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Inappropriate/d bodies: Reorganizing the terms of life and death
1Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay.
Abstract:
The aim of this article is to offer insight into the different meanings of death that pierce the lives of people with disabilities and to discuss how those meanings are formed through a close connection with their bodies. To do that, I take an anthropological approach to trace the life paths of two individuals from a southern Latin American metropolis, exploring their embodied experiences of disability. Based on their accounts, I look at how their bodies are affected by specific conditions of stigma, dispossession, and social death, but also how, as "inappropriate/d" bodies, they rise above the logic of difference and move from a state of "absence" to a state of "presence" in the social world.
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