Description
This paper asks what limits the search for disappeared gender- and sexually dissident persons encounters today, and how these might be overcome. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with women and LGBT+ searchers in Medellín, Colombia, it examines the reach and limits of human rights and transitional justice frameworks in accounting for lives and deaths targeted by heteronormative and lethal violence. In Colombia’s post-accord context of no-war-no-peace, social families of buscadoras y buscadores, formed by kin, activists, and LGBT+ communities, mobilise gender-diverse solidarities and relational care to recover, remember, and dignify lives erased by historic discrimination and everyday violence in and beyond conflict.
These collectives do more than locate remains or identify names: they produce counter-knowledges and alternative archives of dissident life, expanding what counts as justice, mourning, and memory. Their everyday practices of search confront the necropolitical order that renders sexual and gender-dissident bodies disposable, transforming spaces of grief into acts of body-territorial resistance and relational world-making.
Foregrounding feminist decolonial epistemic-ontological and ethical innovations emerging from Colombia’s search movements, the paper contributes to new directions in International Studies by rethinking how the discipline conceptualises violence, dignity, and justice in contexts where peace accords coexist with ongoing and historic violence. It shows how Southern feminist and gender- and sexually dissident practices of search generate theoretical and methodological insights that make International Studies more responsive to plural experiences of survival and ambiguous loss in and beyond conflict.
