Inextricably Tied: Gender, Race, Chronic Illness, and Disability in the Works of Edelma Zapata Pérez

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the works of Colombian author Edelma Zapata Pérez as disability life writing, that is, literature that gives the disabled author agency (Couser). Since Zapata Pérez was multi-ethnic and disabled, Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality is utilized to demonstrate that these identities are intertwined in her life and writings. Subsequently, Zapata Pérez’s representations of disability are examined via Siebers’s idea of complex embodiment, which “raises awareness of the effects of disabling environments on people’s lived experience of the body, but it emphasizes as well that some factors affecting disability, such as chronic pain, secondary health effects, and aging, derive from the body.”