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Reimagining personal and collective experiences of disability in Africa

HOWELL, Colleen
LORENZO, Theresa
SOMPETA-GCAZA, Siphokazi
2019

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This paper explores understandings of disability in Africa through the personal and collective experiences of a group of postgraduate students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The students, as disabled people themselves or practitioners working in the field across Africa, were required to capture their understanding of disability on the continent in a poster, set as a summative assessment task. What emerges from the students’ posters provides valuable insights into the complex social, political and economic factors that influence and shape the experience of disability in Africa. The paper argues that these insights are especially important to existing conceptual thinking around disability and its importance to discussions on Africa and its development. It suggests that grappling more carefully with the experience of disability in Africa brings much needed voices from Africa and the global South into the field of Disability Studies and deepens these debates in valuable and necessary ways.

 

Disability and the Global South, 2019, Vol.6, No. 2

Participation, agency and disability in Brazil: transforming psychological practices into public policy from a human rights perspective

GESSER, Marivete
BLOCK, Pamela
NUERNBERG, Adriano Henrique
2019

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Participation is a little discussed or researched concept in the social sciences, despite its importance in understanding activism. This article presents some theoretical and methodological considerations for promoting social participation and agency for disabled people through the work of psychologists associated with Brazilian public policies. This article takes the form of a discursive study, based on the dialogue between: a) Brazilian legislation on disability; b) Bader Sawaia’s Ethical-Political Psychology; and c) Disability Studies. Based on the assumption that psychological practices should promote participation and agency for disabled people, we present the elements that hinder or control participation. We then present theoretical methodological contributions to build practices that promote participation and agency, highlighting: a) critiques of moral and biomedical models of disability; b) understandings of disability from intersectional perspectives that incorporate it as a category of analysis; c) including disabled people in the construction of research and professional practices disabled people and d) the rupture with ableism, which blocks the participation of disabled people. Participation has shown to be a multidimensional concept that covers a spectrum of aspects – from the practice of activism to the constitution of subjectivity in disabled people.

 

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2019, Vol. 6 No. 2

Disability, Decoloniality, and Other-than-Humanist Ethics in Anzaldúan Thought

BOST, Suzanne
2019

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Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing has been read as decolonial based on her resistance to dominant national, racial, and cultural formations. This essay turns to unpublished documents from the Gloria Anzaldúa archive that are decolonial at a more fundamental level. In autobiographical writings about her own experiences with disability, as well as doodles and figure drawings, the alternate forms of human life that Anzaldúa depicts defy the logics of identification and differentiation that underlie colonial hierarchies. Refusing to fix bodies with labels, Anzaldúa accepted mystical encounters and inter-species minglings without judgment. She experienced her own disabling conditions (including a severe hormone imbalance and Type 1 diabetes) in the epistemological fold between medical diagnoses (which enforce the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being) and trans-corporeal perceptions that defy empirical analysis. I analyze the ways in which these more capacious ways of being resonate with recent developments in posthumanist theory and disability ethics.

 

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2019, Vol. 6 No. 1

Globalized Food and Pharma: The South Bites Back in Lina Meruane’s Fruta podrida

JÖRGENSEN, Beth E
2019

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One common denominator of the novels and short stories by Lina Meruane (Chile, b. 1970) is the unconventional representation of illness and disability, and a critique of the connections between illness or disability, medicine and globalization. In this paper, I examine her novel Fruta podrida (2007) (rotten fruit) and the challenge it poses to the globalization of food production and pharmacological research as they affect people living in the Global South. This critique is realized obliquely and disturbingly from three distinct subject positions: a Chilean chemist who works for a fruit company in Chile; her half-sister who has diabetes; and a nurse in a New York City hospital. The linguistic and structural complexity of the narrative discourse demands an engagement with the text that places a further demand on its readers to engage with the inequalities and abuses created under globalization.

 

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2019, Vol. 6 No. 1

Decolonial Embodiment: Fanon, the Clinical Encounter, and the Colonial Wound

UREÑA Carolyn
2019

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Disability studies and the medical humanities have recently garnered increasing attention from academics interested in challenging modern, biological understandings of health and illness that dehumanize and alienate people with disabilities and those who are ill. While these discourses have much to contribute to the understanding of human diversity, including the study of race and ethnicity, the risk of conflating illness, disability, and historical forms of systemic discrimination remains a point of concern. As a black Martinican, clinician, and philosopher, Frantz Fanon draws our attention to the importance of healing the physical, affective, and epistemological wounds of coloniality by attending to the social relations that produce them. Fanon exposes the limits of hegemonic epistemologies of the body, raising the question of what other kinds of knowledge about health and illness are likewise excluded by the coloniality of knowledge. Theorizing the clinic as an important location from which revolutionary thought can emerge, I provide a decolonial framework for understanding how a sustained encounter between critical race and disability studies can generate new conceptions of health and healing that requires thinking about a different kind of pain and suffering not captured by the current rubric but to which we, in the twenty-first century, must nevertheless attend.

 

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2019, Vol. 6 No. 1

Precarious Bodies, Precarious Lives: Framing Disability in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Cinema

GARRETT, Victoria
2019

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Alejandro González Iñárritu is a salient example of contemporary Latin American directors who portray sick or disabled bodies as a visual and affective shorthand for different forms of violence. This article explores the relationship between his signature intersecting plots that join seemingly disconnected social spheres in a shared precariousness and his portrayal of illness, injury, and disability to suggest the violence and inequality that underpin these connections. I argue that González Iñárritu’s films frequently represent injured and disabled bodies to expose invisible connections that make social injustice possible as evidence of his using film as a political or ethical intervention that might erode the way contemporary global capitalism reproduces coloniality in everyday life. At the same time, his films illustrate the pitfalls of utilizing disabled bodies to realize this critique, thus shedding light on the ethical dimensions of this tendency to link disability with a critique of violence.

 

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2019, Vol. 6 No. 1

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