Cathy MCILWAINE, King's College London, United Kingdom
Moniza RIZZINI ANSARI, King's College London, United Kingdom
A large body of work in Latin America explores how urban violence in the region’s urban margins has severe long-term affective and deadly consequences for racialised women, both in the public and the private sphere, capturing the physical and emotional trauma created by structural racism. Advancing feminist and decolonial geographical approaches to countermapping, the paper explores women’s spatialised and embodied resistance to intersectional forms violence in the favelas of Maré (in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) through a participative and creative mapping experience. This experience is part of a broader multi-method research project that investigates how women develop practices to cope with and combat gendered violence in contexts of decimated economic livelihoods, armed urban conflict and endemic state neglect. Combining body maps and community maps created by women residents of Maré, we analyse their intricate demarcations of both unsafe and potent sites (in the city and the home) and reflect on the emergence of intersectional activism to build new urban experiences for favela women in Rio de Janeiro at large. Drawing on Verónica Gago’s (2019) work as well as with key Afro-Brazilian feminists (Gonzalez, 1988; Nascimento, 2021), we highlight how a growing number of feminist groups have been created in Maré to reconstruct ancestral and collective memory and to promote measures of self-care (following Lorde, 2006 [1980]) through which women process embodied trauma and creatively develop new forms of ‘potencia feminista’. Of particular relevance in the case of Maré is its women-led community history in which the building of emotional bonds in collective engagements has been historically reconfigured into political action to reclaim urban rights to all of Maré’s residents.
Mots clés : Gendered violence |Brazil|Ancestry | Self-care |Resistance
A104668CM