Gender Geography is not a genre of Geography

La Géographie du genre n'est pas un genre de Géographie

Abstract

This article defends the idea that gender Geography is not a genre of Geography, aiming to contribute to the reflection on what might give geographical meaning to the geography-gender relationship. To this end, we have conducted an epistemological and ontological review of nature, body, and technique, considering them as important mediations in this relationship, which, dialectically, can reproduce as forms of spatial being-in-the-world. In this sense, this article poses the ethical-political challenge that future geographies consider gender issues as intrinsic to an anti-capitalist project, in which our being-in-the-world with others, that is spatialized in the multi-scale of bodies that connect as coexistences, allows us to exist as who we want to be.

Keywords:
gender geography; relational ontology; body; nature; technique

Resumo

Neste artigo defendemos a ideia de que a Geografia de gênero não é um gênero de Geografia, buscando contribuir para a reflexão sobre aquilo que pode conferir sentido geográfico à relação Geografia-Gênero. Para tanto, realizamos uma revisão epistemológica e ontológica sobre natureza, corpo e técnica, admitindo-os como mediações importantes da relação, que, dialeticamente, pode se reproduzir como modos de ser-estar espacial no mundo. Nesse sentido, este artigo coloca o desafio ético-político de que as Geografias por vir considerem as questões de gênero como intrínsecas a um projeto anticapitalista, no qual o nosso estar no mundo com os outros, que se espacializa na multiescalaridade dos corpos que se conectam como coexistências, nos permita existir como quem queremos ser.

Palavras-chave:
Geografia de Gênero; ontologia da relação; corpo; natureza; técnica

Résumé

Cet article défend l'idée que la géographie du genre n'est pas un genre de géographie, cherchant à contribuer à la réflexion sur ce qui pourrait donner un sens géographique à la relation géographie-genre. À cette fin, nous réalisons une révision épistémologique et ontologique de la nature, du corps et de la technique, les considérant comme des médiations importantes dans cette relation, qui, dialectiquement, peut se reproduire comme des modes d'être-spatial dans le monde. En ce sens, cet article pose le défi éthique et politique pour que les géographies à venir considèrent les questions de genre comme intrinsèques à un projet anticapitaliste, dans lequel notre manière d'être au monde avec les autres, qui est spatialisée dans la multi-échelle des corps qui se connectent comme des coexistences, nous permet d'exister comme nous voulons être.

Mots-clés :
géographie du genre; ontologie de la relation; corps; nature; technique

I only hope that the vastness of the spaces required by the presentification of the other does not obliterate the pretensions of clarity of the analysis. (Gerd Bornheim, 1998, author’s translation).

Introduction

This text is not about Gender and Geography. This text is about geographical theory and practice. But is it possible to talk about geographic theory and practice today without dimensioning gender theories and practices? Is it possible to talk about gender theories and practices not considering the geographical dimensions present in them, even without clarity of purpose or declared interest? This text covers this issue: the conditions of impossibilities¹, whether epistemic or ontological, in which considerations about gender, carried out in different fields of knowledge and also in artistic and/or fictional representations, cross Geography and geographies, in such a way that we can identify their permeability as existing impossibilities, but which manifest themselves, albeit in a spectral way, in fundamental questions of our tradition as knowledge and philosophy.

In order to achieve a better understanding on the set of intentions we intend to develop in this article, we would like to advise that we will start from a perspective that is at the same time not essentialist or relational of gender and Geography. Which means that we think of a Geography considering that the means of existence situate the possibilities of knowledge mediated by the knowledge and spatial practices of the self-other relationship, that is, of alterity, which we read as the man-environment relationship; society-nature; society-space.

The fact is that, despite the terms chosen, due to the objective of the reading we want to achieve, it is important for us to consider the hyphen we use when we want to spot the existence of a relationship. We suppose that this graphic sign reveals a spatiality of the in-between, a spacing that characterizes a certain negotiation between the terms, but which also makes it feasible to consider that there is tension between these terms, as well as to throw some light on the hierarchies historically established as a mark of relationships, especially when they acquire a dichotomous meaning.² These are dimensions implied in the self-other relationship as aspects of alterity which we will cover regarding our objective of thinking about the Geography-Gender relationship, considering as fundamental the spatiality or, we can say, the geographicity inherent to the relationship, which produces a geographical sense to gender issues; capable of opening an even greater horizon for Geography, we suppose, than that of becoming a field or a specialty among us.

The I-other in this article is a reference in the understanding of the meaning of the relationship itself because it is an approach to Geography that considers ontology beyond the debate through epistemology, a point previously developed in our work with respect to the debate on the geographicity of feminisms (Biteti, 2022). We suppose, therefore, that the subject-object relationship is insufficient for us to think about the relations that we are interested in dealing with in this text, since there are certain aspects of spatialized alterity in which the self-other relationship opens up to new meanings or syntheses that are not exhausted in the subjectivity of the subjects or in the objectivity of the objects, even though the subject and the object can participate in the dynamics of being. Naturally, we are aware about the pertinence of the works that consider embodied subjects as a possibility of criticism of mere subjectivism.

However, there is an accumulation of ontological issues that we consider important to bring as central in this work, and these present reflections on body and corporeality that are not necessarily linked to the approaches of the subjects; even though it does not relinquish them. Also, ultimately, they even question the very destiny, affirmative, of the definition of subjects by philosophy and science, understanding that there is a kind of humanist teleology that reinforces the hierarchy in the subject-object dichotomy. We think that this may result in merely objectifying readings of the body and instrumental readings of technique and control or mastery of nature, considering that these themes, body, technique and nature, are permeable and allow us to relate Geography and Gender.

Thus, the main objective of this article is to ontognoseologically reflect Geography, in capital letters when referring to scientific knowledge, and geographies, linked to existences and inscribed in ways of life, both permeated by gender debates, theorizations and practices. Methodologically, although we consider practices as fundamental, we chose to select discussions that are central to geographic epistemology and ontology, tensioned by the way they appear in gender theorizations. Therefore, we chose not to bring everything that has been and continues to be produced in Geography considering this intersection. We admit our epistemic disobedience, but we wish that this is not interpreted as an injustice to those who came before.

However, as we have said, if we work with the conditions of impossibilities, it is necessary, at least, to try to see what has not been accomplished or what has not acquired a leading role among us, trying to glimpse what was at the service of these impossibilities or interdictions. Therefore, we hope to contribute to the analysis of the Geography of the present, the context of this text, but also to the Geographies to come, considering that the future is not that which is posed as the new, but that with which, by identifying the repetitions, the spectres and the imagination, we can promote openings for thought and the conditions of existence to beings who, participating in the reproduction of space, find in the “there” of things,., in their being, the possibilities that guarantee them the permanence of differing. Anyway:

Against the twists and turns of these old roads already trodden, the trace/residue is the frenetic manifestation of the always new. Because what it opens is not the virgin land, the virgin forest, this fierce passion of the discoverers. In fact, the trace/residue does not contribute to completing the totality, but allows us to conceive the unspeakable of this totality. The always new is no longer what remains to be discovered in order to complete the totality, what remains to be discovered in the white spaces of the map; but what we still need to weaken in order to truly disseminate the totality, that is, to perform it totally. (Glissant, 2005, p. 83, author’s translation).

Thus, for the purpose of our analysis, we will make an incursion into themes that we consider fundamental and common to the geographic and gender studies without necessarily coexisting in the same temporality. Our cut-off is, therefore, thematic, so we can make inflections, considering that our perspective of time is also not linear, since we are inspired by the Yorubá philosophy which says: “exu killed a bird yesterday with the stone he threw today” (author’s translation). This is the sense of bringing as points of convergence between Geography, geographies and genres, the themes of nature, body and technique, thought ontologically from the points of view of existence, relationship and movement.

It is worth noting that the consideration of movement is not limited here to changes of place or flows, but ontologically means transformation or the capacity to be-other. Hence, they are foundations that bring together epistemic and ontological dimensions to the geographical, as we suppose. For didactic and deeper purposes, we could choose only one of the aforementioned themes, given the depth each one requires; but, as they sometimes mix and even get confused, we chose to present them trying to build paths or alternatives to see them in relation. However, we understand that we ourselves - and also those who read us - can deepen the relationship that we consider most pertinent to the research itself, whatever it may be. This gives this article, albeit preliminarily, the desire that it may become, in addition to a theoretical reflection, an essay on the proposition of method.

Geography and Ontology of Relation.

We were inspired by Édouard Glissant's “Poetics of Relation” (2005, 2021) to think about the relationship in its geographical sense or, in what we have considered over time, the self-other relationship pertinent to the ways of our being in the world as beings that coexist in the same common objective horizon. In this text, by resorting to an existential perspective, we understand that this leads us to speak of alterity and the self-other relationship as something that potentially allows us to broaden the understanding of the spatio-temporal relations between human and non-human beings, in other experiences of the world and other forms of being-in-the-world, distinct, although coexisting, with the Western forms that hegemonize themselves, Even in the West itself.

We would say that the content of the relationship alluded to, being an ontology of the relationship, leads us to a dialectic of being (Sartre, 2002), a perspective that centers our argument. If, in this scope, we intend to think about the differences in dialectics, seeking to bring this reflection to Geography, we understand that a possibility of understanding this is given by the recognition of the scalarity between existences on which we are interested in reflecting, especially for the purposes of this text, those that are not conceived as a standard, a norm, or as a paradigm face to the numerous spatial strategies of normalization and normalization that constrain, when they do not exterminate, the possibilities of the coexistence of differences, of the movement of deferral and diversity.

An element that marks our intention with this discussion, considering the possible interfaces and mutual fertilization of geographical theories and gender theories - to contribute to reflections on a Gender Geography, and not a genre of Geography - is precisely to bring to light the relational aspect of Geography in some approaches to our history as knowledge and as science, seeking to understand how our particularity makes this a distinctive feature in relation to the other sciences that constitute themselves as modern ones, in a rupture with their classical way of knowing, through concepts, as analyzed by M. Foucault in “Words and Things” (1966).

Ruy Moreira, in “Where does geographical thinking go? For a critical epistemology” (2006), offers us a periodization of Geography, considering the ruptures of paradigms, as we mentioned about the Foucault reading, also considering that no rupture occurs completely, that is, that there are continuities and discontinuities between periods and, in the same way, processes that imply recovering aspects of a previous paradigm and attributing new meanings and signifiers in the present, since ideas are instituted in reality, in different geographical contexts and in a relationship of knowledge-power. Moreira then considers three paradigmatic phases: “the holistic paradigm of low modernity, the fragmentary paradigm of industrial modernity and the holistic paradigm of hypermodernity (or post-modernity), as a current trend” (Moreira, 2006, p. 13, author’s translation). It is a combination of philosophical reference sources with their respective formats that the author considers.

Thus, regarding the current period of Geography, there would be a plurality of philosophical references, in which, we suppose, we can situate the references that guide the gender theorizations that we bring to this article. But this does not mean disregarding the other periods, at the risk of reinforcing a fragmentary approach, in this case, of a theme that may appear as new, but that dialogues with our tradition.

If geographical “low modernity” had the label of holism coming from the philosophical references of German idealism and romanticism, we speak of an Europe that assumes as a power project the control of the world in the game of unification-fragmentation of territories, that is, a whole spatial dynamic of reproduction that is consolidated through changes in politics, in science and in the thought of the time. Geography changes because social processes, the material world and subjectivities also do, but we need to see this trough the economic and power relations contexts; for instance, to understand the meaning of the positivist fragmentation of Geography “in modernity”, and, with this, identify the nuances of the so-called crisis of modernity, or the very notion that “we have never been modern” (Latour, 1994, author’s translation), in order to reach the complexity of the current period, both for Geography and to propose a Geography-Gender relationship.

We know that in geographical epistemology there is a strong tradition of defining spatial cut-offs taking into account common aspects that, combined, can demonstrate an ontological stability capable of characterizing an identity and, thus, establishing a relationship via comparison with other identity cut-offs, this being a mark of Regional Geography of Vidalian inspiration, for example. There is a chorological dimension here that is methodologically organized by comparison, aiming to establish the “regional individualities”. In this sense, classification is a specific way of relating difference and identity that marks modern scientific representation, which Geography does not escape from and which has repercussions on the prevalence of identity through the suppression of difference (Moreira, 2007).

When we project other meanings of relationship, thinking that spatial cut-offs do not necessarily need to have an area of character and that we can even think of bodies as constituent parts of a relational spatiality, this perspective leads us to multiform existences, open to the future, to the outlining (Biteti; Grandi, 2024) and to transformation, that is, situations that tension the boundaries that separate self-other because they admit permeability, because they differ, because they are thought of in their spatialized alterities.

Thus, we suppose that one of our tasks when thinking about the Geography-Gender relationship is to avoid an incarceration of bodies in their spatialized corporeities, just as when we see them as units of identity character. We understand that this can prevent countless possibilities of the existence of bodies open to the world, which reproduce themselves as a world bordering the boundaries of identifications, but which, for that, need there to be an open world for them, where they can recognize themselves as integral and constituent parts. There is a desirable dialectic, as Moreira outlines it:

Difference or dialectic? First of all, dialectics of difference. Dialectical difference as concrete content. Non-difference as mediation of identity, pure category of the method of representation. Concrete difference. But, above all, a reaffirmation of the subject of/in history (Touraine, 1994). A subject that is polymorphous in difference. And difference that is reaffirmed in/as a subject. But also, the death of the universal subject, in the face of the (re)birth of the multiple subject. Death and birth of the subject, dialectically together. (Moreira, 2007, p. 171, author’s translation).

The relationship exists through the distinction of the terms that constitute it, but it is not a question of fixed, immutable distinctions, but consistent with the history of being, the perspective of an ontological dialectic, which, therefore, is not limited to the condition of method, but to the very way of being of things, considering changes and movements, as we learn in G. Bornheim (1983). Here, there is the movement in which the being jumps from being as the meaning of the relationship, and for us this constitutes geographicity (Biteti, 2014), in such a way that it is up to us to identify what are the mediations of this movement. We understand that space is a category activated to ensure that the relationship can take place, one of the mediations, therefore. In such a way, what is repeated (which is not a repetition of the same) can confer a sense of permanence of the conditions that make it possible for all bodies that are in the world, depending on the way they are, to be who they want to be, which presupposes their own making. But, for this, it is necessary to ensure the repetition of difference, of deferral, and the reproduction of the non-normative.

It is no coincidence that J. Butler (2019), when dealing with gender performativity, draws our attention to the historical conditions created for the reproducibility of the Same and not of the Other. From this point arises, we suppose, one of the ways of considering the “spatial disconnection of the subjects” (Moreira, 2007, author’s translation), if we understand that space as an important dimension of our being in the world and not as an exteriority of Cartesian meaning, a co-constitutive of existences. After all, simultaneous to being a body we are space, something that should not be disregarded when we think about the production of space (Lefebvre, 1974), nor when we think about the production of bodies.

Hence, inevitably, our theoretical assumption is, at the same time, political, as we can see in D. Harvey (2004) and D. Massey (2008), each in their own way, but sharing criticisms of the way not only in which we conceive space and the body in Geographical Theory, but also, and above all, the concrete ways of spatial relations and practices imposed by capitalist modernity, which are reproduced in an uneven development (Smith, 1988), but as a totalizing project, as we said in a recent article on “A spatial economy of bodies” (Biteti, 2024).

In the propositions of geographers D. Harvey, in his “Spaces of Hope” (2004), and D. Massey, when he writes “Through Space” (2008) to convene “A New Politics of Spatiality”, what we see are initiatives that aim to consider differences and experiences in the light of a spatial imagination that wants to transform the world and the conditions of life; In this sense, it is a future that needs to be carried out spatial-temporally. We repeat the disturbing phrase that J. Butler, inspired by T. Adorno, fires in some of his reflections in which the condition of gendered bodies is linked to that of other bodies made precarious by race, class, age, condition of migrant, face the constant threats to their existence, whether by the regime of control and punishment over their actions and their bodies, or by the destruction of the built environment and its ways of inhabiting. She asks, “Is it possible to live a good life in a bad life?” (Butler, 2019, author’s translation).

How do Gender Geographies contribute to our understanding of the world and of ourselves as beings in the world? What is Gender from the point of view of your Geography? Before the questionings that we propose here from Geography, in what we point out as conditions of impossibilities between us, we intend to focus on some foundations that articulate an ontological nexus of the relationship in Geography and in Gender theories, “weakening to disseminate” and to identify some of our impossibilities.

In the following sessions, we will try to make brief incursions, mediated by what we present here as the ontological nexus of the existential meaning of self-other relationship; mediations that are configured as spatiality for us to visualize some of our impossibilities when dealing with Nature, Technique and Body, from this perspective. This is because we understand that such a discussion is necessary so that we can draw parallels with the analogous contents in the debates of Gender, imbued with the purpose of finding reciprocal fertilizations, since there is a thematic permeability, but whose objective, at the end of this instant, is to affirm Geographies to come.

Thus, if space is a mediation of my being in the world, in such a way that we can visualize trends and forms of spatial organization of society, however, it is essential to understand continuities and discontinuities, order and disorder in the dynamics of movement. If society reproduces and needs to repeat itself, space is a category of repetition and reproduction, dialectically with social processes. When we think of the body as space, we need to handle what may sound like a paradox, because we know that space is not a subject that organizes, it is society that reproduces itself spatially face the relationship with the other, presupposing an alterity.

In this sense, when we refer to bodies as space and, therefore, a scale or spatial cut that is related to other ones, we know that scale-bodies (Biteti; Grandi, 2024) are agents whose action can have a transformative character of the world and existential conditions, especially if we think from the perspective of political bodies.

Facing this and other issues, we reaffirm the necessity to consider the ontology of the relationship through a dialectic of the being, also so it’s possible to see what is situated in the in-between of the being, a spatiality marked by tensions, which can become conflicts and contradictions in view of their overcoming. Such an approach is not possible from the exclusive point of view of geographical epistemology, but by thinking of Geography as an ontology, as a way of being in the world of human and non-human beings, which, before the multiple determinations of the concrete, in relation, can be-come, thus acquiring a meaning that we have called geographicity (Biteti, 2019, Biteti, Moraes, 2014, 2019).

We are interested in treating the dialectic of being considering the continuous movement of the relationship between being and entity, finite because it is historical, but always open to new contradictions, as a process that is not resolved in the self or in consciousness, but as an opening before a reality that is inapprehensible in its entirety. For this reason, we will dedicate ourselves to talking about what is placed as other, considering that it is in difference that the relationship is possible, and it is in a dialectical relationship that the individual jumps from being as a sense of the relationship of alterity. Understanding in what ways this in the production of what we are, mediated by the ways in which we coexist in the world, but in a world that is not the same, is a challenge that goes beyond any field of specialty of Geography, without ceasing to be geographical.

The debate on nature in the Geography-Gender relationship

Frankly speaking - as much as I like to choose images for these things -, frankly speaking, your monkey origin, gentlemen, so far as you have something of this nature behind you, cannot be as far from you as mine is before me. But it tickles the heel of anyone who walks on earth - from the little chimpanzee to the big Achilles. (Kafka, 1999, p. 41-47 author’s translation).

In this passage from the literary text “A Report for an Academy”, published in the book “A Rural Doctor” (1919/1996), the writer Franz Kafka, in the figure of his character, Pedro Vermelho, satirizes what is seen as an evolution from the condition of nature of the monkey to the condition of culture of man, to which he is questioned by the Academy. Our highlight concerns the inversion that the text proposes when it attributes nature a freedom in contrast to human prisons. Here, we consider the history of Philosophy to identify some influences by which the debate on nature reaches the Sciences in the period of modernity, especially in Geography.

We understand that it is a way to understand the subjectivity of an era related to the theme, agreeing with what Merleau-Ponty says: “it is not scientific discoveries that have caused the change in the idea of Nature. It is the change in the idea of Nature that allowed such discoveries” (1994, p. 25, author’s translation). We can, to the same extent, contrast the idea of nature forged by Western European modernity with other ideas and experiences of natures that were not intended to be universal, assuming that we can extract from them other meanings of relationship with nature capable of producing new understandings for a Gender Geography.

We intend to point out some difficulties that the debate on nature in Western modernity has brought to Geography, in order to claim a broadening of scope, in which “Other natures, Other cultures” (Descola, 2016) can permeate the link we are trying to establish between Geography-Gender, especially in a critique of the essentialization of nature, which, for us, occurs both by the admitted biological definition and by the attribution of a fixture in the ontological distinction between human and nature, reinforced by the dichotomy in the Sciences in general. In these perspectives, certain non-normative gender bodies are questioned in their own sense of humanity, just as it was done with colonized bodies, in both cases, taken as beasts or animalized. Such an understanding historically justifies a set of actions, such as, for example, civilizing missions, holy wars, imprisonments, sex normalization surgeries, and many forms of violence and extermination.

In Philosophy, there are different conceptions about nature. We identified at least three views, even at the risk of generalization. An older view, in which nature appears as the principle of motion or substance, which would characterize a metaphysics of nature, as in Aristotle (classical period of ancient philosophy). There is also a perspective in which nature is apprehended as a necessary order or causal connection, taken as exteriority in opposition to the interiority of consciousness (whether in philosophical rationalism or empiricism). And yet another view that considers nature a field of unification of certain techniques of investigation (we can find it in Pragmatic or Empirical Philosophies).

But we would say that the period of the Renaissance consolidates a perspective that opposes nature and man, and even when the “return to nature” is proclaimed, we understand that it was the Aristotelian sense that one has returned, which means seeing nature as a directive principle in man in the form of instinct (see Rousseau and the good savage). And there is a recurrent view that has been extending for a long time, I would even say from antiquity to modernity, which shares a predominant perspective of nature as order and necessity in which regularity is emphasized, and which serves as the basis for the notion of natural law, a presupposition not only of law, of morals, but also of Modern Science.

A. Vitte (2007) states that modern Geography is heir to the philosophical debate on the metaphysics of nature that reaches Kant. The striking elements of this influence were guided by the biological paradigm of organism, in which the laws of nature are an ex ante. This nature-organism has a sense of totality with purpose. In this sense, it is possible to attribute the function of Law, linked to a principle, whether mechanical or moral.

In Gender studies, there is also a marked presence of the organic idea of nature that defines the human body as biological, in such a way that sexual difference comes to be the protagonist of the debate on the difference defined by the genital organ, and this as the main reference in the attribution of genders. That is, a binary order of difference is established, which is fixed and essentialized, in order to deduce from it what would be the male and female genders as order or natural law. It is important to say that such a perspective coexists with the concrete production of sexual hierarchies (Federici, 2017), which attribute to women the role of biological reproducers of the species, fundamental to the more general reproduction of capital through unpaid work, and which condemns to abnormality any existence that does not fit into the binary of sex and gender.

Therefore, the considering that the limit that defines and separates humanity and nature may not be fixed, allows gender to be displaced from the perspective of biological sexual difference. However, this presupposes expanding the idea of nature that we have as a condition for us to understand what happens close to the limit, in the spatiality of the in-between, endowed with conflictive and even transgressive force, which manifests itself in Trans and Queer existences. To do so, however, it is necessary to qualify the relationship of alterity between the entities, in order to understand the potentialities of transformation inherent to the dialectical movement, including self-transformation.

In geographical theory, the attempts to approach a relational meaning are perceptible both in the holistic perspective of interaction between the spheres of the inorganic, the organic and the human in the period of low geographic modernity, in Humboldt, as well as in the perspective of the integrative relationship of nature in geosystemic approaches, as well as in the critical perspective of Marxian inspiration, even though such initiatives of integrative vision, except in Humboldt, have taken place in the context of the division attributed between what would be Human Geography (through the metabolism of work, which relates man and nature, but gives a centrality to man) and Physical Geography (through the interaction and complementarity between natural elements, which may include man, but gives a centrality to natural elements).

And, even in the face of this diversity of approaches that we mention here as examples, even if it would be necessary to deepen each one in their differences, we suppose that, in all these cases, there would still be the perspective of biological dominance and the establishment of a fixed ontological distinction between the terms of the relationship, thus reinforcing a dichotomous perspective in which there is always a superior hierarchical pole in the relationship and, sometimes, it disregards the moral dimension present in laws, including natural ones. In this way, thinking about nature, and not only natural phenomena, is an ontological task posed to the relationship man-nature for Geography and, therefore, important to the alleged Geography of Gender.

However, we suppose that there is a difficulty created by the fact that our gaze is centered on an ontological difference between man and nature defined in a stable and hierarchical way in the treatment we give to nature in Geography, but not only among us, since it is characteristic of Western European modernity to define a rigid limit between nature and culture. The fact is that the centrality of the biological in the definition of nature has repercussions both in Geography and in gender theorizing, linking necessity to survival, so that everything that approaches the world of nature denies the sense of freedom as a humanist project (which is why we started this session with the satire made by Kafka).

There is in this a sense of the degeneration of nature, which inevitably reaches the body in contrast to the valorization of culture and the spirit. Before this, it is recurrent that everything that is said about the body, linking it to nature, something manifested especially when we talk about women, trans people or those who perform gender outside the binary and cis order, and, we would say, also about colonized or peripheral bodies, assume a moral vision.

Philosopher Vladimir Safatle points out the need to think of another place for nature, mentioning the article of the Ecuadorian Constitution that defines nature or Pacha Mama as a subject of rights. According to him, such a political decision calls into question the distinction between people and things in a society in which people wish to be free by subordinating things. Such perspective seems interesting to us when we consider P. Descola's argument in a Conference published as a book (2016), whose title is “Other Natures, Other Cultures”. The author says in a critical tone: “In short, there is an important difference between humans and nonhumans: humans are subjects who have rights because of their condition as men, while nonhumans are natural or artificial objects that do not have rights by themselves” (Descola, 2016, p. 9, author’s translation).

Aiming to shift the gaze of Western cultures regarding the logic of control and domination of nature, we sought references of another relationship in the Bantu African culture. We did this in the text: “Ubuntu Philosophy, Ontology, Nature and Cu“Ubuntu Ontology: nature being-with-man” (Biteti e Moraes, 2020). In the text, we formulate as one of the objectives to problematize notions that start from a universal sense of man and nature, operating through dichotomy. In contrast to this, Ubuntu decentralizes man's place in his relations with other beings. It is not a humanist ethic focused on man, but a way of being-with the other, with nature, with life. This, in the words of Bas'llele Malomalo, is the central element of African philosophy, which conceives of the world as a web of relations between the divine, community, and nature (composed of animate and inanimate beings) (Malomalo, 2010).

M. Sodré, when speaking of the nagô system, says that certain symbols fundamental to the dynamics of life are maintained, unlike societies that are constituted influenced by European philosophical rationalism. An important example is Exu. Exu is a dynamic element, invested with a power present in everything that exists, a symbolic principle of differentiation through movement and communication. In this sense, individuation is done by the assimilation of the world, in a holistic and non-atomized way as in Western cultures in general, as we can see in the following quote:

Curiously, the cultures that most adapt the organic to the inorganic, or seek the positivity of the being in a cosmic aspiration in which the natural is included, do not have a specific and centralizing word for this exteriority to man: the word “nature” is Latin. But the force field designated by it is a concrete universal, it is present in all cultures, without, however, obeying a fixed ontology, so that one can speak of different natures, corresponding to different symbolic perspectives. It happens that nature and language are conceptual creations destined to give an organicist form - where things are rationally interconnected, and each object must be apprehended as a whole - to the historical singularity of ancient Greek, just as they appear, even conceptually “ex-nominated”, in Arkhé's cosmologies. (Sodré, 2017, p. 200, author’s translation).

Along these lines, regarding “Brazilian” indigenous communities, Viveiros de Castro (2009, 2018) states that the classic distinction between nature and culture in Western cosmologies cannot be thought of in the same way in indigenous cosmologies. Viveiros de Castro also presents many contrasting marks between these ways of thinking and being. It is in the face of this that he affirms the contrastive “multinaturalism” to the proclaimed “multiculturalism” of Western societies. According to him, “the Amerindian conception would suppose, on the contrary, a unity of the spirit and a diversity of bodies” (Viveiros de Castro: 2018, p. 4, author’s translation). Among Amerindians, nature and culture are part of the same sociocosmic field.

Multinaturalism is the basis of Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism, something linked to a variable ontology, different from relativism, since it does not operate through representation. Also, because the Amerindian emphasis is on the body, the locus of the clash between humanity and nature. We suppose that this contrasts with the idea of a definitive ontological difference, in which Dasein is only human and, as Heidegger (2003) says, the animal is poor in the world. Multinaturalism opens up the possibility of an ontological instability that tensions certain limits that define identities.

In this sense, when we propose to think ontologically about the relationship, in such a way that this could contribute to the theorizations not only of Geography in the course of its epistemology, but also of Geographies to come, which presupposes the encounter and reciprocal fertilization with the theorizations of Gender, we are interested precisely in tensioning the boundaries of the self-other and proposing to consider alterities with non-humans as significant (Haraway, 2016). When P. Descola proposes something “Beyond Nature and Culture” (2023), it is precisely the fixed limit between borders that he problematizes and which inspires us to think about this possibility when he says, among many other arguments he develops, that:

Many so-called “primitive” societies invite us to this overcoming, they who never dreamed that the frontiers of humanity would end in the vicinities of the human species, they who do not hesitate to invite the most modest plants and the most insignificant animals to the concert of their social life... (Descola, 2023, p. 16, author’s translation).

We could go in the direction of proposing a decolonization of the idea of nature forged by modernity, but we fear that this will not be enough. First, given the coexistence of distinct ways of existing as nature and as culture, even if this implies the recognition of the impossibilities of permanence produced by relations of power and ways of production of the modern-colonial project that are imposed on many of these societies. However, we wish to recognize that permanences produce coexistences, and, before the encounters, there is no denying the possibility of convergences, contagions, mixtures, and also conflicts and contradictions.

Perhaps we need to displace and decentralize spatially, as Susan Buck-Morss did in her book “Hegel and Haiti” (2013), when she noted that the ideals of the French Revolution were accomplished on Haitian soil, as a rupture and as a Revolution. This also means that fundamental authors can be margins, even if they are in the centers, and that it is not possible to give up the “monstrosity” of Paul Preciado, the “cyborg” of Donna Haraway, the Queer Theory of Teresa de Lauretis, the gender performativity of Judith Butler, as we will see below, and so many others who make use of classical thought, much of it European, to produce an enormous wealth of discussions on gender and sexuality, pointing to the limits and boundaries of what hegemonically legitimizes itself as nature and culture in Modernity.

The debate of the body in the Geography-Gender relationship

If we highlight nature as a fundamental theme of the Geography-Gender relationship, we would say that the approach to the body is analogous, since traditionally the body is understood as nature, circumscribed to the field of necessity and, in this case, ends up being placed as the lower pole of the relationship with the spirit. From this perspective, the body was seen as the place of sin, desire and emotion, which needed to be controlled by reason. Corruptible, in such a way that, within the scope of colonial modernity, the world was divided between the peoples of the body (colonized) and the peoples of the spirit (colonizers), thus affirming a set of civilizing practices through catechizing and artistic missions, not to mention the so-called “holy wars” (Alencastro, 2000), in which it was not enough to civilize, but, inevitably, exterminate.

Before this spectrum of degradation in which the body and nature are primary targets, we constitute ourselves as Modern Science. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1985), Adorno and Horkheimer offer an idea of this when they deal with Odysseus's return trip to Ithaca, an epic poem written by Homer in Antiquity, but which appears as a ghost of modernity, we would say, especially when we attribute centrality to reason in the production of the modern subject, something that presupposed the control of the body and nature. Regarding this reading, the philosopher Olgária Matos (2009) states that the constitution of the self and the subject occurs face to the negativity of everything that is external to it, including the very denial of the relationship with this external other, which must be dominated.

According to the author, myth, the basis of other societies, is constituted by a mimicry that allows the relationship between man-nature. Science, on the other hand, defined by the principle of identity, by denying alterity, objectifies nature in order to dominate it and reduce it to the same, to the Subject. So does Odysseus. On his return trip to Ithaca, which we consider here as a journey of thought, having as its destination the conformation of the rational subject, given that all kinds of desires, wanderings and passions attributed to nature and the body are rejected. To do so, the body had to be contained, tying itself to the mast or covering the ears. The fact is that having control over nature presupposed renouncing the desire for the body, which is the condition of freedom and culture.

We can say that in recent decades there has been an increase in approaches to body and corporeality in Geography, as well as in other Sciences, like Philosophy, and as an agenda of social movements, especially those of an identity nature. In Brazil, this approach can be understood from the perspective of the third paradigmatic moment pointed out as a proposal for periodization by Moreira (2007), being situated in the context of a return to holism as a critique of modernity, bringing together multiple references, including phenomenology, Marxism, cultural studies and philosophies of language, as important theorizations. But the important role of feminist, black, indigenous, LGBTQIAP+ social movements as forces of change and questioning the role of Science in the face of the social, environmental, and political crises we are experiencing must be highlighted.

We need to take into account the theoretical and political relevance of these displacements in order to think about social beings, taking into account their experiences and their position in the world, in terms of both geographic location stricto sensu, as well as positionality between the social markers of gender, race, class, age, among others, in which the body appears as unquestionable evidence.

But if so far we have sought to contribute to the understanding of the way in which the body was produced as a problem to be controlled, civilized, normalized, overcome, exterminated, something that is not limited to the idea of body, but to concrete, historical bodies, our question becomes, therefore, whether it is enough to just claim the centrality of the body in the theorizations of Gender in Geography, disregarding the ways in which bodies have been reproduced concretely, symbolically, as discourse, representation and ideology, throughout the period of modernity, linked to the numerous strategies of power in capitalism, which gain expressiveness in spatial configurations. Recently we asked this question:

If the body can be recognized as an empirical reality and, therefore, not belonging to any specific scientific field, we wonder how a careful look at spatiality could help in the process of complexity of knowledge about this spatial entity and, at the same time, avoid its reification. Although we recognize the plurality of possible spatial approaches to the body, our intention here is to indicate how the debate on the scalar dimension of space can contribute to reflections on the processes, practices and actions that constitute bodies and, at the same time, condition the influence that they exert on the construction of space, highlighting the multiplicity that constitutes them as products and producers of spaces. In this text we propose to initiate a theoretical-philosophical approach with a mainly methodological interest between the body and the debate on the geographical scale, formulating the conceptual proposition of the body-scale. This formulation aims to highlight the ideas of movement, displacement and co-constitution - in addition to highlighting the inseparable political character of these ideas and the potential of approaches concerned with positionality (hooks, 2013; COLLINS, 2016; KILOMBA, 2019; HARAWAY, 1995), performativity (BUTLER, 1990, 1997) and the destabilization of the margins of the body (HARAWAY, 1991) - for the complexity of the analyses interested in seeing it as a spatial cut. (Biteti e Grandi, 2024 a, p. 73, author’s translation).

The note we made is in line with the arguments on this article, which seeks to contribute to the reflection on geographic theory and practice in line with gender theorizations and practices, but to think, after all, what is gender from the point of view of your Geography? Or, what is Geography from the point of view of gender diversity? In this sense, when we talk about bodies, we want to problematize the hierarchical dichotomies and the centrality of reason, not to create a new centrality in the body, but to explore the multiple associations, identify the tensions of the limits between identifications, recognize the possibility of the movement of becoming other, value the forms of existence that present themselves as Transgender or Queer.

To this end, we understand that it is essential to deprive bodies of their strictly biological meaning, admitting them as dynamic and procedural socio-natural constructs. When we think that the production of bodies owed not least to the production of the world, we would say that everything is always a reproduction, that is, an opening to the other and a repetition of the difference in which it is not possible to identify origin, since what exists is and is in relation to something. In this sense, we can say that bodies are political and that their reciprocal actions of production of the world and of themselves, as processes of reproduction, can be admitted and visualized in a scalarity, as we suggest as a reference of method inspired by Grandi (2023).

Having said that, the particularity of our interest is to reveal the scalarity of the relations that configure the spatial arrangements, taking the non-hegemonic body as a reference. And why? Because we understand that such bodies allow us to see relationships and configurations that Science, governed by the principle of identity, does not make visible or consider. And, also, from the perspective of the practices and struggles undertaken by these bodies considered dissonant or abject (Butler, 2019; Kristeva, 1980), in which gender inequalities are central, but not unique in the set of inequalities produced by capitalism, to broaden our scope, as Butler and Preciado, authors of reference in gender theorizations, did, when they included in their analyses the precarity (Butler, 2018) and queer multitudes (Preciado, 2021). In this way, “the look at scalarity allows us to highlight the movement and practices dimensioned and carried out by non-conforming bodies and that build and enhance disruptive non-hegemonic policies (anti-capitalist, feminist, queer, anti-racist, etc.)” (Biteti; Grandi, 2024, author’s translation).

If scalarity creates a possibility of methodological transit in the consideration of bodies in their dynamic and relational spatiality, it is necessary to see them ontologically as such. This presupposes thinking about the dimension of the existence of bodies with other bodies in the same common objective horizon, that is, in the coexistence or cohabitation of the world. A sense of corporeality of the body that philosopher Marcelo Moraes defines from the skin (2020). Existence (ex-sistence) means one out, that is, to exist as a body presupposes existing-with the others.

However, considering the tradition highlighted here, which separated space and body, the tendency is to think of the body as an autonomous, individual or personal unit and, from this perspective, to affirm a subjectivity without intersubjectivity, that is, without a world. The affirmation of the Ego instead of Eros is a form of denial of the other and of alterity, which means the “expulsion of the other” (Han, 2017) as a trait of the neoliberal capitalist world. We call this a society of the “self” or a mass egocentrism (Mbembe, 2021), because it is indeed fed by the logic of content production and representation of images through social networks.

Wouldn't this, on the other hand, be a contemporary way for the body to kill space? Let us save ourselves from it by thinking about the zones of contact and contagion, the spatiality of the in-between, of what constitutes a tension, a conflict or a contradiction. Merleau-Ponty (1999) calls it a corporeal scheme; the fact that my body is in the world as a requirement of spatiality, an idea worked out by the geographer Bettanini (1982). In the same way, Frantz Fanon (2008) does when dealing with the racial issue from a perspective of the body-space relationship, calling it the racial epidermal scheme and, also, in A. Mbembe's (2021) notions of corporeality and body-border, as we can see in the following quote:

“Corporeality”, in this case, does not refer only to what is massive in the body and in everything that objectively composes it (the skin and its colors, the organs taken individually, the bones that give it structure, the blood that circulates in the veins, the nerves, the hair system that covers it like vegetation, the microbes that populate its fauna, the water without which it would succumb to aridity, etc.). Corporeality also refers to the way in which the body is an object of perception, that is, how it is created and recreated by the gaze, by society, by technology, by the economy or by power; the way it positions itself in relation to everything that surrounds it or that moves and creates a world around it. (Mbembe, 2021, p. 12, author’s translation).

Hence the important critique made by geographer David Harvey (2004) when he says that claiming the body in Science should guarantee us something more than a narcissistic self-referentiality, under penalty of joining efforts that guarantee that there is only recognition, which is important, without a doubt, but which is not enough in the face of the necessary transformation of the current violent, sexist, transphobic conditions that we live in neoliberal capitalism (Fraser, 2003).

And, in the face of deliberate fragmentation as a form of control of our existences, neoliberalism acts by always creating new, increasingly effective mechanisms for capturing and alienating our possibilities of transgression. Thus, it is important to think of alternatives of struggle that consider to border, in order to tension, what is set as a limit, aiming, at times, to transgress. We see this, for example, when Preciado says “Why can't the abandonment of femininity become a fundamental strategy of feminism?” (2020, p. 21, author’s translation); and, also, when he points out that his gender transition is a device in the understanding of social control strategies:

... Far from being private, the observations about my body and my personal vicissitudes describe political ways of normalizing or deconstructing gender, sex, and sexuality, and can, therefore, be interesting for the constitution of a dissident knowledge face hegemonic languages... (Preciado, 2019, p. 41, author’s translation).

Considering that there are countless technologies of power and that, over time, they have asserted themselves as sexual technologies of control, how can we understand the possibility that the same technologies can transform bodies to adjust them more coherently to desire are, ironically, not capable to strengthen the control we have, making these bodies a space of experimentation and profit for capital? How can we suppose that we will be able to establish our own rules for our bodies, if there is a set of pre-existing and coexisting rules that my being in the world even prevents me from seeing them as such, considering that we constitute ourselves as a body within a moral order?

We live with spatial roughness (Santos, 2002) or inheritances in which the previous forms and spatial relations act on our lives, conditioning our actions and the ways our bodies perform. Techniques and technologies act on the reproduction of space and bodies and interfere in our understanding of the nature of space and the body. This debate is too dear to Geography and equally important in Gender Studies for us to leave out from this article. We continue with it.

The debate on technique in the Geography-Gender relationship

The debate on technique crosses all mythologies, whether as a technical artifact, a mean of realization and also of transformation. We can say that philosophy is the tail of these different apprehensions, and technique even gains a centrality in many philosophers, from Antiquity to the most contemporary, such as G. Simondon, M. Heidegger and W. Benjamin, as examples. It would be no different with the sciences, especially before the role assumed in modernity, in which their combination with techniques would have been capable of producing a great transformation in the means of production, circulation or installation, significantly altering the ways of life.

In Geography, the understanding of techniques as a mediation of the man-environment relationship in the production of geographical space has been known since the classics, and we would even say that it represents a way of seeing that constitutes a paradigm due to its repetition in numerous geographers of our tradition, such as Vidal de La Blache, Max Sorre, Pierre George, acquiring a great highlight in the work of M. Santos. In “The Nature of Space” (2002), when discussing what for him are the foundations of Geography, he says:

It is well known that the main form of relationship between man and nature, or rather, between man and the environment, is given by technology. Techniques are a set of instrumental and social means, with which man realizes his life, produces and, at the same time, creates space. (Santos, 2002, p. 29, author’s translation).

Agreeing with the importance of the treatment of technique in Gender Geography, we would even say that our concern is in line with an ontological reading of technique, in which it can be admitted as an inscription in the history of being. This makes us aim to visualize some impossibilities of the theme in the Geography already produced, especially when we understand techniques as exteriorities or means of realization, a criticism somewhat anticipated by Santos when he mentions the “technical phenomenon” as a set of relations that permeate the life of society.

Here we intend to talk about techniques bringing some reflections that link them more directly to the body, also considering the so-called “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 2010), but also, by considering the sense of extensiveness of the body as space or of the corporeality of the body as being there, reinforcing that the production of bodies that do not obey the normative standard of gender can be a way of seeing that techniques are not merely external instruments, but which are capable of ontologically redefining body and space. That is, they need to be apprehended in the dialectical relationship of being in the world.

In this sense, how can we create other spaces within normalized spaces, seeing this from the diversity of bodies and natures? The perception of the existence of the multiplicity of spaces in a non-hierarchical coexistence between bodies and natures can bring us closer to the conception of heterotopias proposed by M. Foucault (2014) as an important theorization for thinking about spatial policies that ensure the existence and reproduction of difference and, at the same time, create possibilities of permanence for non-hegemonic bodies and spaces.

The relationship that unfolds from the personal body as part of what we want to think of as a political body and, therefore, from a space produced by social processes at multiple scales, dialectically, leads us to believe that we need to understand and incorporate in Geography an ontological look at technique as something that contributes to transformation and, therefore, because this is the case, it destabilizes any fixed or essentialized ontology, being fundamental for us to consider the man-environment relationship in the context of existence and the different ways of being in the world.

M. Foucault presents four main types of technologies, according to him, defined by a distinct matrix of practical reason. There would be, therefore, technologies of production, systems of signs, of power and technologies of the self. According to us, these technologies operate in an associated way most of the time, although each form may reveal a particularity in the form of domination. In the relationship that we propose between Geography and Gender, the technologies of the self “allow individuals to perform, with their own means or with the help of others, a certain number of operations in their own bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being...” (Foucault, 2010, p. 323-324, author’s translation).

Donna Haraway presents us with the figure of the cyborg as a fiction capable of mapping the social and bodily reality of the moment in which we live in a more open perspective. The cyborg as a hybrid of animal and machine, in both natural and manufactured worlds, does not replicate itself through organic reproduction. In this way, the author considers that the “cyborg is our ontology that determines politics” (Haraway: 2000, p. 158), since it blurs the boundaries between organism and machine, as they were constituted in a fixed and sometimes non-relational way by capitalist, racist, patriarchal and domination of nature Western science and politics.

The cyborg would be a creature of a post-gender world and, also for this reason, a myth that places us before the inaccuracies of the established borders. This would be his potential for political imagination in a world marked by new technologies, in such a way that the cyborg as a hybrid of nature, body and machine, can reveal that the contradictions that exist within identifications have been increasingly used as a strategy to fragment the struggles for capitalism. However, instead of reaffirming the units, the cyborg uses the oppressor's technology to turn against him, proposing other types of coalition, affinity and, as Butler (2018) would tell us, a politics of bodies in alliance.

It is up to us to ask ourselves about the bodies that overcome the instituting dichotomies of modernity, in order to create themselves as imagetic bodies that dispute a sense of inaugural landscape of new codes and new visions of the world. Within the scope of Gender debates, we highlight Trans and Queer bodies. Lauretis (1994), when dealing with gender technologies, states that the word Queer, which has a long tradition in the English language, was historically marked by negative signifiers, being designated to deal with the “strange, weird, eccentric, of dubious or questionable character, vulgar”. The perception of this means that, in the context of the political struggle for gay emancipation in the 1970s, Queer has acquired a sense of “sexual contestation, before being identity”.

However, the author is concerned about the current use of the term, which sometimes escapes the connotation of sexual deviation to present itself as “inclusive, democratic, multicultural and multispecies gender”. But what is at stake, as the primary meaning of the term, is the normalizing character of sexuality. In this sense, inquiring about Queer sociability presupposes considering conflicts, without ignoring the ungovernable aspects of sexuality that confront society as a whole in the public sphere, as well as in the family, or internally, in each one of us. We would say, on the most different scales, something that contributes to our perception of the spatiality of non-normalized bodies, and this includes, in addition to gender and sexuality issues, precarious, racialized bodies, border-bodies, vagrant, subalternized, marginalized bodies.

By considering the expansiveness of the technologies of domination and oppression of bodies in their corporeality, as spatiality, P. Preciado follows the line of what we present about the cyborg as a myth that expresses the contradictions of the present time, surrounded by micro technologies that tear the social fabric, thus problematizing the fixity of the boundaries that define identities and brings us important contributions to think about how the naturalization of sexual practices and the gender system guide a set of technologies of power of modernity. And for this reason, his “contra sexual manifesto” presents itself as sexual counter-discipline and resistance technologies.

Although we agree with the criticism made by Harvey (2004) that we need to think about a politics of the body that is not exclusively linked to the politics of sexuality and gender, we suppose, however, that there are important elements of this debate that we have not even incorporated into Geography. When we try to propose reflections on Gender and the body, even when we bring important theorizations from phenomenology, post-structuralism and cultural studies, it seems that the marks of our epistemological tradition regarding the objectification of the body, technique and nature are maintained.

When Preciado (2019) says that counter sexuality is a theory of the body that does not fit into the oppositions of sexual identities because it is a body that dissimulates, it is precisely this relationship between the body and technique that it dimensions, something that, it seems to us, inspires another reading of technique in Geography. In the same way, it occurs when it proposes to displace sex from the natural history of human societies, considering a history of technologies that are reproduced in bodies, spaces and discourses, and that also produces realities through language.

The bodies incorporated by technologies that relativize the hierarchical dichotomy of the regime of sexual difference, inhabiting a space between, a non-normalized body-space, end up collapsing, in the space of their body, countless conflicts that manifest themselves, in a scalable way, in the home, in the streets, in politics, in the media, so that they are, despite their personal wills, political bodies. As Preciado says, “The trans body is a colony of disciplinary institutions: psychoanalysis, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, the market” (2019, p. 39).

In Geography, such political bodies reveal that bringing the body, in the face of existing epistemological possibilities, is insufficient to the challenge of participating, as a science, in the construction of another epistemology of the body. It is as if we were trying to replace an incomplete paradigm with another, equally incomplete. Thus, an attempt is made to create a unity, legitimizing identity fragmentations as totalities, or else, thinking about the relationship from a systemic, additive, and not contradictory, dialectical perspective. I even fear that we are doing this with intersectionalities, treating them as fixed elements that add to each other. Thus, we project a unity as a sum of identifications, without necessarily seeing the movements, conflicts, and contradictions within them.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps the goal today is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and build what we could be to get rid of this political “double constraint”, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization proper to the structures of modern power. (Foucault, 2010, p. 231 - 249).

Understanding the dynamics of bodies that tension the relations established as rules and norms in a space-temporality hegemonized by capitalism, which results in their perception as monsters, vagrants, sluts, beasts, madmen, witches, marginals, can situate us in front of the criticisms we need to make, the contradictions we cannot fail to see and the political imagination we will need to have, in the dispute of another project, political, of a shared world.

A Gender Geography, therefore, is not a genre of Geography. It can be a weapon of struggle, in our arsenal of war, against the unequal geographies produced by capitalism. To this end, it is worth considering that there is a geographicity in the Genres or, we can say, a perspective that thinks about the Genres from the point of view of their geography.

Such a purpose, in view of the argumentation that we try to bring as a contribution to the debate, is unfeasible if we maintain the centralism of the self, contributing to a reading devoid of the world. Without a world, we kill Geography. Nor is it possible, as we have said, to dwell on the limits of sexual difference, disregarding the possibilities of existing as another of this difference, in lives that exist by brokering limits, in the bordering spatialities of the between or the trans. When impossibilities and constraints are created to differ, the movement of difference is interrupted. Without differentiation, we kill the relationship. But, above all, if we neglect the concrete world of neoliberal capitalism, which acts directly on the mediations that constitute us as beings in the world, technology, the body and nature, objectifying relations and acting on the reproduction of life as less important than the reproduction of capital, then we kill our possibility of being in the world; We no longer know who we are, because we cannot even be another, in another possible world. We will all die, some earlier than others. And we are already dying, we know.

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• 1
  Here we use the condition of impossibility to contrast with the idea of “condition of possibility” present in Kant's Critical Philosophy, as something that underpins the possibility of knowledge, moral action, and aesthetic judgment. We assume that thinking about the impossibilities of each historical period helps us to question the constitution of epistemologies.
• 2
  For example, when we talk about “society-nature”, “culture-nature”, “man-woman”, it is not difficult to identify what consolidates as hierarchically superior, thus establishing an unequal relationship between the terms.
• Data availability:
  The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in the article itself.
• Financial support
  The publication of this article was financed in part by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) # 401619/2024-9.

Edited by

• Article Editors:
  Elisa Favaro Verdi and Ginneth Pulido Gomez

Data availability

The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in the article itself.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  12 Dec 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  09 Jan 2025
• Accepted
  23 July 2025