 Two sorts of skeptical responses have greeted the effort to define disabilities as individual traits, conditions, or functions, selected by some set of rules or criteria. The first critique is inspired by the work of Michael Foucault on biopower as a form of control exercised by modern states over the bodies of their populations (Tremain 2017). This critique argues that to focus on individual characteristics in defining disability is to miss the forest for the trees. “Disability” refers not to a set of individual characteristics, or to a concept that encompasses such a set, but to a mechanism that identifies various types of individual characteristics for the purpose of social control. Notably, Shelley Tremain analyzes disability as a mechanism constructed and maintained by laws, informal norms, cultural understandings and other exercises of biopower. Impairments and disabilities only exist within this culturally and historically contingent apparatus that arose in part as a means for people who saw themselves as “normal” to regulate those they labeled as “deviants”.