Bodies in rebellion | Cuerpos en rebeldía

Practices of re-existence and narratives of violence among women with disabilities in Colombia | Prácticas de re-existencia y narrativas de violencia en mujeres con discapacidad en Colombia

Abstract

This study analyzes the violence directed at women with disabilities, who are doubly excluded by the intersection of gender and ableism, generating epistemic inequity and dispossession. Through a qualitative hermeneutic-critical approach and militant research, semi-structured interviews of 14 participants in Santiago de Cali, Colombia, were analyzed using snowball sampling. A content analysis focused on the intersection of oppressions was conducted, revealing intersectional and multi-spatial violence—economic, psychological, emotional, physical, and sexual—perpetrated in domestic, institutional, and public spheres. In response to these aggressions, the participants deploy agentic processes articulated in nine practices of re-existence: 1) politicity in a feminine key, 2) eroticism, 3) self-care, 4) sisterhood, 5) voluntariness, 6) courageous discourse, 7) criticism and discrepancy, 8) feminist consciousness-raising, and 9) affective networks. The study concludes that the categorization of re-existence is its primary theoretical contribution, demonstrating how the agency of these women transforms oppressive conditions into an eropolitics that confronts the dominant social order.