This knot in my neck: Reflections on doctoral study in the search for feminist visual potencia

With the sounds of thousands of women’s voices still in my ear, feminist chants, reverberating across my skin, images of the day prior form behind my eyelids, coming back together in new arrangements of collages from throughout the day. I am momentarily unaware of my body; it is filled with that achy numbness that happens after intense exercise, or physical activity, or of a whole day spent marching and protesting. It’s only when I attempt to move, turn and lift myself out of bed that I realise I can’t. Pain causes me to recoil from myself, every position now unbearable. My neck can no longer sustain the weight of my head. My back, in shock at this ineptitude, has tensed tight, seeking to prop up at best it can, this shift in relation. Knots have formed all across my neck and upper back. Sore to the touch, it seemed something had forced its way through my skin and into my fascia.

It was the morning after 8M 2023 in Mexico City. The day had been full of emotional charge and affects filling the atmosphere. Feminist visual potencia was all around. The hairs on my arms stood on end as feminist chants filled me with joy, rage, and hope all at the same time. My eyes filled with tears as I watched performers get wrapped in black plastic bags replicating scenes of the killing of women. Those tears spread through my body as the words of Sonia returned to me on the murder of Fatima. The day was full, overflowing like the streets. There was so much to take in that I wondered how I possibly could.

This was the last research event after 6 weeks of delving into every related area that I could. It was for me the culmination of hours of interviews, of participating in events, of listening, absorbing, and trying to make sense of feminist visual potencia among all the violence and the pain that surrounded it. I had felt feminist affects attached to me as my skin and senses became even more sensitive to the violence of patriarchy. Fear overwhelmed me in different moments when my body would shrink into itself and my steps quickened, walking home, or feeling men’s gazes in the street. On the morning of the 9^th of March 2023 then as I woke up, it seemed that my neck and my body more broadly had gone on strike. They had had enough, just like the women striking 3 years earlier on the same day had. Enough of patriarchy, enough of violence, enough of all the pain and injustice that women and so many others face daily.

My doctoral research entailed a journey of searching for feminist visual potencia. Inspired by Veronica Gago’s concept of potencia feminista – a type of power which ‘refers to that collective capacity for creation’ (Gago, 2020: 12) – I proposed as a way of focusing on specifically, the visual and the importance of image-making practices through the concept of feminist visual potencia. Throughout this journey, the weight of various direct and related experiences caused knots in my neck and impressions on my mind-body. It has been these moments that have provoked reflections on what feminist visual potencia is, what it involves, and how I relate to it. Not solely academically or ‘intellectually’, but in terms of my feminist commitments, my personal, political experiences and my desires for other possibilities of institutionalised knowledge production which bridge these separations. Research embedded in my body during field work; I became submerged and implicated in my research which was surrounded by violence and injustice.

My doctoral research revolves around two fieldwork-based case studies organised more or less a year apart. The first I completed was in Mexico over 6 weeks cutting across February and March 2023. It was here I first came to feel my research embed into my body. The day after the mass 8M feminist march in Mexico City which had been the culmination of my research there, I woke up unable to move my neck as I shared earlier. I had felt deeply within my emotional, psychological, and physical bodies, the affective aspects of interviews, participation in events, and my emersion in feminist activism and the conditions which were fuelling it, specifically feminicides. The names, faces, and details of different women and their deaths started to take hold of me, to attach and puncture through my skin – shifting something within that went beyond simply helping me to understand on an intellectual level, the concept of feminist visual potencia. As I moved throughout the city, my hairs started to stand on end, and I became alert in public spaces as I moved through them with hyper-sensitivity and an acute awareness of how women seemingly just disappeared from metro stations, taxis, or on their way home.

One evening, weeks earlier, I went for a drink in a bar with a friend who happened to be in Mexico City at the same time. Both feeling the constant unwanted gaze and attention of a table of older men, we decided to leave after finishing our drinks. Even though I was staying a 10-minute walk down the road and she was living in the other direction, we called a shared Uber home. Images of news stories I read and cases I had become familiar with flooded my mind – the CCTV images of Adriana Fernanda López in a bar with friends having a drink, cutting to another CCTV image of a man who had also been at that same bar, carrying her lifeless body out of his apartment into his car, came back to me full of fear. This fear was being fuelled by feminicides, the impunity that surrounded them. I was searching for potencia, but I was overtaken by impotencia. My movements started to change, my body moved in public space differently, my skin on edge, my eyes hyper-alert.

The following day, I discussed the experience of the previous evening with the host of my accommodation. He suggested I get pepper spray, offering to give me some. I declined, yet I started to reflect on this visual strategy against possible physical harm. Pepper spray, a personal weapon against an individualised pathology of men willing to attack women, is inadequate in the face of patriarchy. I wanted a solution, a response that was not going to put the responsibility of not being killed onto me. I did not want to end up as another victim, blamed for whatever reason that society, the media, and the state could find. I didn’t want to just hurt the eyes of a potential attacker, I wanted something to destroy the gazes, images, and imaginaries that kill women again and again. How could visions of patriarchy be burned without using its own tools against it, I started to question? How could the cruelty and violence of feminicides not be made individual women’s responsibility, or about women’s capacity or lack thereof to protect themselves. I felt the weight of feminicides start to press down on me. Anger along with the fear started to gain on me.

Rather than shifting or destroying violent misogynistic gazes, it was my gaze that was being transformed through the research. Certain images stayed with me and changed how I saw everyday objects around me. After the interview with a family member of a girl who was murdered, her body found in a black bin bag, I started to see objects differently. The words of the young girl’s aunt were the first ones that made me realise the research would entangle me. It similarly showed me how listening to the testimonies of family members and survivors would take courage (Van der Kolk, 2015: 195). It would demand something of me that was beyond academic skill or ability, but just as important, it required empathy, solidarity, care, action, a search for potencia among the pain.

At the time of the interview, I did not understand what the experience of a loved one being brutally murdered and their body discarded as rubbish felt like. Two years later, I came unbearably to understand this as my own family member was murdered. She was 26 years old, young and full of dreams. Those years prior, I nonetheless empathised and was moved by the exchange that took place for the research. Something shifted in me and in the way that I perceived the world around me. After that conversation, bin bags, like that which had been described, took on new meanings.

The bin bag transformed from a simple household object to one of death. Psychiatrist and trauma specialist Bessel Van der Kolk (2015) says that ‘trauma changes people’s perceptions and imagination’ (p. 15). For me, it transformed this seemingly benign object into something which was not just a container for waste, but rather something which embodied the relationship between the domestic sphere, our consumerist cultures, and feminicides. Each time I saw bin bags in the street from then on, they appeared somehow complicit in feminicides. I imagined them concealing women’s bodies with their flimsy plastic skins. Rather than simply helping dispose of waste, the bags became containers of stories of violence from the everyday to the unimaginable.

Yet it was not only bin bags. I came to remember all the stories that I had heard in the news over the years, all the films and series in which women’s mutilated bodies would appear in a different type of bag – often a suitcase. Some months after returning from Mexico, I attended a show with a friend in my hometown in the UK where a woman performed a silent 1-hour play all revolving around a bag. She started in the bag with her feet hanging out. My mind quickly moved out of the theatre and back to the interview. I did not see a female clown in a bag, but instead, I saw victims of feminicide. I wanted to cry. It was a sight that caught me off guard and forced me to take an extra breath.

Gloria Anzaldúa (2015) states that there are moments in which something takes place from where ‘[w]e experience a radical shift in perception, an “otra forma de ver”’ (p. 16). My perception of the world had cracked; I was experiencing this otra form de ver. My way of seeing had been pulled apart and burst open – I could not stop seeing feminicides and the traces of violence in my everyday life. Gender violence does not simply mark bodies around us, it imprints itself onto our perception, forging ways of seeing that are insistent, intrusive, and inescapable.

Coming back to that morning after 8M in which my neck had become stuck and my body had seemingly gone on strike. This was a culminating moment in which the research had taken hold of me, not only mentally or emotionally but also physically. In the research and writing process up until then, I had tried to separate my body from what was happening. Following academic norms, the object of the study was over there, but what was happening right here in me, I believed to be a failure of my ability to separate the self from the object. My mind and body were ‘supposed’ to be separate, but my body was screaming at me. I was trying to ignore what was happening, yet cracks were appearing through which leakages started to multiply.

It was in the months after the fieldwork trip when I transcribed and analysed my interviews and data that I began to realise I could no longer ignore what my body was trying to tell me. I felt myself dread returning to some of the interviews. As I did, I would find myself often in tears as I listened to the recordings or as I came to analyse the texts. I felt helpless in my academic researcher role. Unable to do anything that felt meaningful or that could really change the situation. There on my own, isolated, writing a doctoral thesis, it became difficult to see the importance of this work while women continue to be killed daily. It felt insignificant, and I felt even more separate in the experience I was having. Even after I made it through the transcripts and data and drafted the case study chapters, my body kept indicating something was wrong – my coccyx dislocated itself, my shoulder froze, and my body’s ability to extend and move became increasingly restricted, limited, and painful.

A year after my first fieldwork trip to Mexico, I began my second trip, this time to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Once again conducting interviews and participating in events, I became entangled in the affective aspects of my research. The unexpected news came during my stay, 6 years after the assassination of politician and activist Marielle Franco who my second case study was focused on – of the names of those who were accused for ordered her killing. The news came as a shock, and I felt the immediate impact of it on my body not as a relief, but as an overwhelming sadness. The news hit as if I only just realised that ‘justice’ would never bring Marielle back, and I grieved her as if I knew her, as if she meant something to me – which she did, but not personally. I realised that somewhere along the way of searching, I had unconsciously come to hope that I may encounter Marielle there, living, alive among the murals, photos, and visual reproductions of her that I was searching among. I had been chasing her traces and had become obsessed with her. I had lost myself in her image in an academic-invoked obsession with her life, death, case, and legacy. I had come to know so many details about her, a person I never knowingly met. On the release of that news, I teetered on the edge of a migraine for days.

Six weeks into this research, the morning following an event demanding justice for Marielle, in a seemingly synchronised way, I woke up again unable to move my neck. It seemed that my body had reached its limit of research once more. It was forcing me to stop, to attend to the various ways in which working on violent topics was starting to impact me. In the days that followed, I sank into the space around me. I cancelled plans and avoided leaving where I was staying or seeing anyone. The news about Marielle, the 6 weeks of research up to then, the bearing witness to others’ pain while feeling a sense of impotencia to do anything about it other than translate it into academic research gnawed at me and took hold, depressing my being. Sara Ahmed (2017) states regarding feminist work that, ‘[so] much ends up being invested in our own bodies’ (p. 5). My body was invested and investing itself in the work.

It was only in realising that what I was experiencing in both situations was not a personal failure but a trauma response that I started to untangle myself from my research. I was already familiar with notions of vicarious trauma through activist and frontline work in gender-based violence. However, in searching for greater understanding about this specifically in relation to academic research, and moreover to doctoral study, I found few discussions including the work of Andrea Nikischer. Through an autoethnographic method, Nikischer shares her own experiences of finding herself overcome with negative effects from her academic research. She found herself ‘drowning in empathy and fear’ but feeling the pressure to be productive which left her with ‘a sense of being “wrong”’ (Nikischer, 2019: 908).

Isolation and the study, rather than the active aspect of her work, were crucial to the negative effects she felt (Nikischer, 2019: 909). Nikischer shares that the feeling of helplessness in the face of violence and suffering compounded her sense of distress (Nikischer, 2019: 912). Before understanding that what she was experiencing were the traumatic effects of her experience, she had rather turned these inwards and into self-blame. Even as she started to better comprehend what she was going through, she found little academic recognition or support. I had, up until then, felt like depression was taking over. As I found meaning through the work of Nikischer, the words of feminist collective LASTESIS arrived differently. They state, ‘[i]t’s not depression, it’s capitalism and the patriarchy’ (LASTESIS, 2023: ix). Which they say preceded by saying,

[t]he isolation of our feelings and experiences has allowed the patriarchy to take us by surprise, alone and anguished. We can defend ourselves from patriarchal cages by genuinely internalizing empathy and sisterhood, inextricably tied to the collective. (LASTESIS, 2023: ix)

The individualised nature of doctoral study and this research meant that some of the critical aspects that protect against the harms of patriarchy, specifically the collective and connected nature of working, but also the empathetic ways of relating and politics of care, were absent.

The search for feminist visual potencia, like much research on feminist movements, entails the need to engage with the underlying violence, injustice, and cruelty that drives them. While feminist visual potencia does not, on the surface level, appear to denote discussion of violence or feminicide, I quickly realised as I started the research that engaging with the cases and movements which I believed were expressing feminist visual potencia could not be done without attending to the violence surrounding them. I also had to delve into the stories and cases of feminicides that fuelled the movements I was looking at. One after another, day after day, the rage, despair, and need to do something about it, to stop women being killed, was not only powering feminist revolts, but it was also overpowering me as I struggled to find potencia by individualised, academic doctoral study. I needed feminism not in theory, but in practice. I needed feminist academic structures that were embracing and caring – I needed something around me to transform.