Professor Susan Antebi is a leading voice in the study of disability, corporeality and human difference in Mexican cultural production. She is part of a select group of researchers recognized in 2025 by the Dean’s Research Excellence Awards, which celebrate the outstanding and influential scholarship emerging from across the Faculty of Arts & Science.
Professor Antebi did not come to disability studies through theory alone. Her interest developed gradually, built as much by personal experience as by academic work. Long before disability studies gained recognition within Latin American literary and cultural scholarship, she was already thinking about how bodies and minds are classified, treated, and spoken about. Those questions were informed, in part, by her own experiences with outpatient psychiatric care.
She relates one of these formative episodes in the introduction to her book Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production. She was a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1990s. On a humid spring afternoon, she exited the campus and cycled towards Belmont, Massachusetts, for a doctor’s appointment. The psychiatrist at the hospital would see her for twenty minutes. She was late and out of breath. Inside the appointment room, the questions came. At one point, the doctor asked her to start at one hundred and count backward, subtracting seven each time. It felt like an exam, an academic test disguised as a medical one. Was this a measure of intelligence? Of mental health? Of compliance? Knowing she was being tested made her anxious, but it also made her alert to how easily evaluation slips into diagnosis, how quickly a person can be sorted, labeled, and placed within a system. In a teaching hospital, she realized, one is not only examined; one may also become research material.
Looking back years later, Antebi recognizes this experience traces an imaginary arc between the world of study and the world of being studied, between institutional authority and lived vulnerability. Those crossings would later contribute to her work in disability studies, otherness, and corporeality in Latin American literature and culture. Her research did not emerge from a single event but from a slow accumulation of questions not only about monstrosity and normalcy but also about how bodies are read, categorized, and managed, and about what gets lost when difference is treated as a problem to be fixed.
In this conversation, Antebi reflects on that early moment and the path that followed: from graduate school in the 1990s to a body of work that has helped define Latin American literary and cultural disability studies. Professor in the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, she speaks about archives and films, about eugenics and empathy, about the risks of categorization and the necessity of critical perception. At its core, her work insists on something simple: that disability is not a deficit but a way of being in the world, one that can expand imagination and invite us to see others, and ourselves, with greater care.
What first drew you to the study of disability and corporeality in Latin American cultural production?
During my doctoral research, I was interested in the genres of freak-show, circus side show and ethnographic spectacle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the way these spectacles depicted various forms of ‘otherness’. This would include disability, unusual physiques, and racialized bodies. Often such displays would conflate these differences, so that racialized people were depicted as disabled or monstrous, and disabled people were depicted as belonging to another ‘race.’ My first book, Carnal Inscriptions, which grew out of my doctoral research, looked at the role of freak-show style presentations in Latin American literature and performance art. It also explored how disability and other forms of bodily difference shape literary texts. A key issue for me in this project was to engage with how the concept of monstrosity as a metaphor has shaped Latin American literary studies, and Latin Americanist thought more broadly.
The idea of the monster, as in the case of Caliban (an anagram of the Spanish, canibal), often serves as an overarching metaphor of otherness, which can be rejected, reclaimed and tossed back and forth, applied to individuals or populations. But the limitation of this metaphor is that it often does not attend to the particularity of human experience, nor to the materiality of the human body. Although I work with texts, I argue that there is a way of paying attention to literary texts that is more closely attuned to the details and differences that an all-encompassing metaphor might miss. This is also a way of paying attention to the relationship between the material body and the text (an ancient and common problem for scholars of literature).
How has your research evolved since your early work in disability studies, and how has this evolution shaped your focus on Mexico, archival research, and your most recent book, Embodied Archive?
Since this first project, I have continued my research in a disability studies framework. This includes an active questioning of what constitutes ‘normalcy’, and of how the boundaries of the normal (especially the normal person, and the normal body) have come to be defined. It also includes exploration of how disability defines and shapes literature, culture, and the world, and how disability can be central to practices of reading, writing and research. More specifically, my research has shifted towards a focus on Mexico, including literary and archival documents.
In my most recent book, Embodied Archive, I considered documents from the period of the 1920s to the 1940s (following the Mexican Revolution), and how public health and education institutions shaped ideas of health, progress, and national identity through this period. In these archival documents, disability appears as sickness, aberration, abnormality or pathology, but also as an uncertain threat, something that may have existed in the past, or that may come to occur in the future, what I refer to as contingent disability. Through this work I have continued to be interested in the archive as central to my research and writing practice. The ‘embodied archive’ entails the moment of encounter with archival documents, and the way that this experience continues to shape disability as lived reality in the present day.
You explore the intersection of disability studies and Latin American discourses of human difference. Could you give an example of how these two perspectives come together in your work?
One example could be a film I have written about, Los olvidados, (The Young and the Damned), directed by the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, but shot in Mexico with Mexican actors. The 1950 film offers a social critique of extreme economic inequality and its effects on children in a rapidly urbanizing Mexico City. This is a common theme in literary and cinematic representations of Latin American cities, and here emphasizes the unfulfilled promises of the Mexican Revolution. But in addition, disability makes various appearances in this film, linked to poverty and violence, and also to Buñuel’s grotesque corporeal aesthetics. What is especially interesting to me here is the way disability, whether evoked through blindness, feigned injury, references to epilepsy, or to inherited criminality, connects different characters together and circulates between them, suggesting both vulnerability and strategies of survival. I also think it’s important to read this film in the context of Mexican hygiene and eugenics campaigns of the first decades of the twentieth century, which means in turn understanding the bodies of the characters and the populations they evoke as both promise and threat.
Your work examines how ideas about eugenics have shaped Mexico and the Americas, and how unusual or extraordinary characters appear in stories and performances. What drew you to these subjects, and what do you hope people take away from your research?
In the introduction to my book, Embodied Archive, I talk a little bit about how I might respond to the question of how I became interested in this topic, and in disability studies more generally. It is in part because of my own experiences with outpatient psychiatric services—with psychiatric symptoms, treatments, and the blurring of the two. However, every time I answer this question I give a different answer, which is to say that there isn’t necessarily one truth to this, and that in any case, people are likely to believe whatever they choose.
My interest in ideas about eugenics in Mexico grew from a sense that disability and human difference are continuously exposed to threats of categorization, assimilation, and eradication, and that in this sense, eugenics needs to be understood in broad terms, and not just as a strictly defined form of reproductive control. I hope that people who read my work will grasp that disability in narrative and culture has the potential to unsettle what we think we know, and also that it can produce new and compelling ways of perceiving the world.
How has this field evolved since you began working in it, and what questions or challenges feel most urgent today?
I would describe my work as situated in the area of Latin American literary and cultural disability studies. This is because there are scholars working in separate, but related areas of Latin American disability studies, in history, anthropology, sociology and other social sciences. There is important work in areas such as education and human rights, and there are scholars employing more quantitative approaches. All of these areas and more are relevant to the broader field of Latin American disability studies. My contribution has been primarily to literary and cultural studies within this field, although also in dialogue with scholars from other areas and disciplines.
When I began my doctoral research in the 1990s, I found little if any scholarship from the Canadian or US academy focused on Latin American literary and cultural disability studies. It was a time in which exciting new work in Anglo-American disability studies was blossoming, and many of my interlocutors were from the US academy. However, disability studies in Latin America are not new; the issue is more that transnational and trans-regional communication between scholars, especially between North and South, does not always occur. In the north, we often fail to read the work of our colleagues in the south, and there is always a risk of imposing critical paradigms from locations of privilege, or of misconstruing regional and disciplinary differences.
I think that over the past few decades, scholars have started to pay more attention to this issue, and there has been an improved circulation of ideas and dialogue. But this continues to be an urgent area of concern for Latin American disability studies and for global disability studies. One of the most important changes I have noted in Latin American literary and cultural studies is that disability studies is no longer seen as a narrow, niche, or minor area, but instead occupies significant critical space in journals and at conferences, and has attracted the interest of more graduate students in recent years.
In my current research and writing I consider ongoing and historical interconnections between disability, including madness, and experiences of magic or the paranormal, both within and beyond the Mexican context. I am especially interested here in disability as ‘poiesis’, or as the creative rendering of the world, so this is something that feels especially urgent to me right now.
I am also involved in a collaborative network on eugenic legacies and anti-eugenics. Given the rightward political shift in much of Latin America and North America, combined with economic austerity, and the devalorization or even pathologization of many individuals and populations, I think that paying attention, in a historically-informed way, to how eugenic ideas may be finding their way back into our contemporary world, is especially crucial.
How has your time at the University of Toronto supported your research journey?
I am very grateful to have been supported over the years by fantastic colleagues in ISPLAS (formerly Spanish and Portuguese), and at the University of Toronto more broadly. I have had the opportunity to teach graduate and undergraduate classes on Latin American disability studies and related topics and have been inspired by students to develop and rethink my work, sometimes in unexpected ways. Our students are truly exceptional, and it is a privilege to teach in ISPLAS. I have also hired graduate students to assist me in archival research and learned a lot from that collaborative process. Beyond ISPLAS, spaces at U of T such as the Centre for Global Disability Studies, and the Department of Social Justice Education at OISE have offered an extraordinary community of disability studies scholars.
Understanding the Field: A Few Words That Matter
Corporeality refers to the state or condition of having and being a physical body — not just the biological facts of the body, but how embodiment shapes experience, perception, and social interaction. In disability studies, it illuminates how bodily differences are socially constructed and experienced, not just biologically determined.
Disability studies is an academic interdisciplinary field that examines disability not only as a medical or biological condition, but as a social, cultural, political, and historical phenomenon. Disability studies explore identity, power, representation, rights, and inclusion and integrate perspectives from sociology, cultural studies, history, law, and ethics.
Eugenics is a pseudo-science and a social movement concerned with improving human populations by favouring the reproduction, thriving, and social value of certain people or traits over others.
The meaning of monstrosity and of the monster varies greatly from one historical or cultural location to another. In general, monstrosity serves to signify deviance, abnormality and threats to the "norm." The monster also threatens prior categories and classifications, and although it may appear in embodied form, it is difficult to pin down, and tends to represent something beyond itself.
Describes the process by which individuals or groups are perceived and treated as fundamentally different, separate, or outside the presumed norm. In cultural and disability studies, otherness is central to analyzing how certain bodies and minds are constructed as different, inferior, or abnormal, and how these constructions lead to exclusion, stigma, and unequal treatment.