YCCS Roundtable event: Radical Creativity: ARTivism against gender-based violence in Mexico

Event details

Mexico has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence (GBV) in the world, with women and trans* people particularly at risk. 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 recent decades, demanding an end to this epidemic of GBV. Within this movement, activists are using arts-based strategies - or ‘artivism’ - to envision alternative ways of addressing GBV. Artivism goes far beyond demanding legal change, creating spaces to push for the transformation of social structures and cultural norms. It enables activists to envision a world in which GBV is responded to in radically different ways, and is more effectively prevented. By utilising artistic interventions - from graffiti to sculpture to performance - artivism turns culture against itself: using cultural forms to subvert dominant cultural norms. The impact of artivism is two-fold: it creates spaces for survivors to heal, and it challenges the norms that perpetuate GBV. Moreover, the process of creating, designing and executing artivist 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 GBV.

This roundtable brings together scholars and activists with knowledge and experience of this powerful and dynamic movement.

Speakers: Melissa Chacón (University of York), Mora Fernández (La Casa Mandarina), Harriet Gray (University of York), Tallulah Lines (University of York), Natalia Stengel Peña (University of Strathclyde).