Caged: Intimate Violence and the Search for Sovereignty at the Margins of the City

Abstract

“Caged” is an ethnographic investigation of intimate partner violence in Usme, a peripheral district of Bogotá, Colombia, where 37% of women report having experienced physical violence by a partner and 80% report some form of controlling behavior. The purpose of this research has been to understand the exercise of this violence through the lives and positions of those who survive it, those who respond to it, and most of all those who commit it. What their experiences from the margins of the city illuminate is that in the intimate dynamics of violence—the perpetrations of it and the resistances against it—are reverberations of the same spatial inscriptions and social logics that have shaped relationships of power and control from the municipal to hemispheric scales. The intricate webs of contradiction and paradox that this produces are what have provided the apertures for engagement, as well as the means by which to appreciate the tensions that cut across, connect, and constitute these acts of violence. In the context of ever-expanding legal apparatuses to address these forms of abuse, these junctures have become sites of rethinking sovereign relationships and the spaces that they have created, how consciousness emerges from them, and they have raised new questions about the place of subversion and aspirations for transformation of the self and society.