Moving, waiting, searching across borders: Gendered geographies of violence, disappearance and contestation in southern Mexico

Women displaced by violence from Central America are the protagonists of this dissertation. Their intimate stories and acts of survival and care are foregrounded as they move, wait and search in social spaces in southern Mexico. They are mobilized to reconceptualize mainstream academic, political and humanitarian thinking about bordering practices as integral parts of states’ tactics to control people’s movement only. The dissertation delves into migrant and body-territory epistemologies of everyday politics, arts-based contestations and performative acts, revealing and making present the bodies, spatialities, and knowledges that populate a geopolitically manufactured border and migration “crisis” in southern Mexico. The research explores bordering practices at the scale of their everyday implementation on the ground, theorizing how borders and bordering as a violent state-driven apparatus operate, how it is experienced differently, whom it impacts, and how it is negotiated across space and time. The research is situated at the intersection of political geography, critical border studies, refugee studies and transnational feminist approaches. The study and grounded analysis originate from feminist ethnographic and participatory action research with migrant women, feminist and women’s groups, collectives searching for the disappeared and others accompanying border-crossers in 2022-23. The methods applied include life history narratives, in-depth semi-structured interviews, workshops, and the accompaniment of people moving, waiting and searching along migratory routes. This dissertation contributes to debates on bordering practices, gender violence, migrant disappearances, and care, making four unique contributions to the literature. First, the methodological approach fosters novel narratives about borders and the acts of people crossing them despite fears. Second, the research reveals a gendered and intimate geopolitical analysis that highlights women’s experiences and survival strategies and considers their exclusion to move quickly across borders that shape and are shaped by state practices. Third, the research re-conceptualizes the outcomes of bordering practices, exposing the protagonism and spaces of care while underlining the experience of waiting in borderlands, all of which are frequently overlooked and undocumented. Finally, the research reads disappearances as violence towards (feminized) migrant bodies and territories and probes subsequent performative searches by friends and family that defy the salient maternalist and state-centric discourses.

Author dc:creator

• Biorklund Belliveau, Linn Maria Gunilla

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hyndman, Jennifer

• Geography
• Gender studies
• Latin American studies

Statement dc:rights

• Author owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10315/42411

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:yorkspace.library.yorku.ca:10315/42411