Envisioning Vulnerability and Safety Otherwise: Artivist knowledge on gender-based violence in Mexico

Mexico has one of the world's highest rates of gender-based violence (GBV). GBV in Mexico is shaped by complex and intersecting factors including human trafficking, the war on drugs, failures of the Mexican state, and the role of cartels, as well as cultural and social factors like the pervasiveness of machismo and patriarchal norms. In addition, like elsewhere, GBV itself is multifaceted and diverse in Mexico, shaped by intersecting axes of oppression such as gender (including trans*/cis status), age, race and ethnicity, sexuality, socio-economic status, and migration/(un)documented status.

Within this context, a vibrant and multifaceted feminist movement has surged in the last decade, demanding an end to this epidemic of GBV. The feminist movement in Mexico is characterised by its use of creative strategies, many of which fall into the category of 'artivism': the use of arts-based methods to pursue social movement goals. The actions carried out by artivist groups use culture to challenge cultural norms.

Moreover, the process of creating, designing and executing these projects constitutes a form of collaborative feminist knowledge creation, through which activists use lived experience, feminist theory and activist strategies to create new understandings of what it means to achieve justice for survivors of gender-based violence.

This project uses participatory, arts-based research methods to build knowledge in collaboration with a diverse collection of artivists working against GBV. We do this in pursuit of two specific but interlocking aims. First, we will produce new insights into the diversity of experiences of GBV, and into everyday resistance strategies.

This will include recognition of the specific vulnerabilities that anti-GBV activists experience in Mexico, where their work often puts them at risk of violence. Second, we will explore artivism's power to break the mould of dominant ways of thinking about GBV, and to imagine new possibilities for understanding and generating safety outside of the limiting criminal justice frameworks provided by the state.

We draw on two main methods: photovoice, and zine making, and the outputs we create will allow us to make significant contributions both within and beyond academia. Our academic outputs will make a significant contribution to scholarship on GBV and on the use of arts-based methods. Empirically, we will create knowledge about intersectionally-mediated experiences of everyday vulnerabilities to GBV in Mexico, and about how people navigate and resist these in order to maximise their safety.

In addition, we will develop arguments about how we might think outside of conventional assumptions to imagine a world without GBV. Our contributions will be of interest to scholars of politics, social movement studies, gender studies, Latin American studies, and art studies.

On the impact side, we will co-produce a zine together with artivists that will communicate knowledge about vulnerability, safety, building a world without GBV, and artivism as method. Published in both Spanish and English, the zine will be targeted towards activists hoping to find new tools for their work, and towards NGOs and policymakers looking to improve responses to and efforts to end GBV.

It will thus open space for different high-level conversations about the orientation of efforts to end GBV and the allocation of resources. It will be a powerful tool in promoting both South-South and South-North learning, particularly across other Latin American contexts but also further afield.