Embodied Epistemologies and Ethics of Care

Abstract

This paper investigates the nexus between politics, bodies, and urban spaces from an intersectional, transfeminist, and queer perspective. By questioning traditional approaches to public space, it argues that the relationship between bodies and the city is historical, contingent, and rooted in power dynamics, while also constituting a key site for practices of resistance and political creation. Drawing on trans/feminist tools—namely the practice of positioning, the embodied gaze, and the ethics of care—the paper re-reads urban dynamics as inherently political, taking into account bodies, emotions, postures, and collective gestures, and challenging the foundational private/public dichotomy. Transfeminist and queer movements thus point toward a new epistemology of the city, one that disrupts the public space of Western patriarchal traditions and their claims to homogeneity and universality, revealing cities as traversed, contested, teeming, and passionate spaces.