Mapping the Body: Feminist-Queer Interventions in the Reproduction of Academic Knowledge

Abstract (English)

Anthropology's disciplinary colonial past and foundation to researching the "other" has produced and reinforced a project of humanism that is dependent on this "other" to legitimize who is included and excluded from the category of [human] knowledge producer (Berry et al., 2017; Loperana 2022). Feminist and queer traditions within and outside of the academy have provided oppositional projects that dispute so-called established knowledge and its historical paradigms. Refuting disciplinary boundaries and the interpretation of knowledge-bearing as an individualized process, this panel brings together a series of papers which seek to map the body along possibilities for cultivating epistemic justice.
Drawing on phenomenology and feminist anthropology, Vasquez examines the labor of knowledge production, particularly the psychosomatic bodies that navigate (U.S.) academic anthropology, and the field as a professional disciplinary body with stakes in reproducing particular canons, methodologies, and epistemics. Applying a queer analytic to anthropology research, Rodriguez examines the IRB process as an epistemic compromise. Building on Avery Gordon (2008) and Viviana Beatriz MacManus (2024), Gamez analyzes the multifaceted ways radical women in Guatemala and their sociopolitical formations have developed life-affirming strategies against what she calls the afterlives of genocide, that both expose violent systems of power present in the Genocidal period and expose radical women in criminalized traditions (Gordon 2008; MacManus 2020). Finally, Macal discusses the concept of cartographies of healing, a decolonial feminist approach that examines and describes the embodied transformative memory of the groups and women who seek justice in Guatemala.