Abstract
This research examines the experiences of violence and resistance among Latin American migrant women in England, particularly those based in London. In addressing the tendency of existing work to focus on specific nationality groups and/or emphasized intra-community violence, it also develops an innovative theoretical decolonial feminist geographical approach to understanding violence and migration. More specifically, it investigates the ways in which coloniality informs women’s experiences across multi-scalar spatialities and temporalities. It does this through an exploration of the territorialized effects of violence and resistance, beginning with the body as the first territory-scale, connecting to territorialities at other scales.My analysis builds on engaged empirical research including three months of participant observation within the London-based charity Latin American Women’s Aid together with the experience of having worked for this organisation for nearly four years; in-depth interviews with 10 front-line workers; life-story interviews with 20 Latin American survivors and Body-Territory maps crafted by 10 of these. Methodologically, the thesis makes original contributions to a decolonial feminist geographical praxis for migration studies by developing Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios as a methodology that links a feminist geopolitics approach to migration with a decolonial feminist geographical embodiment praxis. This builds on and adapts Cuerpo-Territorio (‘Body-Territory’) as an embodied Latin American ontology and method.
Through this methodological approach, this research provides new empirical understandings of Latin American migrant women’s experiences of violence and resistance in England, especially in terms of the relationship between state violence, intimate violence and the embodied effects of those. Conceptually, it provides three main theoretical contributions substantiated through the notions of state and (state- sponsored) intimate border violence; the spatialised coloniality of abuse; and spatialised embodied resistance(s). Advancing a decolonial feminist geopolitical understanding of coloniality, necropolitics and the state of exception, the notion of state and (state-sponsored) intimate border violence traces the multi- scalar workings of border violence against migrant women, from state to state-sponsored intimate manifestations. From within the state territory, border violence territorialises migrant women’s bodies as annexed territories of exception upon which legal abandonment enables sovereign power to be exerted not only by the state but also abusive partners. I also investigate modern coloniality through unveiling discourses and practices that perpetuate and legitimise violence against Latin American migrant women by dehumanising them in racist sexualised capitalist territorial ways. To understand the dynamics, causes and consequences of this form of violence I focus on the spatialised coloniality of abuse. This emphasises the ways in which violence against Latin American migrant women is historically and currently underpinned by coloniality, operating intersectionally and spatially in a continuum across spatial-temporal scales, from colonialism into the present. Finally, investigating Latin American migrant women’s resistance to border violence and the spatialised coloniality of abuse I develop the concept of spatialised embodied resistance(s). This analytical construct challenges views of migrant women who experience violence as passive victims, by recognising how their resistance is spatially constrained and contingent on spatialised embodied colonial imaginaries, therefore often manifested in small, quiet, embodied, collective or simply unconventional ways.
| Date of Award | 1 Jan 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Cathy McIlwaine (Supervisor) & Majed Akhter (Supervisor) |