Abstract: This talk considers eighteenth-century Peruvian civil cases involving enslaved Africans as sites for articulating and negotiating ideas about bodies, disability, and fitness. Afforded permission to sue their owners in the Spanish Empire's courts, enslaved litigants navigated legal channels to attain what historian Michele McKinley describes as "fractional freedoms," incremental improvements to their circumstances. Enslaved litigants petitioned for these gains by accusing owners of cruelty, neglect, or overwork and by claiming existing or resulting bodily injury, disease, or mental unwellness. Central to their legal strategies was the act of drawing attention to their own bodies; enslaved litigants often petitioned to have physicians and surgeons inspect them to confirm the presence or absence of disability. Through analysis of multiple civil cases, I argue this litigation gave rise to a concept of disability based not on liberal notions of universal rights, but rather on enslaved litigants' claims to early modern legal principles that recognized forms of corporate status based on vulnerability, exclusion, and suffering that under Spanish law could warrant and require protection.