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Embodied Politics: Disability Narratives, Trans Discourses, and the Struggles for New Forms of Associativism

Gender
Social Movements
Feminism
Identity
Narratives
Activism
LGBTQI
Gustavo Elpes
Centro de Estudos Sociais, University of Coimbra
Gustavo Elpes
Centro de Estudos Sociais, University of Coimbra

Abstract

This paper intends to explore the relationship between disability studies and transgender studies by studying the intersections of body and self-constructs as related to lived experiences, social representations and the struggles to raise awareness of new political subjectivities and belongings. In face of the increasing visibility of new forms of associativism that has contributed to the diversification of social movements (and its relation to the meaningful transformation of disability narratives and trans discourses from trans and disabled people), the paper will look to Madrid, where, in the course of the occupy movement context, were provided more integrated form of politics. While acknowledging that this form of politics has been researched before, the voices of trans disabled people with regards to public protests' sites are still invisible in the literature and undervalued in political praxis. I will inquire about the ways that disabled trans people understand their own identities and how they relate to different sources of power that attempt to define them within already acknowledged systems of visibility and recognition. The aim is to contribute to the debate about how public collective expressions and protests interact with the arguments about normative bodies and pathologizing processes. I will point to the omission in the literature in relation to how trans disabled people generate spaces for visibility, recognition and political demands. On the one hand, different forms of social movements have created strategies for integration politics, and on the other hand, there still remain challenges for inclusion regarding trans disabled bodies within the physical spaces and within collective struggles. In this context, lies the interest in understanding trans and disabled people embodiment in relation to politics.