Uncovering Ableism in Martha Fineman’s Ontological Vulnerability and Resilience Theory: A Critical Disability Theory Perspective
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper begins with the premise that language contributes to the concept of disability and then engages a Critical Disability Theory (CDT) approach to scrutinize the rhetoric and language used by Martha Fineman in her work on ontological vulnerability and resilience. This paper will demonstrate that because the language used in Fineman’s ontological vulnerability theory and resilience model are highly susceptible to an ableist interpretation, her work inadvertently reinforces the notion that non-disabled people are fully human, while those with disabilities are insufficiently human. As a result, her scholarship may contribute to the prolonged oppression and othering of people with disabilities. The first part of the paper explains what CDT is, focusing largely on how ableism produces and sustains the co-constitutional concepts of disability and ability, and how CDT can be used as an approach for probing Fineman’s scholarship. The second part introduces ontological vulnerability and resilience theories, with a particular focus on Fineman’s work. The third part applies a CDT approach to uncover how Fineman’s language and rhetoric concerning vulnerability and resilience contribute to the construction of disability and ability. Finally, I highlight potential ways CDT scholars may reframe ontological vulnerability theory to overcome this issue. Keywords: Critical Disability Theory (CDT), vulnerability theory, Resilience Theory, Critical Feminist Theory, Martha Fineman
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.120 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it