The right to the city from the perspective of feminist ethnography: Politicizing emotions and resistance in the urban space

Abstract

With this article we aim to restore the value of the knowledge provided by feminist ethnography about gender and sexual inequalities in the urban space, as well as issuing a response that addresses these inequalities from within resistances framed in everyday life. Starting from a critical review of the notion “Right to the city”, we inquire about the place that gender and sexual inequalities have in this concept. Next, we underscore the value of emotions in relation to the right to the city, and ethnography as an appropriate methodology to register conflicts that take place in the urban space and practices of resistance in everyday life. To explain our proposal, we draw on different works that study urban space from an ethnographic perspective. There are two emotions, “fear” and “non-belonging”, that we find inscribed in the reproduction of gender and sexual inequalities in the daily experience of the city, and that would also act as a driver of daily resistances. Our theoretical and ethnographic research leads us to advance feminist ethnography as a useful methodological strategy to expand the notion of the right to the city to the complexity of urban conflicts, beyond class, as well as to politicize strategies of resistance in everyday life, too often made invisible.