiences. The problem here is that people who only have one identity in common, for example being deaf, are very likely to have a great variety of experiences, because experiences depend on many other social factors. So far, we agree. But we think it’s important to emphasize that that doesn’t mean there can never be any value to statements referring to one’s identity — a nuance Appiah also seems to imply, but which Pigliucci does not pick up.
What motivations might speakers have to use phrases such as Katz’s “as a person who was born deaf…”? And which of those are legitimate ones? This depends to a great extent on the social position of the speaker.
Identity affixes can, for instance, be uttered in good faith by more privileged speakers. As Appiah also notes, stating that you are a white man may be a humble move. You don’t so much say what experiences you do have, but rather which ones are unavailable to you because of your privileged position. In this way the affix can serve as a qualification of the statement that follows. You want to share your opinion, but you also admit that your perspective is just one of many, and perhaps not the most well-informed one.
Furthermore, when a speaker from a minority group utters the phrase, this ‘speech act’ has indispensable epistemic and performative aspects to it. Stating your identity conveys some information to the hearer. It does not tell the hearer much about your specific experiences, but it does tell them something. If you tell them you are a black woman, for example, this might signal to the hearer that you are a member of a group that has been ignored in public discourse for a long time, and that’s still underrepresented. And although you don’t give information about your specific experiences, you do signal that you may have access to certain experiences that your hearer maybe does not have.
We are convinced that it is always valuable when someone from a minority group tries to speak up, and that it is too easy to dismiss such a voice and its content immediately because that person would use the phrase ‘as a’. We don’t want to accuse Pigliucci of doing this, but his kind of discourse and focus can easily be co-opted by those arguing against self-advocacy.
Of course, there are pitfalls in using the phrase ‘speaking as a’. Appiah is right to warn us of the dangers of homogenizing a group of people based on one identity mark. Deaf people, for example, are very likely to have a great variety of experiences, because experiences depend on many other (social and cultural) factors. “One is not just one thing”, Appiah quotes from Gayatri Spivak. Sarah Katz, for example, is not just someone who is born deaf, but also an award-winning poet and writer. In the footsteps of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Gayatri C. Spivak, and Barbara Johnson, Appiah, therefore, makes a case for an intersectional approach: “Being a black lesbian, for instance, isn’t a matter of simply combining African-American, female and homosexual ways of being in the world; identities interact in complex ways”. This concept of intersectionality is also very much at work within the discourse of ‘disability identity’, a discourse worth looking at in the context of this discussion, because it shows how important it is to work (strategically) with both ‘intersectionality/non-fixity’ and ‘disability identity’ at the same time.
Many disability scholars are doing great work in pointing out the problems of homogenizing disability experiences. They show the absurdity of assuming that all disabled people feel/think/want the same things. Their anti-essentialist thinking leads them to reject ideas of disability as a fixed identity or a purely individual affair solely linked to a certain diagnosis. Many scholars challenge the still widespread presumption that disability is self-evident or monolithic. It is not so easy to establish the borders of disability identity, they point out. And it can be dangerous, too: if we understand disability as a fixed identity based on natural facts, we risk depoliticizing it. Since disability scholars understand disability as a complex natural-cultural phenomenon, many of them instead call out for politicizing disability. This does not imply a complete rejection of medical interventions, it is rather asking to pluralize the ways we understand disability. Disability is then understood as something that is experienced in and through relationships, and not in isolation.
Besides expanding the leaky borders of disability identity, it may at the same time be important to also locate disability identity in time and space to mobilize its political potential in a particular context (Garland-Thomson 2014). The autistic activist Ari Ne’eman saw himself confronted with the criticism that he shouldn’t speak from an autistic identity position in his work, because he shouldn’t claim to speak for other autistic people — for instance, autistic people who are non-verbal and/or have an intellectual disability. He responded that “sometimes that perspective [against speaking ‘as a’] is utilized not to make an argument that there should be broader representation or to do more to reach individuals with more severe degrees of impairment in one area of life or another, it’s a way of attacking the idea of self-advocacy altogether or, even worse, the whole area of rights and dignity for people with low levels of ability.” (Ne’eman in Waltz 2013:143)
Speaking ‘as a disabled person’ (or like Katz ‘as a deaf person’) can function as a move to refer to the importance of minority voices (often ignored voices) in a debate. The phrase then functions as to address the ‘collective affinities’ (Scott 1989) in terms of disability, a collective that can encompass everyone from people with intellectual disabilities to those with chronic illness. People within these different disability categories don’t have the same experiences and/or opinions, but they can all be discussed and speak up in terms of disability politics, “not because of any essential similarities among them, but because all have been labeled as disabled or sick and have faced discrimination as a result.” (Kafer 2013, 11)
Perhaps it is more productive to think about the two above mentioned-approaches (moving beyond disability identity and locating/marking, at least provisionally, disability identity) as complementing rather than contradicting one another (Garland-Thomson 2014). Speaking as a disabled person, then, is not necessarily about portraying ‘the right experience that represents a whole group’ (as Pigliucci suggests) nor is it about exposing ‘the truth’ about a certain disability experience. It is rather about placing a long-ignored perspective on an equal level and about entering into a dialogue with prevailing views. It is about considering reports from ‘lived experience’ as empirical facts to be considered alongside experimental facts when doing science (as, we believe, Katz did with deaf experience). We, thus, follow disability activist and scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in proposing that both positions and practices (i.e. opening disability identity borders and locating disability identity, or speaking ‘as a’) can be strategically mobilized by people with disabilities and their allies in navigating the world, building communities, and creating new knowledge about disability.
So, in an ideal world, all speakers (both from minority and majority groups) would have nuanced knowledge about how to use the speech act ‘as a’. But of course, the intentions and position of the hearer are just as important for a critical discussion. We agree with Gayatri C. Spivak (who was also quoted by Appiah) that the question ‘Who should speak?’ is perhaps not as important as the question ‘Who will listen?’. If the hearer is unwilling or unable to interpret your ‘as a…’ in the ways described above, it isn’t of much use, as Katz might unfortunately have experienced when reading Pigliucci’s response. The speaker gives the hearer some information — how the hearer chooses to evaluate that information is up to her. Hopefully, though, she takes the social and historical context of her interlocutor into account when doing so.
We wrote this piece out of a conviction that the voices of minority groups, underrepresented groups and disadvantaged groups deserve an important place in our debates. And although we are very much aware of the many pitfalls with that ‘speaking as a’ phrase, we are also concerned that focusing on the use of specific phrases can divert the attention from the actual message someone wants to bring across. History is riddled with instances of privileged or authoritative people such as academics policing the language of specific groups, telling them not only how, but also where and when it is appropriate for them to speak up. So instead of telling underrepresented voices how they should express themselves, let’s truly focus on what they have to say. Only when we listen can the other be heard.