The Poems of the Foot-Mouth. Political Rhetoric of Disability in Gabriela Brimmer’s Poetry

Abstract

This article problematizes the construction of political rhetoric of disability in the poetic production of Mexican activist and writer Gabriela Brimmer (1947-2000). I argue that the exercise of poetization that Brimmer undertakes, which is part of her autobiographical project, challenges the conventional production conditions of poetry. She was resorting to alternative forms of authorial and material visibility, which provided her with the construction of a space of bodily dissidence invested politically by the incarnated cerebral palsy experience. In this way, Brimmer constructs a series of images that become a testimonial and singular record about her experience as a woman, writer, and activist. I maintain that poetry is an alternative knowledge –neither pathological nor diagnostic– from the perspective of disability that manages to undo the images of suffering, tragedy, and suffering associated with a subject seized by the medical-rehabilitative discourse.