Description
The materiality of (living, dead and surviving) bodies has been highlighted as a productive element of resistance against gender violence in Latin America. According to De Souza (2019), “claiming back the situatedness and positionality of bodies has allowed feminists to defy the mind/body dualism that structures most of Western philosophy and retrieve the centrality of questions of gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, nationality and so on to the structuring of the political” (p.91). While acknowledging the potential of feminist solidarities to disrupt and open up the political space to other worlds, this article aims at furthering the debate by also considering the precarity of these bodies’ geopolitical positions. The fact that certain bodies are exposed and/or continuously treated as exceeding dominant political structures may be read through their inherent potential for disruption and politicization. However, their exposure and visibility are themselves symptoms of their ‘dislocation’ from dominant representations / expectations of presence in ‘space’. In other words, these bodies exceed the “map” and they are seen particularly because they are conceived as ‘out of place’. Recognition through dislocation often imposes its own text inhibiting any other texts written in/expressed through these bodies to be read/heard. Drawing on the literature on feminist geopolitics and decolonial feminism, this paper aims at exploring obstacles and subjective boundaries imposed on ‘subaltern’ bodies by geopolitical representations, asking after the conditions for gendered geographies of visibility, recognition and agency.
*De Souza, Natália. (2019). When the Body Speaks (to) the Political: Feminist Activism in Latin America and the Quest for Alternative Democratic Futures. Contexto Internacional. 41. 89-112. 10.1590/s0102-8529.2019410100005.
