Cuidado y agenciamiento corporal: políticas del cuidado en la Fundación GAAT de Bogotá

Abstract

Within the context of struggles for recognition and dignity of people with trans life experiences (PCEDVT) in Colombia, the Grupo de Acción y Apoyo a Personas Trans (GAAT) Foundation has played a key role by developing politics of care that confront structural exclusion and position themselves as political tools against the systemic violence faced by this population. Through strategies such as training, psychosocial support, and rights advocacy, GAAT has generated organizational spaces that guarantee access to essential resources while simultaneously fostering processes of self-management and autonomy in a context historically structured to marginalize and deprive trans people of their right to exist with dignity. This study examines the relationship between care and bodily agency, understood as the capacity of people with trans life experiences to inhabit their bodies through self-determination, challenge the normative meanings imposed upon them, and generate new forms of existence. Within this framework, bodily agency becomes a central dimension of trans subjectivation in resistance, as it allows the body to be re-signified as a political, affective, and creative territory. Supporting these processes through care involves configuring material and symbolic conditions that enable access to health, education, and employment, as well as the subjective and political recognition of trans identities in environments free from violence and structural exclusion. The research proposes a critical and innovative approach by analyzing care not as an assistentialist act but as a political and epistemic technology that has been appropriated and re-signified by organizations such as GAAT to challenge the gender regime and produce alternative forms of collective sustenance. While traditional politics of care have been historically linked to the feminization of labor and the reproduction of domestic work, GAAT deploys a situated politics of care that operates as a device of resistance, self-governance, and production of subjectivities. Methodologically, the study is based on a documentary and critical discourse analysis of the policies implemented by GAAT, articulated with conceptual frameworks such as post-gender perspectives, situated epistemologies, and care theories. The corpus was examined through an analytical matrix, an adapted characterization tool based on Carol Thomas (2019), and a rhizomatic diagram that allowed the mapping of the social, cultural, political, economic, and epistemic dimensions of care. The findings reveal that GAAT’s politics of care not only generate material and symbolic conditions for a dignified trans existence but also radically transform the way care is conceptualized and practiced in society. Rather than reproducing institutional or assistentialist logics, these practices become catalysts for resistance, agency, and structural transformation. This work fills a gap in the literature on politics of care by analyzing care as a strategy of trans self-governance from a Latin American, feminist, and situated perspective, demonstrating that practices of care not only sustain lives but also help to institute possible worlds.