HABILITATING BODYMINDS, CARING FOR POTENTIAL: Disability Therapeutics after Zika in Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

This article traces how Brazilian mothers raising children with congenital Zika syndrome cultivate their children’s bodyminds through habilitative care—care that mobilizes a range of substances, technologies, and techniques to encourage maximum potential development of embodied abilities in young disabled children. Based on fieldwork conducted since 2016 with families impacted by the Zika epidemic in Bahia, Brazil, I argue that Bahian mothers’ intensive investments in habilitative care constitute a way of asserting their children’s deservingness of ongoing care and of contesting public narratives of their children’s lack of futurity, thereby challenging exclusionary ideas about whose bodyminds are worth “potentializing.” In dialogue with critical disability studies, I show how habilitative care is bound to discourses of “overcoming” and “curing” disability that scholars in this field have long criticized. I use my ethnography to unsettle these critiques, asking how to attend to the shaping of developing bodyminds amid the precarities of everyday life in the Global South.