This chapter outlines how researching and understanding the ‘painful truths’ of gendered urban violence can be usefully analysed through a ‘translocational gendered urban violence framework’, which forms the conceptual foundation for the book. We delineate the transnational continuum of gendered urban violence which underpins the framework, and outline the key categorisations and definitions of violence against women and girls which are themselves diverse and intersectional across the overlapping private, public and transnational spheres. We also briefly outline the incidence of such violence in cities and among transnational migrants. The ‘translocational gendered urban violence framework’ is then presented as a heuristic tool for understanding the dynamics of gendered urban violence, with a focus on how direct violence against migrant women and women living in peripheral territories is fundamentally rooted in deep-seated gendered inequalities of power which intersect with other forms of indirect structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. This framework seeks to emphasise how gendered urban violence is not an individual phenomenon but one deeply embedded and embodied within intersectional and translocational power structures. Women’s protagonism is incorporated within the framework through pinpointing embodied creative and everyday resistance practices. In highlighting how gendered urban violence is embedded within wider circuits of power and control across scales, this approach can capture a feminist politics of translation and insist on a transformational perspective.

Delineating and categorising gender-based and gendered urban violence

Having identified in the introduction the key debates and contributions underpinning the book, it is important to explore what is meant by gender-based violence, violence against women and girls and gendered urban violence, not least because definitions have evolved, broadened and been contested over time. The majority of definitions of gendered violence, violence against women (VAW), violence against women and girls (VAWG) and gender-based violence (GBV) date back to the 1990s and draw on the declarations associated with the UN Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and, specifically, on the 1993 UN Declaration of the Elimination of Violence against Women in Article 1. Here, violence against women is defined as: ‘Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivations of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life’. This is expanded in Article 2 to note that it may occur in the family or community and be perpetrated or condoned by the state. Specifically, it identifies violence against women as:

Similar definitions were incorporated into the 1994 Belém do Pará Convention of the Organisation of American States (also known as the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women), which is the primary reference point for Latin American countries. These have also been broadened further in the Beijing Platform for Action, with an explicit link to human rights and recognition that ‘refugee women, women migrants, including women migrant workers … destitute women, women in institutions … are particularly vulnerable to violence’.² In turn, UN Women identifies ‘Ending Violence against Women and Girls’ as one of its nine priority areas,³ and since 2015, it has included forced pregnancy and abortion, ‘honour crimes’, stalking, sorcery/witchcraft-related violence and child, early and forced marriage as forms of violence against women (UN Women, 2015: 13). The word ‘girls’ is used in the terms to ensure that certain types of violence are included such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C) in recognition that such violence affects women throughout their lives from childhood into older age. Also important is that gender identity is non-binary and fluid with ramifications for the types of violence that women experience in intersectional ways (Doan, 2010). In 2011, the UN Human Rights Council adopted the first UN resolution on sexual orientation and gender identity that acknowledged that LGBTQI+ people experienced disproportionately high levels of discrimination, with subsequent amendments acknowledging their experiences of gender-based violence (Hughes et al., 2016), some of which are specifically linked with their sexual identities, such as ‘corrective rape’.⁴

These definitions have been the result of complex negotiations among feminist movements, academics and with international organisations (Kelly, 2005). At their root, they reflect how, although all violence is inherently gendered, gendered violence occurs where the motive for the violence is gender-based and where the victim/survivor is directly targeted because of their gender among those who identify as women and/or girls and trans women and where the perpetrator is a man. Gender-based violence can also be perpetrated against men, against sexual minorities and/or those with gender-nonconforming identities, although men are the main perpetrators. In turn, female-on-male violence is also perpetrated, albeit in lower proportions than male-on-female (Scott-Storey et al., 2023). From a feminist perspective, it has been argued that the term ‘gender-based violence’ can depoliticise the violence, deflecting attention from the fact that women and girls disproportionately experience such violence at the hands of men. The term gender-based violence illustrates how women can harm other women, also allowing for avoidance of binary and heteronormative categorisations and emphasising the importance of gendered and deeply asymmetric patriarchal power dynamics (Piedalue et al., 2020). In general, the acronyms VAW (violence against women), VAWG (violence against women and girls) and GBV (gender-based violence) are not used in the book. This is to ensure that such violence is not sanitised and that in writing the terms out in full, the brutal realities of the harm underpinning the terms are not forgotten. We therefore use gender-based violence, gendered violence and violence against women and girls, acknowledging that these terms are contested and based on the assumption that the perpetrators are invariably men.

Central to contemporary definitions of gender-based violence is that they extend across private and public domains. On one hand, there has been a concerted effort to foreground violence that occurs within the home and family (intimate partner and non-intimate partner violence) in order to challenge the notion that it is private and therefore immune to being recognised as violence or as a crime, especially by the state (Borges, 2017; Kelly, 2005). On the other hand, a huge diversity of types of violence against women have now been recognised entailing physical, sexual and psychological violence in a wide range of contexts. The acknowledgement of psychological and emotional violence has been especially important, although it is the form least likely to be identified as violence by women themselves and by states and therefore has the least available data (UN Women, 2015) and is the least likely to be prosecuted (Boesten, 2012). Indeed, violence within the home, and specifically intimate partner violence, has often been invisibilised when it comes to seeking legal redress, with women commonly held culpable and impunity being the order of the day (Brickell, 2015, 2020).

As part of the recognition that gender-based violence is multidimensional, and drawing on Crenshaw’s (1991) seminal work on African American women’s experiences of domestic violence, it is essential to conceptualise this violence as deeply intersectional, with certain women more or less likely to experience it than others or in different ways according to their varying and interrelating identities. Those most likely to experience disproportionate levels of gendered violence include women from certain ethnic or racial groups, those with disabilities, lesbian, bisexual or transgender women, sex workers (UN Women, 2015) and especially migrant women (Bastia, 2014; Bastia et al., 2023). Different types of violence intersect in causal ways, something that has been incorporated into ideas around the continuum of violence against women (Kelly, 1988; Kelly 2013; see below). At the core of these ideas is that minoritised women are situated within a complex interlocking matrix of power (Hill Collins, 1990). To understand the gender-based violence they experience, it is not enough to focus on their individual experiences and social norms around them but rather to also acknowledge wider structural processes of colonialism, state power and global migration dynamics (Sokoloff, 2008). This process requires extreme caution in using culturally essentialist interpretations when exploring gender-based violence among minoritised and migrant women (Sokoloff and Dupont, 2005). While it may be true that migrant women and/or minoritised women experience disproportionate levels of gendered violence, this is not because of their culture (Fluri and Piedalue, 2017). Rather, it is more likely to be linked with women’s location within various structural systems of intersectional oppressions.

As noted in the introduction, and drawing from the work of Latin American feminists who have developed the concept of intersectionality (Carneiro, 2003; Lugones, 2007, 2010; Nascimento, 2021) and others, it is important to note Afro-descendant and/or Indigenous women may face disproportionate levels of gender-based violence based on their race and class position (Caldwell, 2000; dos Santos, 2017; Perry, 2016), as may lesbians, trans women and those from gender-nonconforming identities (Bastian Duarte, 2012), migrant women and women trying to exercise their reproductive rights (Women Resisting Violence Collective, 2022a). Gendered violence in the continent is thus rooted in a patriarchal, colonial and slave society which materialises in racist, socially excluding, sexist, homophobic and transphobic practices, all of which are especially marked in Brazil (Carneiro, 2003; Ribeiro, 2016; Segato, 2016). The violence of coloniality linked with what Lugones (2007) has denoted as the ‘coloniality of gender’ is at the core of much discussion of indirect and structural forms of gendered violence in Latin America. Decolonial feminists often refer to the region as Abya Yala to resist the racism, sexism and heteronormativity which is implicated within the colonial project and has since promoted various forms of violence against Indigenous, Black, lesbian and trans women. It is important to talk about gendered violence in the plural to ensure that this encompasses its multidimensionality and intersectionality as well as its direct and indirect forms.

This thinking also feeds into debates around ‘femicide’ and ‘feminicide’ which also have conceptual roots in Latin American feminist debates and the murder of women in Ciudad Juárez in particular (Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010; Wright, 2001, 2011). In its simplest terms, femicide refers to the intentional murder of women because they are women (Radford and Russell, 1992). Yet, Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos (2010) developed the term ‘feminicide’ as a specifically Latin American translation of femicide/femicidio – which was deemed to be North American in nature. As noted by Fregoso and Bejarano (2010: 5): ‘Our translation of feminicidio into feminicide rather than femicide is designed to reverse the hierarchies of knowledge and challenge claims about unidirectional (North-to-South) flows of traveling theory’, reflecting a translocational perspective (see below). Lagarde y de los Ríos’s terminology was also based on the recognition that murders of women are rooted in gendered power structures where the state and society are culpable in the perpetration of gendered violence and in ensuring impunity. Feminicide can occur in both private and public spheres by individual and state perpetrators directly and indirectly in systematic and everyday ways, and it is bolstered by misogyny, racism and economic injustices (Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010; Menjívar and Walsh, 2017). For decolonial feminists such as Rita Segato (2014), the destructive nature of colonialism perpetuates the war against women’s bodies as part of a wider corporeal decimation through femi(geno)cidio (femicide-genocide).

Throughout Latin America, femicide and feminicide have been criminialised by states, supported by the legally binding Belém do Pará Convention overseen by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. More specifically, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights Gonzalez v. Mexico (‘Cotton Field’) case enshrined the commitment of all states to protect the rights of women to live free from violence. In 2023, all countries from the Central and South Americas – with the exception of Belize and the Guianas – had legislation criminalising femicide (Pasinato and de Ávila, 2023). In Brazil, femicide was identified as a specific crime in the Brazilian Penal Code in 2015 as a sub-category of murder where women are killed as a result of their ‘female sex’, whether directly or due to discrimination (de Ávila, 2018). This is in addition to the 2006 Maria da Penha Law which defines domestic and family violence against women (see Chapter 2). Other forms of femicide have been noted in Brazil on the basis of gender identities and sexualities including lesbocide, travesticide and transfemicide (Davidson, 2020). These definitions in part came about due to the very high levels of these types of killings in the country (Féliz de Souza and Rodrigues Selis, 2022). The extensive legislation on femicide and feminicide has not led to a reduction in their incidence, as is explored below (Pasinato and de Ávila, 2023).

It is important to re-emphasise that we use the term ‘gendered urban violence’ in order to capture both direct and indirect gender-based violence, driven by wider urbanisation processes that recognise how cities are embedded within intersectional, multiscalar and translocal power circuits (McIlwaine and Rizzini Ansari, 2022).

Incidence of gender-based violence in cities and among international migrants

Accurate information on the incidence of gendered violence among women living in cities and among international migrants is difficult to ascertain. Focusing on direct forms of gender-based violence, one of the clearest methodological challenges is under-reporting, with Palermo et al. (2014) stating that only 7 per cent of women worldwide report to a formal source such as the police and/or some other judicial entity. The World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Women have recently recognised these data limitations and, as a result, launched a five-year global programme (2018–2022) in an attempt to strengthen methodologies and improve data collection (although this programme focuses on lifetime physical and sexual intimate partner violence).⁵ This has revealed that lifetime physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence ranges hugely: from 58.5 per cent in Bolivia (2016) to 17 per cent in Brazil (2018) (see also Thomson and Muñoz Cabrera, 2022: xxi). In the UK, this rate was measured at 29 per cent.⁶ This data gathering drew on the WHO (2013) global review that showed that 35 per cent of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence.

In terms of variations in cities, as noted in the introduction, it has been estimated that women are twice as likely to experience gendered violence compared to their male counterparts (UN-Habitat, 2007). However, recent accurate data is difficult to access. Although young men are often most likely to experience fatal urban violence, especially that associated with gangs, this is rarely the result of gender-based violence (Jutersonke et al., 2009; Wilding, 2012). This said, women can experience severe trauma as a result of dealing with violence and especially the killing of partners, sons and other male relatives. In Brazil, this is often anti-Black state violence against men but where Black women suffer from a ‘slow death’ of depression, anxiety and pain (Perry, 2013). Smith (2016) defines this as ‘sequalae’ or ‘lingering trauma’, referring to the physical and emotional effects of widespread state-sanctioned violence. Returning to incidence of interpersonal violence, recent analyses have shown that, while not always the case, intimate partner violence is less prevalent in cities than the countryside, while violence by a non-partner is higher in urban areas. For example, in Brazil, 37 per cent of women in rural areas and 29 per cent of those in urban areas had experienced physical or sexual intimate partner violence; in contrast, 23 per cent of rural women had experienced non-intimate partner violence compared to 40 per cent in cities (McIlwaine, 2013: 67).

While not reflecting prevalence as such, but rather tolerance levels and reporting, data shows that women in cities are less likely than those living in rural areas to condone intimate partner violence, linking directly to debates around urban dwellings being potentially emancipatory (Bradshaw, 2013; Chant, 2013; see below). However, there are variations within cities. Rates of gender-based violence are usually higher in poorer neighbourhoods where security can be compromised through living in makeshift dwellings, inadequate urban infrastructure provision such as street lighting and limited access to sanitation facilities (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016). In addition, in such territories, women often end up working in occupations that expose them to gendered violence (McIlwaine, 2016). Residing in poor urban communities thus exposes women to multiple forms of indirect and direct gendered violence – as they negotiate a range of structural inequalities exacerbated by the urban violence perpetrated by gangs and state security forces (Beebeejaun, 2017).

Turning to international migrants’ experiences of gender-based violence, most quantitative research on prevalence focuses on ethnicity over migrant status (Loya, 2014). When migrant status is analysed, there is much debate over whether such violence is more prevalent among migrant women compared to non-migrants, with analyses undermined by a lack of reliable data and by prejudice (Menjívar and Salcido, 2002). Again, the focus tends to be on intimate partner violence, with much under-reporting and wide variations. For example, a systematic review of twenty-four studies published between 2003 and 2013 on intimate partner violence victimisation rates among immigrant women in the United States (US) and Europe found huge variations. Proportions of those reported to have experienced intimate partner violence ranged from 17 to 70.5 per cent (Gonçalves and Matos, 2016). Of relevance here is a study among Brazilian, African and Eastern European women in Lisbon, Portugal, which found that 11 per cent had experienced emotional abuse, 7 per cent had experienced physical violence and 2 per cent had experienced sexual abuse in their lives in Lisbon. Women identified the home as the most common place where the violence occurred (54 per cent) with the intimate partner the most frequent perpetrator, although 10.5 per cent also occurred in the workplace (Dias et al., 2013).

In the face of inadequate data comparing migrants and non-migrants, it is important not to ‘hyper-fixate on gendered violence as representative of these [migrant] communities’ (Fluri and Piedalue, 2017: 541). As mentioned above, the reasons why migrant women may experience heightened levels of gendered violence lie in a wide range of factors including the pressures caused by wider forms of structural socio-economic exclusion in relation to labour markets, language competencies, immigration status, institutional racism, xenophobia, lack of welfare support and fear of reporting, among others (Cassidy, 2019; Lopes Heimer, 2023; O’Neal and Beckman, 2016). Furthermore, there is also evidence to show that minority and migrant women take longer to seek help, remaining in abusive relationships for longer (Siddiqui, 2018). In turn, the severity and multiplicity of violence may be more marked among migrant women (Sokoloff, 2008), especially when migrants are Black women (Malheiros and Padilla, 2015).

Transnational continuum of gendered urban violence

This section outlines the ‘transnational continuum of gendered urban violence’, which was developed and adapted in relation to this research (McIlwaine and Evans, 2018, 2020) and underpins the translocational gendered urban violence framework. The argument is based on and develops Kelly’s (1988) classic continuum of sexual violence theory, which encapsulates a much wider set of gendered violence that occurs across multiple scales (also Moser, 2001). The thinking behind this continuum is part of wider feminist geographical and geopolitical debates around how gendered violence must be viewed across a series of linkages from the intimate to the structural, systemic and institutional (Brickell, 2020; Brickell and Maddrell, 2016; Pain, 2014, 2015; Pain and Staeheli, 2014). In part, we are responding to such calls as identified by Fluri and Piedalue (2017: 536), who state that ‘there is a critical need to examine the intersecting relationship between gendered corporeality and geographies of violence’. This links to a wider need to shift the gaze from the suffering body to structural and symbolic violences and to show how women resist gendered urban violence in innovative ways (Pain and Cahill, 2022).

Continuum thinking has a relatively long history in research on violence against women and girls based on Kelly’s (1988) continuum of sexual violence against women. Kelly’s main argument is that different types of sexual violence are interrelated and mutually reinforcing such that rape and sexual assault are underpinned by threat, intimidation and coercion – all of which are equally important. As such, sexual violence identified as criminal, such as rape, is causally related with other forms of harassment themselves founded in patriarchal relations and misogyny (Kelly, 2013). Kelly was careful not to identify one type of sexual violence as more important than another and to highlight how gender-based violence against women is often so naturalised and routinised that it becomes invisible (Borges, 2017). Gendered continuum thinking has since been broadened beyond sexual violence to include multiple forms of political and institutional violence, especially that experienced during armed conflict (for example, Boesten, 2017; Moser, 2001), and to explore links between intimate and other forms of social, economic and political violence, especially in cities (Datta, 2016; also Hume, 2009; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004; Wilding, 2012).

Importantly, as noted in the introduction and above, Latin American feminists have been at the forefront of many of these debates. In particular, Rita Segato (2016) has argued that gendered violence is a war against women’s bodies produced by interconnections between the colonial state, neoliberal capitalism and racialised patriarchy. Rape culture, she argues, is perpetrated individually but is fundamentally bolstered by the state. These debates have prompted many public forms of resistance to gendered violence, such as the artistic work of Las Tesis in Chile (Serafini, 2020). Verónica Gago (2020) also builds on Segato to argue that gender violence is multidimensional and such recognition allows for a questioning of the structures of such violence generating resistance (Segato and Monque, 2021; also Félix de Souza and Rodrigues Selis, 2022). It has also been argued that a continuum of male violence against women is embedded within the history of the continent, being reproduced in different ways over time (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004). Conquest, colonisation and neocolonialism have been structured by and dependent on intersectional gendered violence (Lugones, 2007; Viveros Vigoya, 2016). Colonialism, racism and misogyny also have transnational dimensions that are experienced acutely by migrant women survivors of violence. Institutional and state violence and intersectional discrimination are endemic throughout the world but are arguably most insidiously experienced among migrants and ethnically minoritised groups. It has been shown that migrant women survivors of gendered violence experienced multiple forms across the entire spectrum of violences, often reinforced by the culture of impunity, particularly among judicial actors (Rivera, 2009, on Latinos in the US; also McIlwaine et al., 2019).

The ‘transnational continuum of gendered urban violence’ thus acknowledges how gender-based violence occurs across multiple scales in overlapping ways. While there have been efforts to link the body and intimate scales with geopolitics through notions such as ‘intimate wars’ (Pain, 2015) and ‘everyday terrorisms’ (Pain, 2014), there is scope to focus more specifically on the links between the local, transnational and translocational through the prism of the city. The transnational continuum therefore identifies the diversity of different types of violence (within the broad denotation of sexual, physical and psychological) at different levels (interpersonal and collective) and scales (individual/body, family, community/city, state and transnational) that are mutually reinforcing (Figure 1.1). Thus, the continuum encompasses the diversity of overlapping types of gendered violence in a specific city and country, but also the transnational links between them, particularly those associated with international migration between cities of the Global South and Global North (see McIlwaine and Evans, 2020).

Figure 1.1The transnational gendered urban violence continuum

The continuum is largely descriptive and primarily useful in acknowledging that there is a spatial continuum of gendered urban violence among women in city peripheries and among women migrants across multiple domains (Menjívar and Walsh, 2017; Ryburn, 2021). Yet, there are shortcomings of such a descriptive tool in that it assumes a linearity which does not exist in reality, in that the multiple types of violence reinforce one another to perpetuate violence. Also, it fails to fully acknowledge how power relations operate across the different scales and levels – especially in relation to structural and symbolic forms of violence (Piedalue et al., 2020) – and how they are deeply intersectional in nature (Hill Collins, 2017). These dimensions are more fully captured within the translocational gendered urban violence framework.

Translocational gendered urban violence framework

The translocational gendered urban violence framework provides the conceptual foundations for the book. It aims to help understand gendered urban violence across borders and boundaries, moving beyond focusing on multiscalar processes alone across the private, public and transnational spheres to incorporate multiple forms of boundary-crossing and the interplay between direct and indirect violence.

 Translocational theorising

As outlined in the introduction, we develop a translocal and translocational perspective that has yet to be explored in the context of gendered violence and, specifically, gendered urban violence among women residing in peripheral territories and among migrant women from the same country living abroad. Reflecting the importance of rooting our conceptualisations in the work of Latin American feminists as a challenge to the epistemic violence of imposing hegemonic Western feminism (Alvarez, 2009; Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010), especially from a decolonial perspective (Lopes Heimer, 2021, 2022; Zaragocín, 2019; Zaragocín and Caretta, 2021), we have been inspired by the ideas of Sonia Alvarez et al. (2014) around translocalities/translocalidades while also acknowledging the synergies with earlier work by Floya Anthias (2001) on ‘translocational positionality’ (also Anthias, 2013, on her ‘translocational frame’). Here, we outline the overall approach that underpins the framework before going through the constituent parts identified in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2The translocational gendered urban violence framework

Latin American translocalities/translocalidades thinking denotes the feminist geographies and politics of location, translation and struggle within which are embedded multiple identities and modes of domination within and beyond the globalised Americas (Alvarez, 2014). While the transnational is important in acknowledging movements between nation states, given our focus on migrant women who navigate state and other forms of institutional violence inherent in immigration regimes, we are more interested in the complex, multidirectional translocal transfers across specific locales that entail diverse translations, both across and within cities. While ‘translocal’ and ‘translocality’ refer mainly to physical and symbolic space (Brickell and Datta, 2011), we are specifically interested in ‘translocation’ from an explicitly feminist standpoint. Indeed, translocational thinking has much earlier roots in Floya Anthias’s (2001) concept of ‘translocational positionality’ that she suggests is more effective than hybridity in encompassing non-essentialised belonging among diasporic groups. Her translocational approach foregrounds diverse and hierarchical social ordering and fluid categorisations of social identities positioned within historical, political and geographical contexts. Power and struggle are key within the intersectional processes of location, dislocation and relocation that underpin translocational positionality (also Anthias, 2013; 2021). There are important synergies with the subsequent thinking of Alvarez et al. (2014) around multidirectional crossings and translations that challenge the ontological violence of Northern thought. Ideas, bodies and epistemes are renegotiated from the starting point of Latin America, or Abya Yala, through multiple circuits, displacements and repositionings (Rivera Berruz, 2021).

A specifically translocational feminist politics of translation is therefore useful for understanding gendered urban violence across boundaries and borders. Yet, it requires understanding of how Latin American (and other) feminist discourse and praxis travels through places and how it is translated through forms of discursive and actual migration – at different scales, between countries and between and within cities. These translations may be linguistic, epistemological, conceptual and embodied, but also political and transformational (Thayer, 2014). While translocational feminist translation also refers to disciplinary boundary-crossing within and beyond the academy, with a focus on alliance-building, it is also essential to think about translating across the social sciences and the arts through creative engagements. Indeed, alternative forms of knowledge production, some of which are explicitly artistic, are central to translocational feminist translation, and to our framework and research more broadly, in terms of both understanding gendered urban violence but also resignifying it (see below).

The translocational approach also captures multiple identity positions (Lao-Montes and Buggs, 2014: 391) that are crucial for understanding gendered violence across scales (Brickell and Maddrell, 2016; Crenshaw, 1991; Pain and Staeheli, 2014; Segato, 2014). In this vein, Patricia Hill Collins (2017: 1464) speaks of ‘violence as a navigational tool’ that ‘constitutes a saturated site of intersectionality where intersecting power relations are especially visible’. In its discursive and material forms, an intersectional approach is important in understanding gendered violence in the Americas where the violence of colonisation is reproduced across different scales (Hinojosa Hernández and De Los Santos Upton, 2018). Again, Latin American feminists such as Brazilian Lélia Gonzalez (1988) have pioneered theorising around intersectionality and violence in relation to sexism, racism and colonialism (also Cardoso, 2014; Gago and Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2018; Segato, 2014, 2016; Veillette, 2021). A decolonial perspective is particularly powerful in emphasising how heteropatriarchal colonialist power structures should be the starting point for theorising violence against women (Lugones, 2007). Both intersectionality and a decolonial lens are central to understanding the experiences of migrants who are situated within complex matrixes of oppressions (Lopes Heimer, 2022; Sokoloff, 2008).

The translocational lens also allows for exploration of the relationships between migration and cities to show how localities are embedded within global power relations that play out at different scales around a fulcrum that is the city (Anthias, 2021; Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2015; Davis, 2020). Indeed, cities themselves and urbanisation processes are embedded within interlocking structural systems across the Global South and Global North even if analyses tend to be gender-blind (Peake, 2016, 2017). Transnational migration is part of these urbanisation processes, as women migrants from the Global South constitute international divisions of reproductive labour as domestic and care workers in cities of the Global North. In turn, urban economic inequalities are often borne by women, who develop complex reproductive and productive survival mechanisms, in situ and through mobility. These may be through generating household livelihood practices or sending remittances back home which then support urban economies. These, however, can themselves generate violence. Therefore, those residing in cities, whether migrants or not, are part of wider networks involving complex intersectional exclusions that bolster gendered urban violence. Yet, it is essential to recognise that women and men experience both urban living and urban violence differently (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016). Men, and especially young, Black and marginalised men, disproportionately experience urban violence and especially murder, often associated with gang violence (McIlwaine, 2021a). While this violence is brutal, we must look beyond the spectacular to the mundane forms of gendered violence women face that are endemic in cities, not to mention the trauma women face when men in their communities are killed and maimed (Smith, 2016).

Women’s bodies are the axes around which different gendered urban violence interconnections are forged through the private, public and transnational spheres. These form the basis of the translocational approach (see Figure 1.2). Women’s bodies are regularly violated, occupied and commodified in cities everywhere (McIlwaine and Rizzini, 2022). This prevents them from moving freely and exercising their rights, within and beyond borders, ultimately compromising their wellbeing (Datta, 2016; McIlwaine et al., 2020). Yet, women also derive their resistance through their bodies in everyday and creative practices (Félix de Souza, 2019; also below). While urban violence is integrated into the very functioning of cities transnationally (Moser and McIlwaine, 2014), so too is gendered urban violence, which is further reinforced by fear (Falú, 2010).

This brings us to transnational theorising (Browne et al., 2021), or what we call here ‘translocational theorising’ within the framework. Our interpretation of translocational feminist translation (Alvarez et al., 2014; also Anthias, 2001) in relation to gendered urban violence aims to develop a dialogue across borders and boundaries, with women survivors’ experiences at the centre. We aim to foreground the continuities (and discontinuities) among minoritised people who identify as women in Northern cities and those residing in peripheral territories of the South where multiple exclusions underpin gendered urban violence (Dominguez and Menjívar, 2014). Epistemologically, we have aimed to be as inclusive as possible in our knowledge production, although, inevitably, there have been aspects which have been more successful than others. Echoing Parnell and Pieterse’s (2016: 236) ‘translational urban research praxis’ rooted in the African experience, our approach, based in Latin American feminism, is deeply political and intensely gendered in intersectional ways. Our framework shares a commitment to co-production with partners in other universities, with civil society organisations, with field researchers and with research participants (Bell and Pahl, 2018). Yet, we emphasise feminist empirical, conceptual and epistemological engagements in creative translations with artists across borders and boundaries. We also place transversal feminist dialogue at the heart of the framework with a view to being inclusive, intersectional, diverse and based on building bridges and coalitions (Kennedy, 2005). This underscores the importance of theorising from southern cities (Parnell and Robinson, 2013) and from an intersectional southern feminist perspective (Byrne and Imma, 2019). We argue that feminist transversality is crucial in women’s resistance to gendered urban violence where local political processes are part of wider translocational dialogues and movements (Gago and Malo, 2020).

 Deconstructing the framework: intersecting types of violence

Having outlined the translocational theorising underpinning the framework, we turn to the specific components as outlined in Figure 1.2. There are three key sets of processes at play that are themselves interconnected.

The first are the multiple forms of gendered violence against women which comprise direct and indirect forms of physical, sexual and psychological violence that operate across interconnecting private, public and transnational spheres (at the centre of Figure 1.2). These types of violence are inherently multidimensional and intersectional and refer to mutually reinforcing and recurring acts of violence rather than one-off individual acts. These connections are especially acute in cities (Hume, 2009; McIlwaine et al., 2020). Structural violence relates to socio-economic, political and historical inequalities that causally influence the ways that gendered violence is experienced and explained. The understanding of structural violence used here draws on the seminal work of Johan Galtung (1969, 1996), encapsulating material deprivation, symbolic disadvantage in relation to racism and sexism, and psychological hurt which intersects with other forms of violence. These structures of economic and political inequalities of power can produce different forms of violence which vary depending on people’s social identities and access to resources allowing them to exercise agency in the face of other types of violence from the state and armed groups. Structural violence is enacted indirectly as a form of oppression, which is especially relevant in relation to gendered violence. Also of importance is that structural violence is globally resonant, as noted by Farmer (2004: 317): ‘Structural violence is the natural expression of a political and economic order that seems as old as slavery. This social web of exploitation, in its many differing historical forms, has long been global, or almost so, in its reach’.

Feminists also emphasise that structural violence is reinforced by heteropatriarchal colonial systems (Lugones, 2007, 2010; Segato and Monque, 2021). Decolonial feminists also include ‘imperial, white supremacist [and] ableist’ power formations as feeding into structural violence (Montiel Valle and Martin, 2021: 1). This underlies political, state and institutional violence in relation to deeply intersectional gendered and racialised public security and immigration policies (Carneiro, 2003; Cassidy, 2019). Racialised and gendered police violence are especially significant in peripheral territories and against minorities (Caldeira, 2000; Garmany, 2011, 2014; Veillette, 2021; Wilding, 2012). Structural violence also manifests through impunity within judicial systems, which is especially marked in terms of gendered violence and femicides/feminicides in particular (Boesten, 2012; Menjívar and Walsh, 2017) and in the media (Montiel Valle and Martin, 2021).

The framework also includes symbolic violence as a key component, defined by Bourgois (2001: 8), drawing on Bourdieu (1997), as ‘the internalised humiliations and legitimations of inequality and hierarchy ranging from sexism and racism to intimate expressions of class power’ and inscribed on the body (see below). The fusing of different kinds of violence becomes normalised in daily life and manifests in fear and neglect (Menjívar, 2011). Of interest here is the utilisation of the ‘multisided violence framework’ not only in other contexts with high levels of gender-based violence, such as Honduras (Menjívar and Walsh, 2017), but also among low-income minority women in the US (Dominguez and Menjívar, 2014). Again, this reflects an effort to move away from individual determinants of violence and to incorporate symbolic (and structural) violence within feminist understandings of gendered urban violence. The intersectional oppressions discussed above are key to understanding symbolic violence as it connects with various forms of structural violence as part of wider colonial, neoliberal, White, heteropatriarchal capitalist systems (Fahlberg et al., 2023; Viveros Vigoya, 2016). These are just as relevant among migrant women as they are among faveladas (residents of peripheral territories) (Grosfoguel et al., 2015; Nunes and Veillette, 2022).

The final indirect type of violence identified within this set of processes is gendered infrastructural violence. This refers to how lack of access to infrastructure becomes a form of violence through what Rodgers and O’Neill (2012: 401) note as the ‘processes of marginalisation, abjection and disconnection [that] often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure’. While Rodgers and O’Neill (2012) do not mention gender or other intersectional oppressions, they are crucial in understanding how women access support as survivors of direct gender-based violence (Chaplin and Kalita, 2017; Datta and Ahmed, 2020). Lack of access to certain types of urban infrastructure, such as street lighting or compromised access to sanitation facilities, can generate more gender-based violence (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016). Gendered infrastructural violence can be passive or active and is normally conceptualised as a form of ‘slow violence’ where endemic, exploitative and discriminatory processes ensure that gendered, racialised, othered migrants and/or residents of peripheral communities experience long-term trauma (Mayblin et al., 2020; Sawas et al., 2020). Such trauma is generated by anti-Black and anti-migrant state violence that can also create ‘slow death’ (Caldwell, 2007; Perry 2013; Rocha, 2012). Judicial, education, health and public security systems all function to exclude those deemed unworthy of assistance, which is marked when migrant women have insecure immigration status (McIlwaine et al., 2019) and when the state actively ostracises certain territories in cities from public policies (Wilding, 2012). Recent work within feminist geography has also conceptualised the body as infrastructure in relation to how women’s bodies maintain cities through their material and social contributions. Yet, these are invariably invisible and potentially harmful through processes identified as gendered ‘slow infrastructural violence’ (Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022) and ‘intimate infrastructures’ (Datta and Ahmed, 2020).

 Deconstructing the framework: embodiment and creative engagements

Embodiment has long been central to feminist epistemologies. While the body has also been subject to multiple philosophical and theoretical interpretations, the focus here is on bodies as sites of meaning, experiences and agency (Grosz, 1994). Bodies can be understood as material entities where meanings and subjectivities are inscribed through norms and values (Vachelli, 2018a). According to Judith Butler (1997: 404), the body is a ‘continual and incessant materialising of possibilities. One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body’. In turn, Foucault (1977) has argued that the body is integral within efforts and mechanisms to impose social order. People’s relations to the world and their positionalities therefore have embodied and material realities. As noted by Grosz (1994: x–xi), ‘Bodies are not inert; they function interactively and productively. They act and react’.

From a feminist perspective, the body has long been a key site of women’s oppression, especially in relation to gendered violence. Women’s bodies (and minds) are actively targeted directly and indirectly by violence (Segato, 2014). Gendered intersectional violence becomes inscribed in women’s bodies at the apex of public and private spaces in cities (Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2015). Gendered urban violence is thus calibrated in the body and buried in the bones, in the mind and in memories. It is a constitutive element of what Bourdieu described as the bodily hexis: where the body is the site of incorporated history, the affective relationship between body, history and habitus. As Braidotti (2011: 4) notes, embodiment incorporates ‘the idea of a transgenerational, nonlinear memory of one’s belonging to one’s species and community’.

Yet, while this refers to how understandings of gendered urban violence are experienced, created and evidenced, feminist scholars have also developed embodied methodologies to reveal such violence (and other phenomena) (Ellingson, 2017). While these are hugely varied, many revolve around arts-based approaches which in the case of gendered violence have included body-map storytelling (Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2015), body-territory mapping (Lopes Heimer, 2021; Zaragocín and Caretta, 2021), verbatim theatre (Inchley, 2015), animation (Ryburn, forthcoming), mural-painting (Castañeda Salgado, 2016) and many more (Thomas et al., 2022). Such creative methodologies are invaluable for understanding how the body performs, feels and senses gendered violence. They can also potentially assist in understanding how the intersections of intimate and structural violence through state violence, patriarchal capitalism and colonialism are displayed and understood through the body (Chattopadhyay, 2018). Embodiment therefore allows us to explore gendered urban violence in ways that reflect visceral corporeal engagements. It facilitates a view across boundaries – as bodies move over the private, public and transnational spheres, allowing the structural and systemic to be taken into account more clearly.

Embodiment and creative engagements are an integral element of the translocational framework. We advocate for interdisciplinary and epistemological crossings through embodiment and the arts as a way to understand gendered urban violence more fully through alternative forms of knowledge production, as well as to engender transformation. We include a wide range of creative encounters in the framework, such as working with artists to curate existing research data on gendered urban violence or co-producing new data and creative responses with artists through participatory collaborations in ‘creative translation pathways’ (McIlwaine, 2024; see Chapter 2).

 Deconstructing the framework: resistance

It is important to note that while the body is a site of oppression, it is also one of resistance (Féliz da Souza, 2019). This is key to the final set of processes in the translocational framework. Foucault (1978) has claimed that power, violence and resistance have always been inextricably linked (cited in Saunders and Al-Om, 2022: 545). This is especially true in feminist and anti-racist accounts of gendered violence. Furthermore, forms of feminist resistance in general are acknowledged to operate over multiple scales through ‘countertopographies’ (Katz, 2004) – where local specificities of intersectional oppressions interrelate with global processes, which in cities and elsewhere can generate insurgent feminist change. Katz (2004) has also usefully identified forms of resistance, resilience and reworking as underpinning different types of feminist political transformation that link the local and the global, all of which are relevant here (see also MacLeavy et al., 2021).

Developing resistance to gendered violence takes multiple forms including individual and collective, passive and active (Osborn and Rajah, 2022). These forms can address perpetrators of intimate partner violence as well as identify wider structural conditions, or both (Faria, 2017; Fluri and Piedalue, 2017). Some resistance practices have been developed in the context of endemic urban violence in Latin America (Hume and Wilding, 2020; Jokela-Pansini, 2020; Zulver, 2016) while others involve initiatives among diasporic communities, or both (Piedalue, 2017, 2022). As well as practices, resistance can include setting up observatories and mapping gendered violence, as well as activism and campaigns (Thomson and Muñoz Cabrera, 2022). They can also include ‘quiet politics’ (Hughes, 2022; Pain, 2014) as well as activism and protest, especially in Brazil (Pereira and Aguilar, 2021).

Our framework focuses on everyday practices of resistance to gendered urban violence that include individual and collective, formal and informal, short-term and medium-/long-term and reactive and transformative practices (McIlwaine et al., 2022c). We also include creative and embodied encounters as forms of resistance that allow women to resignify and reclaim their rights in a range of ways (McIlwaine, 2022; McIlwaine and Rizzini Ansari, 2022; also McIlwaine et al., 2022a, 2022d). Resistance to gendered urban violence has been especially important in pandemic and post-pandemic reconstruction times. Here, we have developed the notion of ‘emotional-political communities’, building on the work of Jimeno (2010) which describes how when emotional bonds are created, they may then be reconfigured into political action. We focus on developing mutual support, (self-)care and activism to deal with crisis through building ‘emotional-political communities’ to address gendered urban and broader structural violence (McIlwaine et al., 2023a).

To conclude, the translocational gendered urban violence framework aims to capture the painful, multiple, overlapping and intersectional violence perpetrated against those identifying as women in different contexts and across borders – ranging from the body to the private, public and transnational spheres. It provides a way of identifying the interplay among different types of direct and indirect forms of gendered urban violence which causes and perpetuates oppression in multidimensional ways beyond the individual–perpetrator relationship. The focus is not on spectacular but rather on mundane, endemic forms of gendered urban violence that are deeply embodied. The feminist translocational approach entails multiple figurative and actual border crossings through migratory, epistemological and disciplinary movements. It argues for the importance of using arts-based and creative approaches to understand and challenge gendered urban violence as well as to generate hope and resistance to the ‘painful truths’ of this violence. The book now turns to outlining the translocational feminist tracing methodological framework developed to conduct the research in the UK and Brazil.