For a Transfeminist Bioethics, Therapeutic Itineraries and Deconstruction of Coloniality

Abstract

Abstract: This essay proposes a transfeminist inflection for contemporary bioethics, articulating therapeutic itineraries and deconstruction of coloniality as axes of an insurgent epistemology. He argues that hegemonic bioethics, by operating under cisheteronormative and colonial regimes of valuing life, produces dissident bodies as excess, contamination, or discard. In dialogue with the perspectives of Mel Y. Chen, Abigail Campos Leal, Nat Raha, Mijke van der Drift and with the anthropological literature on therapeutic itineraries, she elaborates care as a situated practice of life composition forged in precariousness, improvisation and in paths that escape the hegemonic biomedical logic. It argues that a transfeminist bioethics operates by deconstructing coloniality: it refuses the central categories of modern knowledge to produce knowledge from colonial fractures and from situated practices of survival. Transfeminist bioethics, therefore, calls us to rethink life, care, and health from the fragmentary and inventive paths that dissident bodies build in order to persist.