Contentious Bodies: The Place, Race, and Gender of Victimhood in Colombia

Abstract

This article addresses the ways in which Afro‐Colombians in the region of María la Baja, Colombia, re‐signify their contentious bodies amidst parallel peace and war efforts. After over sixty years of war, the government and armed paramilitary forces continue to frame Afro‐Colombian campesinos (rural farmers) as both innocent victims and guerrilla combatants. Given the legacies of racialized marginalization, how do Afro‐Colombian communities stake claims to lost land and violent pasts when their very bodies are presumed to challenge their innocence? I illustrate how individuals use their contentious bodies to resist militant and bureaucratic attempts to label them as perpetrators of violence. Afro‐Colombian farmers enact embodied evidence, such as calloused farming hands, to assert their dignity and victimization. Through these corporeal and visual self‐assertions, I examine the ways in which intersectional signifiers—including territory, ethnicity, gender, and class—are simultaneously read and performed within the context of war and peacetime violence.