Disability, Neuro-Dissidence, and Madness: Critical and Situated Approaches
Guest Editors:
Berenice Vargas García
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa /Round Table Clacso Critical Studies on Disability berenice.vargs@gmail.com
Grecia Guzmán Martínez
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / Orgullo Loco México Network,
greciaguzmar@gmail.com
Diana Vite Hernández
Clacso Working Group on Critical Studies on Disability
dianisssima05@gmail.com
“Disability”, “neuro-dissidence”, and “madness” are terms and concepts with different origins, historical developments, and purposes. However, in recent years, they have increasingly shared some processes of reappropriation, as well as certain spaces of epistemic and political enunciation across Latin America. This convergence aims to transgress language and the normalization, pathologization, medicalization, institutionalization, and inclusion/exclusion narratives, which have constructed certain body-minds as “inadequate”, “deficient”, “aberrant”, “abnormal,” and/or “subhuman.”
Drawing on a counter-hegemonic stance, onto-epistemes with critical and destabilizing potential challenge ableist, sanist, and neurotypical standards—both in subjectivities and in academic research, collective and activist struggle. Critical disability studies, mad studies, and studies on/from neuro-divergence become inflections between subjective experience, activism, and academia. Through interdisciplinary, in-disciplinary, critical, and everyday approaches, they shape ways of existing and resisting in our South.
The contemporary notion of “disability,” now anchored in a human rights framework (which promoted public policies emphasizing identity), has brought together different ways of being and existing. However, through a universalizing and homogenizing perspective, it has prioritized the common over the singular, representation over situated experience, and the core over the margins. As a result, other becomings have either recognized themselves from different positionalities or have not identified with the category of disability at all, adding to their claims for justice the demand to be named in ways that acknowledge their particular existence. These include, for example, Deaf communities, chronically ill people, mad communities, neurodivergent individuals, functionally diverse groups, and those experiencing chronic pain. From within their respective heterogeneities, they reaffirm their situated experiences as collective bodies that simultaneously assemble and disperse. Likewise, genealogies connected to mad movements and neurodivergent struggles have given rise to conditions of possibility for constructing political and epistemic individuals essential to expanding liberation projects. Yet, at the same time, they have also reified subjective, political, and epistemic universalities that can sometimes be exclusionary or limited for such expansiveness. Such a complexity calls on us to pay attention to the various modes of identification and enunciation that unfold in the critique to the ableist-sanist-neuronormative system.
Otherwise said, as in any critical thought, contradictions and tensions exist. Yet, transforming our social and systemic conditions requires first and foremost breaking with conventional ideas, disrupting hegemonic representations, making other dialogues and social movements visible, and engaging with anti-racist and decolonial theories that acknowledge the overlapping of oppressions. In that vein, we invite she-researchers, activists, and those who identify as disabled, mad, neurodivergent, or under other enunciations, as well as allies in the struggles against sanism, ableism, heteropatriarchy, speciesism, and colonialism, to contribute critical and situated perspectives on disability, madness, and neurodivergence in our South.
Submissions may fall within any of the following thematic areas:
- Disabled, mad, and anti-speciesist feminisms and transfeminisms.
- Ableism, sanism, speciesism, neuronormativity, and intersecting oppressions.
- Studies of the body and dissident and abnormal corporealities.
- Decolonial and antiracist perspectives in dialogue with mad studies, critical disability studies, and critical neurodivergence studies.
- Discussions on ethics and care and support systems from disabled, mad, and/or neurodivergent perspectives.
- Histories, encounters, and tensions between Mad Pride, the Neurodiversity Movement, and disability in the global South.
- Analyses, methodologies, and theoretical developments drawing on the experienced-based expertise and critical with epistemic extractivism.
For further information or to submit your final drafts, complete with an abstract (in English or Spanish), please write: berenice.vargs@gmail.com
Submissions will be received up to August 12, 2025.
Submissions must have not been previously published and comply with Tabula Rasa’s guidelines.
