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.

Qualifications

• MRes Women’s Studies (pass with minor corrections), University of York; 2017 - 2018
• History MA (2:1 hons), University of Edinburgh; 2005 –2009

Publications / Conference Presentations

• Lines, T. et al (2024). Visual Narratives of Care and Reproduction in Forced Migration: Women Displaced from Venezuela to Brazil. Bulletin of Latin American Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.13579
• Lines, T. (2024). Portraits of feminicide: mural painting as protection among migrant women in Quintana Roo, Mexico. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2345996
• Riggirozzi, P.; Curcio, B.; Lines, T; Cintra, N. (2023). Moving Forward / Salir Adelante: Health, care, and violence seen through the eyes of displaced Venezuelan women in Brazil / La salud, el cuidado, y la violencia vistos a través de los ojos de venezolanas desplazadas en Brasil. Rugby, UK: Practical Action Publishing and Latin America Bureau.
• Lines, T. (2022). “Luchar por estas mujeres en realidad es también luchar por mi”: lo político en el acto de pintar murales de víctimas de feminicidio” in Belausteguigoitia, M. (ed.) Género: Rabia, Ritmo, Ruido, Risa y Respons-habilidad. Mexico City: CIEG-UNAM. Pp. 91-104.
• Grugel, J.; Barlow, M.; Lines, T.; Giraudo, M.E.; Omukuti, J. (2022). The Gendered Face of Covid-19 in the Global South: The Development, Gender and Health Nexus. University of Bristol Press.
• Reacción y resistencia: Imaginar futuros posibles en las Américas. Latin American Studies Association. 12-15 June 2024. Panelist.
• Imagining the future of feminism in the academy. Centre for Women's Studies, University of York. 3 June 2024. Panelist.
• Political Worlds. Political Studies Association. Early Career Network. 3-7 July 2022. Panelist.
• Venezuela, Dispersa. University of Exeter. 11 May 2022. Panelist.
• Polarización socioambiental y rivalidad entre grandes potencias. Latin American Studies Association. 5-8 May 2022. Panelist.
• Politics from the Margins. Political Studies Association. 12-14 April 2022. Panelist.
• Género, Rabia, Ritmo, Rima, Ruido y Responshabilidad. Centro Internacional de Estudios de Género, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 10-12 November 2021. Panelist.
• RightsCon Tunis. 2019. Panelist.
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