Displaced Affects: Emotional Embodied Experiences of Displaced Women in Colombia

Abstract

This research aims to contribute to Colombia’s historical memory regarding the knowledges, experiences, and embodied subjectivities of displaced women, as active members of a society determined by more than fifty years of lasting conflict. Drawing on what has been called the ‘affective turn’, this work explores emotion as a pivotal bridge between the individual and the social, opening new possibilities for investigating and conceptualizing the subject of feminism as embodied, located and relational. Working with oral and visual narratives of displaced women, this research explores emotional-embodied-experiences of war, violence, and forced displacement, relevant in the constitution of oppressed/subversive subjectivities. Analyzing different spaces women have inhabited, objects they have interacted with, and social relationships they have established, during their forced mobility, this research aims to trace different actors within emotion’s sociality, recognizing that emotions of gendered violence are not processes inside victim’s minds and bodies, but effects and affects of social dynamics. This analysis aims to contribute to current debates regarding Colombian society’s accountability for maintaining and perpetuating social injustices in displaced women lives. By locating participant’s narratives at the core of knowledge theorization, this research elucidates new ways of entangle theoretical approaches in everyday life dynamics, widening the influence of the affective turn over cultural and social sciences approaches.