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research-article2023
CGJ0010.1177/14744740231179479cultural geographiesLuckett and Bagelman
Thembi Luckett
and Jen Bagelman
Newcastle University, UK
Abstract
Body mapping is an intimate cartographic process that involves tracing the body and exploring
one’s embodied experience. This visual, arts-based process is highly reflective, designed to
empower communities to express and share stories – often those difficult to utter. Steeped in
various activist and feminist traditions, body mapping is also a practice of care. It is not just about
producing a map but is also about coming together to tend to the body and build solidarities to
generate change. Our article seeks to expand creative conversation around the value of body
mapping for geographers as both a research method and pedagogical tool which may enable
multiple bridges to be crossed: activist and academic, generational, and linguistic. This article
centers body mapping where it was first articulated as a research method – South Africa – and
reflects on a 3-day workshop with the Waterberg Women Advocacy Organization to map the
gendered impacts of extractive industries. By insisting on community ownership of both the
mapping process and maps themselves – where and how they get used – data sovereignty remains
at the heart of this method. This data sovereignty is not insignificant, given the persistent landscapes
of extraction in the Global South. Perhaps most critically, the feminist ethos underpinning body
mapping explored here provides tangible ways in which our work as geographers can cultivate
spaces of care with and for communities who regularly experience the abdication of care.
Keywords
arts-based methods, body mapping, extractivism, feminist activism, Global South
Body mapping is an intimate cartographic process that involves tracing the body.1 Such tracing can
be done on cloth, paper, or any material to create a life-sized outline of the body. Silhouettes are
then filled with drawings, paintings, or cut-out images to represent embodied experiences. This
visual, arts-based process is designed to empower communities to reflect on and share their stories
Corresponding author:
Thembi Luckett, Geography Department, Newcastle University, Henry Daysh Building, Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1
7UR, UK.
Email: thembi.luckett@newcastle.ac.uk
622 cultural geographies 30(4)
– often those difficult to utter.2 Steeped in activist and feminist traditions, body mapping can also
be a practice of care.3 It is not just about producing a map but is also about coming together: tend-
ing to the body to forge solidarities and generate change.4 Vitally, this activist practice can function
as an empowering and beyond-verbal research method that enables communities to process and
even politicize community trauma, and our article reflects on these possibilities.
As a research method, body mapping has roots in South Africa, where it was used by HIV-
positive communities to tackle stigma and address diverse experiences.5 Led by psychologists, this
body-mapping process was intended to celebrate HIV-positive lives, as well as to process trauma.6
More recently, geographers have experimented with this method7; however, we contend that this
engagement remains limited. While geographers have been particularly good at putting the body
on the map as a complex global-intimate site of power and resistance,8 body mapping itself remains
largely confined to therapeutic and medical fields. We argue that body mapping is a meaningful
way of working with embodied experience as feminist geographers. Our paper seeks to expand
creative conversation around the value of body mapping for geographers as both a research method
and pedagogical practice that might bridge activist and academic work.9 The paper is based on
ongoing collaborative work with women in the coal-rich Lephalale Municipality in northern South
Africa. One aspect of this ongoing commitment is a collaborative arts-based project – the focus of
this paper.
illustrates the expansion of sex work and high school dropouts among girls who came to depend on
men working in the mine and power stations for their livelihoods. Vitally, this session provided a
powerful avenue for participants to articulate their intersectional climate concerns. Focusing on
hands enabled participants to slowly and gently enter this conversation in an embodied manner.
Figures 2 and 3. Sylvia drawing her body map and the final artwork. Photo by Thembi Luckett.
of climate change. For Sylvia, drawing body maps with other women was a way to break the
silence about how women were affected in mining communities.
Lebo explained that she came from the rural community of Abbotspoort. Her grandmother,
drawn as an angel inside her body, had 10 children, who sit in a tree (Figure 4). Her mother was
represented as a queen with a crown and heart in her chest. Lebo held her community and family
close – symbolized by warm colors of yellow, orange, and red. Lebo’s map also reflected pressing
social issues, illustrated around her body. Her primary concern was water, depicted as a river with
black and brown marks of garbage and pollution stemming from coal mining. Residents were
forced to use and drink polluted river water, although it was unsafe, because a communal water tap
often ran dry. Lebo moved to Marapong, where she lived next to the power station and felt the
vibrations of every blast in her home. Despite her proximity to the station, she experienced daily
power cuts. The loss of internet access during power cuts disrupted her studies and job applica-
tions. She felt that youth were getting left behind in mining communities. This second stage of the
workshop enabled participants to sink more deeply into their intimate experiences and express
these as part of a wider community conversations rooted in particular lived geographies often mar-
ginalized in climate and energy discourses.
decided that raising awareness and accountability would be undertaken through multiple avenues,
including different media formats and through a public dialog and multi-day exhibition to be held
in Shongoane village in Lephalale in 2023. The body maps will be transformed into a storybook of
the women’s lives and their struggles against coal and climate change in the region for further
advocacy work. Thus, participants determined how to use the data, in the form of maps. This data
sovereignty is not insignificant, given the persistent landscapes of extraction.
A second site of impact of this work was felt by participants themselves, who reflected on the
importance of a space for voicing their embodied experiences. Through painting, one participant,
who shared her story of gender-based violence, remarked, ‘I was able to express what is inside and
get some relief’. The experiential process was also noted as a vital form of research to document
and keep alive memories easily eclipsed: ‘by doing something practical, you don’t forget it. . . I
didn’t know through painting you can get knowledge’. This process also supported women to form
bonds with one another, as well as across generations, as practical space was made for children and
grandchildren to play with the art materials. One participant observed that ‘by sharing and coming
together as women, we can heal’.
Conclusion
Participatory, arts-based methods are ubiquitous within geography11: community-mapping,12 zine-
ing,13 and theater14 to name a few powerful examples. We suggest that body mapping is an impor-
tant, yet hitherto under-examined, addition to this creative toolkit. Moreover, this practice,
developed across Global South geographies, heeds the call of feminist geographers to foreground
diverse knowledge and forms of care to ‘unsettle extractive research relations’.15 In this article, we
engage the maps provided not only with the permission of participants but with their guidance.
Indeed, participants expressly articulated a desire for their work to extend beyond the confines of
the workshop space into wider climate and energy debates. We aim here to follow WWAO’s own
call to embed these artistic interventions into academic and policy spaces.
626 cultural geographies 30(4)
Our paper begins to illuminate ways in which body maps can be used to align with and elevate
existing, community-led activism. This arts-based approach was a vital tool in supporting knowl-
edge-sharing and building feminist solidarities. While body mapping is predominantly used to
document the entire body,16 the workshop discussed here enabled participants to make decisions
about which body parts to visualize, which facilitated a sense of body sovereignty too often stripped
from communities. Moreover, by insisting on community ownership of both the mapping process
and the maps themselves, data sovereignty remains at the heart of this method. The feminist ethos
underpinning body mapping explored here provides tangible ways in which geographers can culti-
vate spaces of care with and for communities who regularly experience its abdication. While gen-
erative, this method also holds very real dangers for its potential to re-traumatize. What is offered
here is an explicit process of robust and ongoing consent and co-creation. We contend that grounded
in care, body mapping becomes not simply a method but a contribution to the powerful healing and
activist work often carried by women leaders in communities, such as Lephalale, at the frontline of
global climate and energy struggles.
Acknowledgements
The authors are deeply thankful for the courageous work of the Waterberg Women Advocacy Organization
and the Khulumani Support Group. The authors also wish to thank the editors, Jamie Winders and Caleb
Johnston, and critical reader, Rachel Pain, for their thoughtful and careful engagements.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: The research leading to this article received funding from the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101023502.
ORCID iD
Thembi Luckett https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2361-7893
Luckett and Bagelman 627
Notes
1. A.Jager, A.Tewson, B.Ludlow and K.Boydell, ‘Embodied Ways of Storying the Self: A Systematic
Review of Body-Mapping’, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research,
17(2), 2016, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1602225.
2. Jager et al., ‘Embodied Ways of Storying the Self’.
3. S.Gunn, Body Mapping for Advocacy: A Toolkit, 2017, <https://www.sitesofconscience.org/wp-content/
uploads/2018/12/Toolkit-Body-Mapping-2018_Online-1.pdf> (1 December 2022).
4. Jager et al., ‘Embodied Ways of Storying the Self’.
5. H.MacGregor, ‘Mapping the Body: Tracing the Personal and the Political Dimensions of HIV/AIDS in
Khayelitsha, South Africa’, Anthropology & Medicine, 16, 2009, pp. 85–95.
6. J.Morgan and Bambanani Women’s Group, Long Life: Positive HIV Stories (Cape Town: Double
Storey Books, 2003); J.Solomon, “Living with X”: A Body Mapping Journey in Time of HIV and AIDS.
Facilitator’s Guide. Psychosocial Wellbeing Series. (Johannesburg: REPSSI, 2002).
7. J.Bagelman and S.Wiebe, ‘Intimacies of Global Toxins: Exposure & Resistance in “Chemical Valley”’,
Political Geography, 60, 2017, pp. 76–85; E.Sweet and S.Escalante, ‘Bringing Bodies into Planning:
Visceral Methods, Fear and Gender Violence’, Urban Studies, 52(10), 2015, pp. 1826–45.
8. A.Mountz and J.Hyndman, ‘Feminist Approaches to the Global Intimate’, Women’s Studies Quarterly,
34(1/2), 2006, pp. 446–63.
9. We write this paper together as feminist geographers who have experimented with body mapping in
diverse settler-colonial contexts. Jen co-analyzed body maps as a tool for monitoring toxic impacts of
a petrochemical plant in Aamjiwnaang, Canada. Notably, this work did not engage with global-south
histories of body mapping. It is in this spirit that we turn toward Thembi’s research in South Africa.
10. Sylvia chose to have her real name used, while Lebo decided on a pseudonym. These decisions were part
of wider ethics discussions during and after the workshop regarding consent, anonymity and ownership
of the artwork.
11. S.Kindon, R.Pain and M.Kesby, Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods (London:
Routledge, 2007).
12. K.Askins, ‘Feminist Geographies and Participatory Action Research: Co-Producing Narratives with
People and Place’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25(9), 2018, pp. 1277–94.
13. J.Bagelman and C.Bagelman, ‘Zines: Crafting Change and Repurposing the Neoliberal University’,
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 15(2), 2016, pp. 365–92.
14. C.Johnston and G.Pratt, Migration in Performance: Crossing the Colonial Present (London: Routledge,
2019).
15. H.McLean, ‘Creative Arts-Based Geographies’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical
Geographies, 21(3), 2022, pp. 311–26.
16. Jager et al., ‘Embodied Ways of Storying the Self’.
Author biographies
Thembi Luckett is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow in Human Geography at Newcastle University. Her
activist and academic work explores the intersections of fossil fuels, gender and grassroots struggles in
Limpopo, South Africa. She focuses on colonial histories and presents of extractivism and climate and energy
justice activism led by women living adjacent to coal mega-projects in the area.
Jen Bagelman is a Reader in Human Geography and Deputy Director of the Institute for Social Science at
Newcastle University. Her activist and academic work is concerned with ways in which exclusionary citizen-
ship and colonial bordering practices generate displacement for diverse communities. She is deeply interested
in how people creatively mobilize to enact more loving geopolitics, particularly related to migrant and envi-
ronmental justice.