Paper short abstract:

Feminist theories on vulnerability emphasize its ambivalent character as dispossession and dissent. Embracing this nuanced understanding of vulnerability, we engage the practices and knowledges put forward by two activist projects collaborating in Spain.

Paper long abstract:

There is a common condition shared among all and each of us which consist of being continuously exposed to be hurt, to be vulnerabilized (using the verb form of the noun vulnerability to stress its processual character). Nonetheless, there are also social, economic and political articulations able to increase or to reduce that possibility of exposure to injury. This provoked vulnerability contributes to generate a differential hierarchy of vulnerability.

Challenging essentialist notions that label certain collectives as vulnerable (both as victims and passive), and building upon feminist theories on vulnerability which emphasize its radical ambivalence, understood as a lack yet also as an opportunity (Butler, 2006; 2009; Lorey 2015), we propose to analyze and draw lessons from two initiatives interconnected in time and place.

Building upon these authors, the sites where different faces of vulnerability are experienced become the very source of subversive, disobedient and re-appropriating practices. Therefore, we focus on two initiatives working to redefine precarity and disability beyond its overly pejorative undertones. This paper compiles and engages some of the embodied and discursive knowledges developed by these two activist initiatives based in Madrid: Precarias a la Deriva, and Foro de Vida Independiente y Divertad.

Both projects, independently and collaborating among them, showcase graphic examples and provide insightful lessons for “dissidence from dispossession” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013) and “resistance within vulnerability” ( Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016; Maguire 2016). This radical engagement with vulnerability shows its productive openings, this time offered by two unique projects for thought in action.