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The academic project of disability studies is increasingly drawing the attention of scholars of Latin American cultural studies (e.g. Antebi; Antebi and Jörgensen; Juárez Almendros; Minich). Nevertheless, further effort is needed to apply the insights of this interdisciplinary formation to the full range of artistic products, cultural practices and social realities spread across the discipline's uneven geographies. The presence of disability in the Chilean documentary may be taken as a case in point.1
As Jacqueline Mouesca put it bluntly in El documental chileno (2005), scholars have generally had to work against the perception that documentary is "el hermano chico" (11) of fiction film. Beyond this obstacle, however, the point is that disability is seldom, if at all, approached on its own terms in the documentary genre. It is no surprise that the themes of political violence, trauma, and historical memory have proven to be mainstays of the scholarship on Chilean documentary, with Patricio Guzmán's three-part masterpiece La batalla de Chile (1975-79) easily becoming one of the most commented films to date. María Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael J. Lazarra conveyed a concise summary of the concerns that, since the 1990s, have motivated such scholarship in their introduction to Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium (2016), writing:
transitions to democracy; truth commissions; persistent socioeconomic inequality; continued battles over memory and justice; struggles for gender equality, sexual rights, and equal access to education; as well as the return to power of leftist governments and political actors who just two decades earlier were brutally persecuted. These phenomena coexist with the entrenchment of neoliberalism in the region, which, next to bodily and psychological violence, is perhaps the greatest legacy of the recent wave of Latin American dictatorships. (5)
As disability theorists such as David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder have explored in The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism and Peripheral Embodiment (2015), such concerns cannot be regarded as distinct from those that ground the methodological approach of disability studies. As both a political project and an academic formation (Davis, "Introduction" 1), it shares with other academic approaches a general focus on human rights as the driver of social change. Disability studies has long been concerned at once with the social construction of inequality-the stigmatization of such constructs...