This article examines the 1 July 1992 massacre of 18 Indigenous males and the concurrent cutting off of the hair of their wives and/or female kin carried out by the Shining Path in the Andean village of Huamanquiquia (Fajardo province, Ayacucho region). Based on first-hand accounts of the Maoist insurgents and the Indigenous women, I frame these events as a local case study of gendered atrocity that was experienced differently by men and women, focusing on the symbolic violence of haircutting. While this atrocity reflects some well-known patterns seen in other armed conflicts, it is shaped by two key factors specific to the time and place: first, particular understandings of the significance of hair within broader Andean cosmologies; second, tensions within the Shining Path movement at a key juncture in the war. I show that the Andean insurgents knew about the symbolic dimensions of haircutting, a crime against the integrity of the human body–soul – one understood to cause endless suffering in the journey to the afterlife in the Andean worldview – but they underplayed them. From this viewpoint, haircutting meant the mutilation of women’s physical integrity, with psychological, social and gender implications.

This article makes the case for recognizing the connection between the Poor Law and the Adoption of Children Act 1926. A child who received welfare under the Poor Law could be de facto adopted by the guardians as early as the late-nineteenth century. Very little is known about this type of de facto adoption which is a significant gap because over 10,000 children were adopted in this way, and it provided the basis for latter de jure adoption. This article initiates the process of filling this gap by exploring archival resources to determine why children were de facto adopted under the Poor Law before the introduction of de jure adoption in 1926. Understanding this form of de facto adoption is important because it was justified as a mechanism of child protection, but this article contends it was another form of punishment designed for families experiencing material deprivation which directly influenced the law on de jure adoption in England. By establishing the connection between the 1926 Act and its Poor Law predecessor, the de jure adoption framework can be contextualized within its wider social history which is embedded in class conflict and distrust toward impoverished families.

This article, based on eighteen months of fieldwork with an organization of women with disabilities in Uganda, considers discourses about bodilymental variation that circulated among members and non-members of the organization. I identify two common discourses, based on the words obulema (disability) and abaceke (weak people). The terms are linguistically and conceptually divergent. Obulema (disability) is an individual condition, referencing a non-normative embodied state that conveys disadvantage. Conversely, recognizing someone as an omuceke (a weak person) requires attending to a person’s bodymind and their socio-economic circumstances and relationships. While obulema is an objectified individual category connected to citizenship and defined through the legal-political realm, whether someone is an omuceke is determined interpersonally. Following Oche Onazi’s suggestion that rights-based and relational approaches to disability justice, while fundamentally different, might not be incompatible, I investigate their interaction during a land dispute between a woman with visual impairment and her neighbours. I combine analysis of how different ways of talking about bodilymental difference invoke divergent logical forms of obligations with attention to the relational contexts in which these obligations apply in practice. This novel approach offers a resource for understanding the complex intersections between discourses about bodymind variation, particularly in postcolonial settings.