Body–Land Relationships

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Genealogy, ‘Body–Land Relationships’, is envisioned to bridge conversations between Northern and Southern, as well as between Black and Indigenous, scholars.

Indigenous and Black women have been disproportionally affected by racial and gender forms of violence rooted in colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. In the wake of ongoing colonial and imperial violence, Indigenous and Black feminists have been concerned with drawing connections between the co-constitutive yet distinctive forms of violence against Indigenous and Black bodies. At the same time, they have been exploring how relations to land are distinctly shaped by one’s experience of colonialism, enslavement, and displacement. Indigenous women’s struggles to protect land and water from the expansion of the resource extraction frontier has contributed to these understandings of violence. Articulating body land as a concept, Indigenous women not only refuse colonial violence, but also theorize what practices may both depatriarchalize and decolonize Indigenous territories and relationships.

The concept of body–land was first introduced by the Maya-Xinka communitarian feminist Lorena Cabnal (2010) to refer to the interconnections between Indigenous bodies and lands as territories of colonial control. Since then, the concept has gained significance and has expanded (Altamirano-Jimenez, 2021, 2022; Zaragocin and Carreta, NYSHN, 2016). Because body–land is an image that emerged from Indigenous women’s struggles, it centers embodied knowledges and highlights the need for crafting relationships as a form of existence that is always collective, individual, interelemental, and interspecies. Indigenous struggles to protect land, water, and life shape new modes political organization and sociability that are as concrete as the places from which they emerge. The body, in this sense, is conceived of as a possibility and multiplicity and always in relationship with other bodies (Altamirano-Jimenez, 2024). As Misguana Goeman highlights, the body is a “meeting place” that is shaped by webs of relations with the human and more-than-human world (2013). Bringing Black and Indigenous feminists into the conversation, Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) proposes a new vocabulary for theorizing entangled embodied experiences. Similarly, the Indigenous and Black theorist, Vasudevan et al. (2022), opened a space for telling stories that reimagines what it means to be human and in relation with the earth.

This Special Issue builds on this work and expands the theoretical and geographic scope of body–land. Authors are invited to explore how body–land may be mobilized to account for entangled histories, embodied experiences, and the possibilities for co-resistance. Authors should analyze Indigenous struggles and Indigenous feminist practices, highlighting how embodied knowledges and practices of bringing bodies together may enable us to building otherwise futures and relationships. Authors should also examine how interconnected forms of accumulation and distinctive forms of violence may assist us in theorizing Black people as being dispossessed and having a distinctive relationship to Indigenous land. Within Indigenous feminist examinations of the violence of colonization, Indigenous women’s political campaigns and struggles contend with the specific ways in which Indigenous women, Two Spirit, and trans people are reclaiming the body as source of pleasure, dreams, and futures. Authors should also examine how ongoing modes of accumulation in the global South and the North may be interconnected, providing an urgently needed internationalist perspective. At the same time, the convergence and divergence of experiences, contexts, and Indigenous place-based and Black political practices will provide insights into otherwise futures. These insights will reveal the structural forces that these communities confront transnationally. 

The editor’s introduction will look at how, as an analytic, body–land invites us to bridge the literature, different geographic locations, fields, histories, and spaces transgressively. The introduction will theorize body–land as an anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-patriarchal concept that centers the territoriality far more than the materiality of land.

This Special Issue will prioritize Indigenous–Black dialog, centering discussions that are often under-examined, including, but not limited to, Indigenous and Black dispossessions, otherwise relationship building, Indigenous land and water protection, sovereignty over one’s own body (body-territory), and body–land methodology.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send the abstract to the guest editors (isabel@ualberta.ca and shirleya@ualberta.ca) or to the Genealogy editorial office (genealogy@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of this Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References

• Altamirano-Jimenez, I. (2021). “Indigenous Women Refusing the Violence of Resource
• Extraction in Oaxaca,” AlterNative 7(2): 215-223. DOI: 10.1177/11771801211015316
• Cabnal, L. (2010). “Acercamiento a la construcción del pensamiento epistémico de las mujeres indígenas feministas comunitarias de Abya Yala” en Lorena Cabnal y Asociación para la Cooperación con el Sur, Feminismos diversos: el feminismo comunitario. España: ACSUR-Las Segovias.
• Goeman, M. (2013). Mark my Words. Native Women Mapping Our Nations. University of Minnessota Press.
• King, T.L. King (2019). The Black Shoal. Offshore Formations. Duke University.
• Vasudevan, P. et al (2022). “Storytelling Earth and Body.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2139658
• Women Earth Alliance and Native Youth and Sexual Health Network. (2016). Violence on the Land, Violence on Our Bodies. Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence Report. http://landbodydefense.org/uploads/files/VLVBReportToolkit2016.pdf
• Zaragocin, S., & Caretta, M. A. (2020). Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(5), 1503–1518. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1812370

Prof. Dr. Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez
Prof. Dr. Shirley Anne Tate
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• body land
• body territory
• Indigenous feminisms
• Black feminisms