Tallulah Lines

Research

Title of research:

Art and Security in Femicidal Cultures: the work of women artists in Oaxaca and Quintana Roo (Mexico)

Brief overview of research topic:

Security is concerned, fundamentally, with keeping people alive. Beyond survival, human security is also concerned with ensuring that people live with wellbeing and dignity in their everyday lives, free from fear and want, and that their vital cores are protected (UNDP, 1994; Alkire, 2003; CHS, 2004). Femicidal cultures cause the early death of women, and the erosion of women’s wellbeing and dignity, since feminicide is the most extreme expression of violence against women on a continuum of violence (Pineda, 2019).

Dealing with femicidal violence and security together is complex and even potentially risky - which is why I think it is especially important to continue to work into this academic space differently. For example, treating femicidal violence as a security problem encourages securitisation responses, which inadvertently reproduce the very (gendered) problems they try to solve. But adopting a human security approach, and emphasising femicidal violence as being produced and sustained in a culture, opens up opportunities to make other interventions, in the everyday and at more interpersonal levels, which offer an approach to women’s security better suited to women’s lived reality of femicidal violence.

I argue that art is an intervention into femicidal cultures that increases women’s human security. Art illuminates threats to women’s security at the granular level in femicidal cultures and in doing so, highlights limitations to the usual policy/institutional responses recommended to keep women secure against femicidal violence. Second, art is a response to these threats which actualises the goals of (feminist) human security to be non-violent, preventative and carried out by ordinary people themselves: in this way art actualises or puts into practice the ‘radical’ theoretical potential of human security, especially when we consider how it resonates with feminist self-defence and politicised care.