Rethinking the practice of care in the context of Down’s syndrome

Abstract

The text reflects on the experience of caregivers of patients with Down’s syndrome in the city of Puebla. This article seeks to highlight three events: 1) the particularity of the link between care, gender and disability, 2) care as a bodily practice and 3) the importance of bodily interdependence as a feminist ethics of vulnerability. I believe that disability care opens up the possibility of challenging the restrictive expectations about what bodies can do, since insofar as caregiving subjects suffer (dis)ability, they also will experience a degree of bodily interdependence that affects they at very personal levels. Perhaps if there were a more radical study on the uniqueness of being affected by (dis)ability, it would be possible to shift the power of suffering to the power to act, linking the personal meaning of care to its political emergence.