Spatialities of embodiment: collective feminist body-mapping with Amazonian indigenous girls and the decolonizing of research

Keywords: Decolonizing research, body-mapping, indigenous feminist geographies, cuerpo-territorio
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 45

Abstract

Decoloniality in research and knowledge production processes has gained prominence in current debates about the politics of fieldwork and methodological designs that accompany it. Although these debates have prompted powerful interrogations about crafting ethical and participatory research, few are the cases that have managed to tangibly address the problematizations raised in the theory. My research, setting in motion the indigenous feminist notion of cuerpo-territorio, proposes body-mapping as a method capable of unraveling the most intimate embodiments of race, gender, age, and place of the body and the territory as an indivisible space. Drawing from a feminist participatory mapping workshop with Amazonian indigenous women and girls from a community where a Chinese company builds a highway, I develop a proposal of a decolonial feminist cartography for the examination of their experiences with the intervention of capital in their body and territory. Mapping their cuerpo-territorio, I argue, women and girls are able to mobilize and dispute the physical and affective spatializations of their territory re-drawing it from the visceral, sensorial, and embodied everyday-use scales that are of interest of feminist geography. Body-territory mapping, besides being capable of challenging binary and Cartesian notions of the inside/outside, emotion/rationality, and material/subjective, opens up space for dissent, contradiction, and ambiguity. This collective, sensitive, and visual methodology, invites us to contest and destabilize both fatalistic and revolutionary narratives usually imposed from above. This method centers the embodied geographies engendered in spaces disputed by global powers such as China.