Corpogravure of a circle meeting: Poetics and Politics of blind women in Brazil

Abstract

This text is an ethnographic report of shared authorship between members of the Brazilian Movement of Blind and Low Vision Women and the anthropologist Olivia von der Weid. We interweave embodied narratives about the unique ways in which the experience of being a visually impaired woman is expressed in their bodies and lives. Understanding that the bonds and connection established in a circle with other women is a fundamental link in the composition of this collective, members of the movement share their marks and what they have inaugurated in themselves, their ways of re-existing after the destabilizations experienced in their training and employment trajectories. Bringing the body, gestures, and movement as motivating elements of exchange and production of knowledge, treating skin as a map of our experiences, we compose here a live image of an event, a corpogravure, with the embodied words of visually impaired women and what they reverberate.