This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. What counts as "disability," how is it framed, and who frames it? My project is concerned with examining disability, biopolitics, and citizenship in Brazil. More specifically, it is concerned with examining how one of Latin America's largest organization for supporting those with intellectual disabilities has recently turned towards increasingly drawing on biomedical frameworks of disability as a means of advocating for its members. I attempt to frame these decisions, and in turn shifting discourses of disablement within Brazil, against what some have called Brazil's "disjunctive democracy" and "differentiated citizenship" structures that. Is it possible to advocate for inclusionary policies for those with disabilities, while simultaneously encouraging the growth of segregating sites and drawing upon biomedical frameworks that have often been seen as diminutive and destructive in alternate contexts? If so, what does this mean for the individual subjectivities of those who are marked as "disabled"?
Matthew Medeiros (2020) studied this question.