Counter-maps of body-territory: Gender-based violence in Mexico

Abstract

This paper is an exercise in counter-mapping gender-based violence, both its lived experience and the need for safe passage. Building on the concept of body-territory introduced by feminist geographers in Latin America, gender-based violence is plotted by its would be objects: female/feminized bodies. Each counter-map is drawn by those immediately moved by violence, by those forced to navigate its deadly consequences. William James offers insight into the spatio-temporal implications of this experience, revealing how the extensive lines of a counter-map are born of intensities felt in sensation and later reflected on in thought. Counter-maps are drawn by thinking-feeling bodies to break with any fixed domain: plotted are individual memories and shared pieces of advice that are accumulated across time to give the map a unique history, and that encompass diverse events to give the map a unique spatiality. Mapped is the experience of gender-based violence in Puebla, Mexico, so as to challenge official cartographic practices and rework their deadly effects.