Living without Permission: Presentation of a Bibliography on the Body and Depathologisation Activations of the Dislocated Archive

By Julieta Obiols

The Dislocated Archive brings together a series of materials that bear witness to the struggle of sexual dissidence collectives to depathologise their identities. These personal and collective manifestos demand the power for people to take decisions about their own lives and bodies and reject the medical discourse that seeks to individualise and appropriate them. In the 1970s militant collectives overcame considerable resistance to persuade the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the section on medical disorders in its Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM). Today’s struggles to depathologise transsexuality and intersexuality are now demanding the right for people to access treatments to modify their body in accordance with their own desires and to avoid compulsive interventions. These struggles are joined by other battles such as fat activism and functional diversity. People’s right to take decisions about their own body is being asserted amid a rise in neoliberal policies that are restricting access to healthcare, while the pharmacological industry is extending the medicalisation of life to all areas it eyes as profitable. Over recent decades, a growing literature inside and outside academia has sought to question the hegemony of medical knowledge and offer a platform for new voices that are slowly beginning to make themselves heard. Part of this bibliography will be presented in this talk.