The Impossible Body: Biopolitics, Digital Networks, and the Historical Production of Normality in Narratives of Women with Disabilities in Contemporary Brazil

Abstract

This article analyzes how digital narratives produced by women with physical disabilities in Brazil participate in the production and contestation of contemporary regimes of bodily normalization. Situated within the fields of History of the Present Time and Digital History, the study adopts a qualitative historical-discursive approach, articulating contributions from Foucauldian biopolitics, feminist studies, crip theory, and discussions on digital platforms and algorithmic visibility. The documentary corpus consists of 26 profiles and blogs produced between 2010 and 2025, analyzed through discursive regularities related to autonomy, sexuality, social recognition, bodily aesthetics, and digital performance. The findings demonstrate that digital platforms do not function as neutral spaces of expression, but as dispositifs that reorganize contemporary criteria of bodily intelligibility and recognition. Four predominant discursive regimes were identified: productivity as a condition of social legitimacy; sexuality as a dispute over intelligibility; moral economies of affective visibility; and processes of aesthetic normalization of disability. Based on these dynamics, the article proposes the analytical category of the impossible body, understood as the expression of contradictory demands imposed on women with disabilities in contemporary digital environments. The study concludes that the expansion of public visibility of disability does not represent the disappearance of ableist norms, but rather their reorganization within circuits of regulated hypervisibility in which recognition, desire, productivity, and aesthetic adequacy become permanently negotiated.