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Topic

Narrated Subjects: Parent Advocacy, Biopower, and the Politics of FASD in Canada

Department of Political Science

Date & location

• Monday, June 16, 2025

• 9:00 A.M.

• Clearihue Building

• Room B021

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Lois Harder, Department of Political Science, ßÉßɱ¬ÁÏ (Supervisor)

• Dr. Justin Leifso, Department of Political Science, UVic (Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Michael Prince, Health Studies in Policy and Practice, ßÉßɱ¬ÁÏ 

Chair of Oral Examination 

• Dr. Julie Zhou, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, UVic

Abstract

This thesis seeks to understand why a self-advocacy movement comparable to those in other neurodivergent communities has not emerged among people with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) in Canada. Through critical discourse analysis of adoptive parent advocacy narratives, primarily Bonnie Buxton’s influential text Damaged Angels (2004), it investigates how parent advocacy shapes public understandings of FASD and contributes to constraints upon political possibilities for people with FASD. 

Drawing on Foucauldian concepts of biopower, governmentality, and subject formation, and on Jasbir Puar’s conceptualization of assemblage, I develop a novel theorization of FASD as a political assemblage – a construction of co-constitutive meanings – that operates at the intersection of settler colonial governance and disability regulation in Canada. This assemblage produces a racialized, disabled subject positioned as both threatening to the social body and fundamentally unknowing. 

The analysis reveals how parent advocacy constructs people with FASD as eliminable subjects through two interconnected processes. First, advocacy narratives mobilize affectively charged themes of contagion and waste to position FASD as inherently dangerous, justifying elimination through prevention. Second, parent advocates function as essential mediators in what I term the “space of interlocution,” where they translate for and speak on behalf of people with FASD, and risk superseding self-knowledge through practices of “over-narration.” 

These processes operate as forms of biopolitical governmentality that constitute certain lives as undesirable while simultaneously constraining how people with FASD can know and represent themselves. Unlike in other neurodivergent communities, where self-advocates have successfully challenged medical models and asserted the validity of neurodivergent existence, people with FASD face specific hermeneutical barriers to emancipatory political mobilization, as the dominant discourses of prevention and management preclude a vision of FASD as a viable form of human diversity.