Walking as Political Utterance: The Walking Subjects and the Production of Space

Abstract

In this work, we challenge supposedly neutral imaginaries of what walking methodologies consist of, unveiling social and political dimensions and addressing the production of embodied spaces involved in the act of walking. We adopt the concept of intersectionality to construct an analysis that considers the effects of the colonial, racist, and sexist historical scheme on the production of knowledge. We understand that the current globalization project produces a global subject that is not racialized, and therefore White. And it is marked by gender norms, and therefore, masculine and heterosexual. These characteristics give the person the privilege of moving “naturally,” without the need to justify physical, social, and political corporealities. In the walking research carried out by subjects who deviate from such global parameters, we identified the interruption of walking as an epistemological event that displaces them from the space they are producing. We also analyzed the idea of risk produced to the researchers when they are identified as someone who “does not belong” to that space. We argue that the interaction among gender, race, and place imposes a local condition to the knowledge produced by Afro-Latin American walking researchers. Finally, we defend the walking methodologies as a political statute in the occupation of simultaneously physical and epistemological spaces because the subject’s position and the power relations that are addressed in the act of walking require consideration.