Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios: A decolonial feminist geographical methodology to conduct research with migrant women

Abstract

ABSTRACT Global North migration studies have historically been marked by colonising discourses partially stemming from methodological nationalism tendencies and a limited engagement with the body. In particular, Anglophone studies on intimate partner violence against migrant women have largely reproduced problematic gendered culturalist representations, which may be symptomatic of a methodological scarcity of research with, for and/or by – rather than about migrants. Expanding on methodological attempts to counter these trends, this paper proposes a decolonial feminist geographical praxis for migration studies, which builds on existing efforts to decolonise feminist geographical methodologies. Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios is a travelling methodology to conduct decolonial feminist geographical research with migrant women. As a Brazilian woman researching Latin American women’s experiences of intimate and state violence(s) and resistance in England, I implemented this methodology in a Global North context of COVID-19 restrictions. Mobilising and adapting Cuerpo-Territorio (“Body-Territory”), as an embodied Latin American ontology and as a method, I methodologically advance critical migration studies and feminist geopolitics’ perspectives towards a decolonial direction. This approach decolonises migration research by proposing a multi-scalar methodological framework that centres on a decolonial feminist understanding of the body, as the first territory-scale of analysis and from which knowledge is critically produced.