Notes for a Feminist Abolitionist Genealogy of Bioethics

In this motivational article, I employ Michel Foucault’s ideas about genealogy, power, and the subject to provoke a new problematization of the subfield of bioethics. By drawing on the claims of feminist abolitionists, the challenges of Foucault’s work, and the lessons of historical epistemology, I reiterate and expand my earlier argument—an argument that merges Foucault studies, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of disability, as well as complicates them—that the field of bioethics is a strategy and mechanism of neoliberal eugenics that must be abolished. To support this expanded version of my argument for the abolition of bioethics, I introduce genealogical work that should compromise the notions of autonomy and self-determination, both of which notions are foundational to the field.