Abstract

The aim of the article was to present a first approach to an epistemological proposal that reflects on and deals with the construction and legitimation of knowledge generated from abject, abnormal, or crippled corporeities geopolitically located in the South. It pays special attention to the sex-gender-ability system in the social and epistemological organization of knowledge. In this development, we identify a positionality and wasted wealth for regional social analysis and transformation as a result of a modern colonial order. Hence, this proposal is inscribed within the Latin American critical thinking to reflect on those other places of abject enunciation.

Keywords:
Epistemology; Disability; Feminism; Interculturality; Ableism

Introduction

Although various studies have related disability to the Social Determinants of Health (SDH), Tamayo, Besoaín and Rebolledo (2018TAMAYO, M.; BESOAÍN, Á.; REBOLLEDO, J. Determinantes sociales de la salud y discapacidad: actualizando el modelo de determinación. Gaceta Sanitaria, Amsterdam, v. 32, n. 1, p. 96-100, 2018. DOI: 10.1016/j.gaceta.2016.12.004
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gaceta.2016.12... ) criticized that they have done so in the sense of homologizing it to a condition of health or disease in the social determination model. On the contrary, these authors have proposed “to include disability from the social model, as a structural SDH, for being a situation that generates inequality in health and social exclusion” (Tamayo, Besoaín & Rebolledo, 2018, p. 97TAMAYO, M.; BESOAÍN, Á.; REBOLLEDO, J. Determinantes sociales de la salud y discapacidad: actualizando el modelo de determinación. Gaceta Sanitaria, Amsterdam, v. 32, n. 1, p. 96-100, 2018. DOI: 10.1016/j.gaceta.2016.12.004
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gaceta.2016.12... ). According to the above, this article recognizes that disability has been understood as a pathological condition, establishing health actions that seek normalization, medicalization and rehabilitation as the ultimate purpose of disability, even recognizing its social definition. This reveals the existence of an ideology of normality (Rosato et al., 2009ROSATO, A. et al. El papel de la ideología de la normalidad en la producción de discapacidad. Ciencia, Docencia y Tecnología, Concepción del Uruguay, v. XX, n. 39, p. 87-105, 2009. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=14512426004 >. Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=1... ) in our society, as well as the reference of a Compulsory Able-Bodiedness (McRuer, 2021MCRUER, R. Teoría Crip: signos culturales de lo queer y de la discapacidad. Madrid: Kaotica libros, 2021.) and a ableist value system (Mello, 2014MELLO, A.G. Gênero, eficiencia, cuidado e capacitismo: um análise antropológica de experiências, narrativas e observações sobre violências contra mulheres com deficiencia. 2014. 262 f. Tese (Mestrado em Antropología Social) - Centro de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, 2014. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://repositorio.ufsc.br/handle/123456789/182556 >. Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
https://repositorio.ufsc.br/handle/12345... ).

The colonial, capitalist, patriarchal and ableist society (Pino-Morán & Rodríguez-Garrido, 2019PINO MORÁN, J. A.; RODRÍGUEZ-GARRIDO, P. De-generadas: la violencia institucional capacitista hacia mujeres con discapacidad en Chile. Revista de Estudios Públicos, Santiago, v. 5, n. 1, p. 1-13, 2019. DOI: 0.5354/0719-6296.2019.50904
https://doi.org/0.5354/0719-6296.2019.50... ) was established through a principle of injustice and ableist imagination, which has been permeating into classificatory, divisive, binary and hierarchical narratives and ways of sentipensar (feeling-thinking), in which the regimes of truth and knowledge are inscribed (Foucault, 2009FOUCAULT, M. Defender la sociedad: Curso En El Collège de France (1975-1976). Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009.). In the face of this, Western hegemonic science is complicit in subjecting certain corporeities to a particular disciplining as an object of study and systematic intervention, denying their emancipatory position as subjects of knowledge production.

However, in the last decades, different socio-political movements at the global and regional level are questioning this subaltern position of stratification and social organization of dissident and non-normative corporeities (Pino-Morán & Tyseira, 2019PINO MORÁN, J. A.; TISEYRA, M. Encuentros entre la perspectiva decolonial y los estudios de la discapacidad. Revista Colombiana de Ciencias Sociales, Medellín, v. 10, n. 2, p. 497-521, 2019. DOI: 10.21501/22161201.2893
https://doi.org/10.21501/22161201.2893... ; Platero-Méndez & Rosón-Villena, 2012PLATERO-MÉNDEZ, R.; ROSÓN-VILLENA, M. De la parada de los monstruos a los monstruos de lo cotidiano: la diversidad funcional y la sexualidad no normativa. Feminismo/s Revista del Centro de Estudios sobre la Mujer de la Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, n. 19, p. 127-42, 2012. DOI: 10.14198/fem.2012.19.08
https://doi.org/10.14198/fem.2012.19.08... ). This demand and cultural transition not only has an administrative legal purpose framed in the recognition of the fundamental guarantees of human rights for people classified as having a disability, but also a cultural possibility of transforming and destabilizing the ableism of our societies.

In this line, ableism will be understood in accordance with Anahí Guedes de Mello, who points out that it is:

Ableism is, therefore, an ideology and a practice based on the existence of a ableist epistemology. The latter, we will understand as that theoretical, political, ethical and cultural position that denies, devalues and ignores the partiality of knowledge that are produced from non-standard bodiednessand sexual experiences or that are developed with emphasis on atypical sensory senses or emotions, which are not expected in modern science.

Considering this, we can trace an archeology of knowledge that has been absent and made invisible by official and universal history, or by the human and social sciences. Consequently, a wide range of epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic injustices were generated by ignoring the riches and sources of knowledge wasted by the hegemonic body of universal knowledge.

Epistemologies were historically concerned with establishing valid and invalid knowledge in a binary manner, ignoring the bodily privilege of those who produce such knowledge, which is not free of many methodological problems. Currently, they are in a wide field of academic and intellectual discussion on the constitution of theories and schools of thought.

On the other hand, this bodily privilege mostly emphasizesheterosexual thinking, a condition from which dominant epistemologies end up oppressing differences. According to Monique Wittig (2006WITTIG, M. El pensamiento heterosexual y otros ensayos. Madrid: Egales, 2006.),

Thus, hierarchical dichotomies are established in an entire sex-gender- abilitysystem which places the private world, enclosing the others: children, the elderly and people with disabilities or illnesses and, especially, women with diversity. This dichotomy between a public-male and private-female sphere also masks the relations of knowledge production that disable the whole collective.

On the contrary, the epistemologies we highlight advocate respect and recognition of diversity, dignity and differences as a minimum condition to advance towards a pluralistic and inclusive society where all people can participate in the different social spaces, including the construction of knowledge. Thus, all of this research-epistemological process can be interpreted as an expression of passion and resistance to the neoliberal regimes of truth, science and justice in order to advance in recognition and protagonism over disputed bodies and silenced lives.

Likewise, this proposal responds, in part, to the experiences, tensions and conflicts systematized by the main author and other authors in their practices and experiences embodied in social research with groups, associations and movements of people with disabilities, reflecting and making explicit the ethical and political position of the researchers regarding the research problem.

Therefore, the objective of this article is to problematize and propose the possibility of anti-ableist epistemologies that recognize knowledges from the human diversities and differences that inhabit Latin America. For this purpose, we considered epistemologies that dialogue with anti-ableism from the perspectives of the South, a peripheral scenario propitious to a long tradition of knowledge acquired in social, political and epistemological struggles.

We draw on learnings from four theoretical currents that have accompanied us in our research processes: The Epistemologies of the South (De Sousa Santos, 2011DE SOUSA SANTOS, B. Epistemologías del sur. Utopía y praxis Latinoamericana, Maracaibo, v. 16, n. 54, p. 17-39, 2011. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=27920007003 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=2... ); the Feminist Epistemologies of Situated Knowledge (Haraway, 1995HARAWAY, D. J. Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres: la reinvención de la naturaleza. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995.); the Feminist Decolonial Epistemologies (Lugones, 2008LUGONES, M. Colonialidad y Género. Tabula Rasa, Bogotá, n. 9, p. 73-101, 2008. DOI: 10.25058/20112742.340
https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.340... ); and the Intercultural Epistemologies (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018MIGNOLO, W.; WALSH, C. On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.; Fornet-Betancourt, 2012FORNET-BETANCOURT, R. Hacia una filosofía del diálogo intercultural en un mundo conflictivo. Logos. Revista de filosofía, Ciudad de México, v. 40, n. 120, p. 171-186, 2012. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://revistasinvestigacion.lasalle.mx/index.php/LOGOS/article/view/2589 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
http://revistasinvestigacion.lasalle.mx/... ) who recognize the possibility of a potential transformative project and that remains in movement among our ability.

Epistemologies of the South: A position for the recognition of alterity

Boaventura De Sousa Santos’s proposal reminds us that:

Therefore, the South is the place of the subalterns, of the omitted, of women, of indigenous, wild, lame and invalids, and all those dissenting from the labeling of disability.

Disability was historically understood as an object of study and purpose of expert intervention. However, it was not considered as a fruitful scenario for the generation of knowledge. Consequently, we privilege and emphasize the development and deepening of critical epistemologies that challenge the ableist, patriarchal, colonial, Eurocentric/Western dominant norm in the sciences and in culture (Pino-Morán, 2020PINO MORÁN, J. A. Cuerpo(s) en luchas: itinerarios disidentes de la discapacidad en Chile. 2020. Tesis (Doctorado en Sociología) - Departament de Sociología, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2020. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/670160 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021
https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/... ).

According to De Sousa Santos (2011, p. 35)DE SOUSA SANTOS, B. Epistemologías del sur. Utopía y praxis Latinoamericana, Maracaibo, v. 16, n. 54, p. 17-39, 2011. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=27920007003 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=2... , the Epistemologies of the South involve

Therefore, we understand the Epistemologies of the South as a theoretical/empirical proposal to make anomalous knowledge visible, on the basis of two methodological proposals. Thus emerges the sociology of absences, which deals with the present that we do not easily see or the past in its incomplete condition, for our interest, the concern for a perspective that tries to transform the negative representations of “indigenous”, “lame”, “crippled” people into “valid”, “present”, “included” people, from an intercultural view and deep respect for our differences (Pino-Morán, 2020PINO MORÁN, J. A. Cuerpo(s) en luchas: itinerarios disidentes de la discapacidad en Chile. 2020. Tesis (Doctorado en Sociología) - Departament de Sociología, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2020. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/670160 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021
https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/... ).

The second question is about the future. In fact, we all act always in the present, never in the future, and that is why the form of non-compliance is produced, which is activated through the sociology of emergencies (De Sousa Santos, 2011DE SOUSA SANTOS, B. Epistemologías del sur. Utopía y praxis Latinoamericana, Maracaibo, v. 16, n. 54, p. 17-39, 2011. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=27920007003 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=2... ) that can activate a knowledge accumulated in resistance, in militancy, in embodied struggles and in all those groups postulating for their recognizability from their diversity and alterity (Pino-Morán, 2020PINO MORÁN, J. A. Cuerpo(s) en luchas: itinerarios disidentes de la discapacidad en Chile. 2020. Tesis (Doctorado en Sociología) - Departament de Sociología, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2020. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/670160 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021
https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/... ).

De Sousa Santos (2011)DE SOUSA SANTOS, B. Epistemologías del sur. Utopía y praxis Latinoamericana, Maracaibo, v. 16, n. 54, p. 17-39, 2011. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=27920007003 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=2... recognizes that we cannot broaden the recognition of our diversities without also broadening the horizon of understandings, a matter of cognitive justice. Societies have not understood the value of differences, the richness of neurodiversity, the experience of non-standard women or of the social movements of psychiatric survivors, among others (Pino-Morán, 2020PINO MORÁN, J. A. Cuerpo(s) en luchas: itinerarios disidentes de la discapacidad en Chile. 2020. Tesis (Doctorado en Sociología) - Departament de Sociología, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2020. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/670160 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021
https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/... ).

In this transition, De Sousa Santos wonders how this horizon of intelligibilities develops. The Epistemologies of the South recognize two key instances, the ecología de saberes (ecology of skills and intercultural translation). Both proposals are related to strategies for converging in dialogues that overcome the staticity of knowledge and of “trained”, “scientific”, “institutional” rigor, to articulate in anomalous interpretations, unexpected intersubjective encounters and abject local-global alliances, temporal and partial understandings with the knowledge of dissident bodies operating outside the linear and monolithic logic of time or outside the accumulation of historical knowledge (Pino-Morán, 2020PINO MORÁN, J. A. Cuerpo(s) en luchas: itinerarios disidentes de la discapacidad en Chile. 2020. Tesis (Doctorado en Sociología) - Departament de Sociología, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2020. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/670160 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021
https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/... ).

Feminist epistemology: Partial and situated knowledges

Donna Haraway (1995HARAWAY, D. J. Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres: la reinvención de la naturaleza. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995.) problematized a critical position on the exercise of truth and knowledge that supports the relationship between knowledge/power in the sciences by proposing the Feminist Epistemologies of Situated Knowledge within the critical studies of the sciences. The author “invites to take a political position in the research, without ambiguities, highlighting subjectivity as a radical position of any objectivity” (Pino-Morán, 2020PINO MORÁN, J. A. Cuerpo(s) en luchas: itinerarios disidentes de la discapacidad en Chile. 2020. Tesis (Doctorado en Sociología) - Departament de Sociología, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2020. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/670160 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021
https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/... , p. 107).

This makes explicit the impossibility of knowing reality objectively, hence situated knowledge is radically partial and incomplete knowledge, like all the skills that this proposal intends to make visible. Thus, each group can consider the partial perspectives of other groups without renouncing its uniqueness. Partiality and not universality would then be the condition for being heard-seen or recognized (Haraway, 1995HARAWAY, D. J. Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres: la reinvención de la naturaleza. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995.).

For this manuscript, situated knowledge is relevant “ these are claims on people’s lives; the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity” (Haraway, 1995HARAWAY, D. J. Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres: la reinvención de la naturaleza. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995., p. 335). In other words, the aim is to recognize the variability of our bodies and repertoires in order to learn/know beyond traditional bodily integrity.

Under this premise of embodied partialities, the bodily experiences of first-person disability dissidents are beneficial for glimpsing vulnerabilities-resistances-agencies relationships and their strategies of power and transformation. Haraway (1995HARAWAY, D. J. Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres: la reinvención de la naturaleza. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995., p. 324) warns “I would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects: feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges.”.

From this scenario, Haraway’s (1995HARAWAY, D. J. Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres: la reinvención de la naturaleza. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995.) proposal invites us to learn from/within our bodies, with a technological vision,

We warn that this perspective does not have a victimizing, naive, and even less relativistic character, Haraway (1995HARAWAY, D. J. Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres: la reinvención de la naturaleza. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995., p. 329) describes it clearly when she points out that:

Therefore, we recognize that these knowledges constructed in positions of subalternity are knowledges that must be understood methodologically as tactile, olfactory, hearing knowledges. Knowledges without reason or with cognitive slowness, proudly rare knowledges as Robert McRuer’s crip theory would express (²⁰²¹MCRUER, R. Teoría Crip: signos culturales de lo queer y de la discapacidad. Madrid: Kaotica libros, 2021.).

This knowledges:

Consequently,

Epistemology of decolonial feminism: how to deal with what is enunciated as abject?

The modern/colonial system configured a new order and social structure establishing parameters of “normality” as the only possibility of being, doing, feeling and understanding the world, an obligatory nature that in addition to permeating human subjectivity fragmented habitability in time-space, a fundamental issue to think about the relevance of the corporeities configured as abject, invalid or crippled-indigenous for the rationality of the occident.

This brought alienation and epistemic violence embodied in a differentiated manner in the population. Therefore, the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2008LUGONES, M. Colonialidad y Género. Tabula Rasa, Bogotá, n. 9, p. 73-101, 2008. DOI: 10.25058/20112742.340
https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.340... ), through the postulates of decolonial feminism, unveiled the matrix of patriarchal domination in biological dimorphism and compulsory heterosexuality in the social structure, so that the conquered bodies were quickly generated in response to this strategy of patriarchal-colonial oppression and domination (Lugones, 2008LUGONES, M. Colonialidad y Género. Tabula Rasa, Bogotá, n. 9, p. 73-101, 2008. DOI: 10.25058/20112742.340
https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.340... ; Oyěwùmí, 1997Oyěwùmí, O. The Invention of Woman. Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minessota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.).

However, this evangelization was not homogeneous in the entire population, the heteronorm and the process of genderization was instilled in those who had the supposed “ability” to be human: man-woman, however, all those bodies classified as animals or barbaric were left out. Thus, the corporeities considered abject, non-valid, crippled-indigenous were treated and disposed in sacrificial, subhuman and non-being places through torture, rape and slave labor, annulling any possibility of existing and being in time-space (Restrepo & Rojas, 2010RESTREPO, E.; ROJAS, A. Inflexión decolonial: fuentes, conceptos y cuestionamientos. Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2010.).

Similarly, the processes of modern/colonial genderization were strongly criticized by feminist disability studies (Arnau, 2018ARNAU, S. R. ¿Sexualidad en la diversidad o diversidad en la sexualidad? Nuevos retos para una nueva cultura sexual. Journal of Feminist, Gender and Women Studies, Madrid, n. 7, p. 27-36, 2018. DOI: 10.15366/jfgws2018.7.003
https://doi.org/10.15366/jfgws2018.7.003... ; Cruz-Pérez, 2013CRUZ PÉREZ, M. P. Teoría feminista y discapacidad: un complicado encuentro en torno al cuerpo. Revista de Investigación y Divulgación sobre los Estudios de Género, Colima, v. 19, n. 12, p. 51-71, 2013. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://ojs.ucol.mx/index.php/generos/article/view/1274 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
http://ojs.ucol.mx/index.php/generos/art... ). The universality of the subject of feminism and its demands, besides the non-recognition of diversity in the erotic-affective plane, as well as of the conditions and needs of those who inhabit these identities, are part of the questions and tensions that still keep occidental feminisms (white and bourgeois) reflecting from the intellectual privilege.

In this sense, the historical, epistemic and subjective reclamation promoted by decolonial feminists as re-appropriation of the body/territory can be situated within the framework of the recognition of abject, non-valid, crippled-indigenous corporeities. However, this discussion has not been the object of concern or further debate within the community. In addition, these bodies continue to be omitted from official and unofficial history, and the Trending Topic social movements have not incorporated them into their demands, struggles, resistances, and claims.

Before this panorama, the question arises: how to deal with what is enunciated as abject? A responsibility inherent to critical spaces of reflection implies precisely rethinking the epistemology of subjects historically omitted from History. Marcela Ferrari (2020FERRARI, M. Feminismos descoloniales y discapacidad: hacia una conceptualización de la colonialidad de la capacidad. Nómadas, Madrid, n. 52, p. 115-131, 2020. DOI: 10.30578/nomadas.n52a7
https://doi.org/10.30578/nomadas.n52a7... ) proposes to speak of the “coloniality of ability” as an articulated work between decolonial feminism and the reconfiguration of disability from a Latin American speech. In this way, the coloniality of ability implies the “disarticulation, erasure and replacement by modern/colonial thought of the communal ethics of reciprocity and cooperation proper to the cosmovision of our Latin American peoples, and of the logics that correspond to their forms of organization” (Ferrari, 2020FERRARI, M. Feminismos descoloniales y discapacidad: hacia una conceptualización de la colonialidad de la capacidad. Nómadas, Madrid, n. 52, p. 115-131, 2020. DOI: 10.30578/nomadas.n52a7
https://doi.org/10.30578/nomadas.n52a7... , p. 125).

In this regard, is it possible to interweave the proposals of decolonial feminism to re-define and re-construct instances of dialogue between territories and abject, invalid, crippled-indigenous corporealities? How to make these dialogues suitable for their own weft threads from the circularity of epistemes, as well as collective and articulated work from their own meanings and experiences of emancipation?

Intercultural Epistemologies: Critical Approaches from Latin America

There are several possible ways of epistemologically approaching disability in territories characterized by non-white culture and society. So far, disability studies have studied disability in racialized people from intersectional, cultural and anti-racial studies approaches, but it is recognized that this field focuses mainly on white disability (Bell, 2017BELL, C. Is disability studies actually white disability studies? In: DAVIS, L. J. (Ed.). The disability studies reader. 5. Ed. New York: Routledge, 2017. P. 406-415.; Schalk & Kim, 2020SCHALK, S.; KIM, J. Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Chicago, v. 46, n. 1, p. 31-55, 2020. DOI: 10.1086/709213
https://doi.org/10.1086/709213... ).

In Latin America, the population is fundamentally non-white, therefore, disability has always been crossed by colonization, contemporary migrations, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants and people of color (these last two conceptualizations are used because they are suggested by Latin American activisms), although our academic production has not always managed to make this visible and, frequently, we adopt and adapt Anglo-Saxon proposals to our reality, a fact that should be noted with concern.

Currently, some of the most critical approaches to analyze disability in Latin America have tended towards the crip/queer theory (García-Santesmases Fernández, Verges-Boch & Almeda-Samaranch, 2017GARCÍA-SANTESMASES FERNÁNDEZ, A.; VERGÉS BOSCH, N.; ALMEDA SAMARANCH, E. From alliance to trust: Constructing Crip-Queer intimacies. Journal of Gender Studies, Abingdon, v. 26, n. 3, p. 269-281, 2017. DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2016.1273100
https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2016.12... ), the critical perspective, the social model of disability and critical disability studies, all coming from Anglo-Saxon proposals. However, none of them has shown interest or sufficiency to relate the study of disability to the situation of our non-white Latin America. In the case of critical disability studies, they showed interest in dialoguing with theoretical proposals that make visible a large part of the current situation of Latin American society (Revuelta & Hernández, 2021REVUELTA, B.; HERNÁNDEZ, R. Estudios críticos en discapacidad: portes epistemológicos de un campo plural. Cinta de Moebio, Santiago n. 70, p. 17-33, 2021. DOI: 10.4067/S0717-554X2021000100017
https://doi.org/10.4067/S0717-554X202100... ). However, they have not sufficiently focus on issues such as the indigenous, the migrant or the territorial, all of which are relevant to understanding the epistemological complexity of thinking from Latin America. On racialization, it has been discussed mainly from intersectional approaches.

In this regard, we propose that intercultural philosophy, and especially those developed in Latin America, constitute a focusing from which we can analyze ableism and propose an approach to anti-ableist epistemologies. Today, nation-states have coapted interculturality as a functional policy in the field of health and rehabilitation (Boccara, 2012BOCCARA, G. La interculturalidad como campo social. Cuadernos Interculturales, Viña del Mar, v. 10, n. 18, p. 11-30, 2012. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=55223841002 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=5... ; Piñones, Mansilla & Arancibia, 2017PIÑONES, C.; MANSILLA, M.; ARANCIBIA, R. El imaginario de la horizontalidad como instrumento de subordinación: la Política de Salud pueblos indígenas en el multiculturalismo neoliberal chileno. Saúde e sociedade, v. 26, n. 3, p. 751-763, 2017. DOI: 10.1590/S0104-12902017169802
https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-1290201716... ). Thus, services and devices have been created based on the idea of a fetishized intercultural health, which has also been applied to disability, insofar as it is understood by the state as a pathological condition.

For this discussion on the construction of anti-ableist epistemologies, we propose decolonial critical interculturality (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018MIGNOLO, W.; WALSH, C. On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.), as well as Fornet-Betancourt’s critical intercultural philosophy (²⁰¹²FORNET-BETANCOURT, R. Hacia una filosofía del diálogo intercultural en un mundo conflictivo. Logos. Revista de filosofía, Ciudad de México, v. 40, n. 120, p. 171-186, 2012. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://revistasinvestigacion.lasalle.mx/index.php/LOGOS/article/view/2589 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
http://revistasinvestigacion.lasalle.mx/... ). These epistemologies are a relevant theoretical framework to analyze how practices with indigenous people, mestizo Latinos, people of color and Afro-descendants in a situation of “disability” are determined by an epistemological ableism of colonial logic, in which the colonialism of existing/being, knowledge and power define the way in which we relate to them. The critical intercultural perspective allows us to stress our own actions, while challenging our medical-scientific and social-cultural rationality about what is known as disability.

There are new forms of research that we could understand as part of a critical interculturality, framed in an accumulation of critical, decolonial, feminist and intercultural perspectives that intersect critical ethnographic studies with a socio-historical and contemporary linkage of disability from a perspective of the Epistemologies of the South. These research challenges require a process of decolonization of researchers and professionals resulting in a reflection of singularity/disability in a non-white Latin America, from the borderlands and integrating the common struggles of peoples impacted by the modern-colonial world-system (Lugones, 2008LUGONES, M. Colonialidad y Género. Tabula Rasa, Bogotá, n. 9, p. 73-101, 2008. DOI: 10.25058/20112742.340
https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.340... ; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018MIGNOLO, W.; WALSH, C. On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.).

The indigenous movement has widely discussed the concept of the body as territory and as community. These elements contribute to the discussion on singularity/disability and their epistemic value can transcend their culture to generate conceptual contributions in the current and numerous discussions on the conceptualization of “disability” in Latin America, doing epistemic justice. But, especially, we recognize that indigenous persons with disabilities carry a complex disability experience, which is linked to a social-historical process of conflictive relationship with the states and with the neoliberal capitalist model, so the struggles of disability cannot be separated from this reality, and the believe that epistemological ableism, is totally related to these other systems of oppression.

In short, an anti-ableist epistemology integrating critical interculturality in its philosophical basis can contribute to an intercultural dialogue between peoples, nations, identities and bodies on equal terms, and to a system of anti-ableist practices in which people themselves lead activisms on what has been called, in the occident, disability.

Final considerations: towards anti-ableist epistemologies from the South - as a proposal - to decolonize knowledge

As we reviewed, the old world and the new world are modern colonial ableist meta-narratives (Pino-Morán & Tiseyra, 2019PINO MORÁN, J. A.; TISEYRA, M. Encuentros entre la perspectiva decolonial y los estudios de la discapacidad. Revista Colombiana de Ciencias Sociales, Medellín, v. 10, n. 2, p. 497-521, 2019. DOI: 10.21501/22161201.2893
https://doi.org/10.21501/22161201.2893... ) that installed an epistemic subordination when it comes to interpreting the world. The Chronicles of India show how Hispanic literature repeatedly has a poor understanding of the people who inhabit what is currently known as Latin America. This situation, according to what was reviewed, has historically replicated dichotomies that are periodically updated: indigenous-civilized, barbarism-modernity up to the abled-disabled subject. Therefore, all this ableist-colonial reification has been established on a principle of bodily hierarchization and inferiorization, which has also been established to delegitimize knowledge.

For example, the concept of the “seen” associated with the “lived” subordinates the “heard” historiographies. With this we want to problematize the “ “worldview” which is used in the West to sum up the cultural logic of a society, captures the West’s privileging of the visual. “ (Oyěwùmí; 1997Oyěwùmí, O. The Invention of Woman. Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minessota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997., p. 4). This is a Eurocentric understanding over the order of bodies and human senses, or as it is stated from decolonial disability studies, a form of “coloniality of seeing” (Barriendos, 2011BARRIENDOS, J. La colonialidad del ver. Hacia un nuevo diálogo visual interepistémico. Revista Nómadas, Bogotá, n. 35, p. 13-29, 2011. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/1051/105122653002.pdf > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/1051/1051226... ). With this background, it is explicit the conformation of the epistemological ableism that builds the current modern colonial societies.

This arbitrary discrimination of power relations and identities involves a whole group of people in contradictions and deep wounds on their activities, subjectivity and struggles. This issue is maintained by not problematizing the epistemological order in which this situation is explained.

Therefore, the epistemological positioning we propose alludes to a corporal geopolitical position, as proposed by Walter Mignolo (2010MIGNOLO, W. Desobediencia Epistémica. Retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialidad. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo, 2010., p. 37-41), in the following reference:

Therefore, we understand the Anti-Ableist Epistemologies from the South as those productions of bodily knowledge in rebellion with the ableist, colonial, androcentric and cisheteropatriarchal world, which aims to decolonize the occidental hegemonic epistemologies. We can understand them as situated epistemologies of resistance insofar as they are a place of political dispute carried out by social movements and first-person experiences, which possess and generate knowledge from and towards a transformative praxis. They are epistemologies that recognize the existence of ableism, and stand up against it.

One of the primary tasks of the Anti-Ableist Epistemologies of the South is the decolonization of knowledge (De Sousa Santos, 2011DE SOUSA SANTOS, B. Epistemologías del sur. Utopía y praxis Latinoamericana, Maracaibo, v. 16, n. 54, p. 17-39, 2011. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=27920007003 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021.
https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=2... ). This is done by working outside the biologicist, pathologizing or clinical logics of universal standardization and/or medicalized participation produced by the disability industry. It is worth remembering that we are talking about corporeities that did not enter into knowledge and science, or often were absent from the production of knowledges, but have clearly been the object of it. Therefore, this decolonization of knowledge materializes in attention to the singularity and partiality of the alliances of dissident corporeities that move slowly or with involuntary movements, in collaboration with guide dogs or with crutch, corporeities that do not hear through the ear canal, but perceive vibrations, corporeities that do not follow the dominant reason, since they think disjointedly or with madness.

Foucault (1988, p. 25) affirmed “learning becomes madness through the very excess of false learning.”. Thus, we understand that the decolonization of knowledge is executed through Anti-Ableist Epistemologies from the South, since it implies destabilizing and unveiling the dominant patriarchal-ableist homogenizing pattern of sciences and research, in order to counteract the perpetuation of the epistemicide of differences. Hence, we incorporate the importance of the point of view of people with bodily differences, which, on the one hand, means to recognize the experiences embodied for the construction of knowledge in social analysis, and, on the other hand, to recognize the agencies of struggles and resistances, which invite to broaden the understandings on the production of emancipatory knowledge in social research.

This type of decolonizing positioning explicitly contains an ethical, methodological and political commitment with historically invisibilized collectives, which are not intended to give voice or testimony, but rather an epistemological commitment that transcends the binarism of the figures of logo-expert, subject-object or researcher-researched. Hence, this reflective process is committed to deconstructing the idea of scientific knowledge - objectives, specific or specialized - in exchange for an understanding of complexity, complementarity and epistemic solidarity (Pino-Morán, 2020PINO MORÁN, J. A. Cuerpo(s) en luchas: itinerarios disidentes de la discapacidad en Chile. 2020. Tesis (Doctorado en Sociología) - Departament de Sociología, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2020. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/670160 > Acesso em: 21 dic. 2021
https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/... ). A commitment to a transdisciplinary approach that articulates activism, academia, art and science. A proposal that is in line with social agencies and praxis, in which skills and knowledges emerge. At this interface is where we situate the Anti-Ableist Epistemologies from the South as rearguard knowledges.

With this proposal we want to break the supposed norms of social research, that which according to Foucault (2009FOUCAULT, M. Defender la sociedad: Curso En El Collège de France (1975-1976). Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009.) circulates disciplining and regulating the theoretical and methodological body of the research that it wants to regularize. Thus, it is possible to speak of a “normalizing research” and an “emancipating research” where disciplinary norms and their counterparts, the resistances, are intersected.

Under these resistances we want to insist on the need to understand the epistemic problem that hides the cultural recognition of the experiences and future of people who have been labeled as disabled in the current order of the modern-colonial -ableist world-system, which makes invisible the knowledge produced by people with diversity.

This problem, which we have called epistemological ableism, underlies and explains, in part, the political problem of persons with disabilities. With this we want to establish a direct relationship between epistemological ableism and the absence of social, political and cultural rights, as well as the existing difficulty in Latin American contexts to recognize them in their concrete and material reality.

For this reason, we want to recognize the different narratives that have been used to devalue and classify people living in Latin America. Thus, we reuse, from pride, the categories of wild, indigenous, lame or invalid and all those enunciations that do not conform to the normativity and productivity expected by advanced capitalism. The intention is to deactivate them from prejudice and resignify their future in practices of resistance, rebellion and re-existence, which are the result of a situated epistemological development not assumed as an alternative, but as a political counter-proposal.

In short, and with this brief review, we wanted to propose some ideas to problematize and explore, from the perspective of Anti-Ableist Epistemologies from the South, the construction and recognition of the epistemological bases that have been sustained for decades by the anti-ableist struggles in our Latin America. Especially paying attention to the activisms and dissident scenarios of disability in their struggles for dignified lives and their resistance to the malestrom of the colonial-ableist-capitalist-patriarchal system.

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