Senses, Emotions and Gender Violence in Public Spaces. Reflections on a Sensory Workshop

This paper analyzes the reception of a fanzine that was part of the “Siento luego resisto” exhibition. Trans-sensorial landscapes of gender violence* (Mexico City, Mx.; Brighton, UK, 2023, 2024). This exhibition was part of a larger project involving artists and social science researchers from the University of Brighton and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana to raise awareness of gender-based violence. This paper aims to identify some sensory and emotional elements that the artistic narrative detonates and the strategies of resistance they inspire. The methodology we used for the analysis of the reception of the fanzine gathers the findings of the workshop “Sensorial maps of violence: experiences, listening and feminist resistance” that we designed and taught in the framework of the exhibition. Our workshop was attended by 51 people, of which 84.3% (n=43) were women and 15.7% (n=8) were men. As for the average age of the participants, the majority group is between 18 and 25 years old and represents 64.7% (n=33). The majority profile of the people who participated in the workshop were university urban middle-class women. We want to discuss the methodological and ethical implications of this work, as well as the strategies employed to carry out care and self-care for the participants and ourselves. One of these strategies was to ask participants to talk and discuss collectively not only their sensitive experiences of violence in public spaces but also how they imagined a world free of gender-based violence in the future.

* https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/activities/i-feel-therefore-i-resist-2