Body, Memory, and Embodied Writing: Performance-Research and Autoethnography as Decolonial and Affective Research Methodologies

Abstract (English)

This paper offers a methodological and epistemological reflection on the intersection between performance-research and autoethnography, understood as critical methodologies for the production of situated, embodied, and politically engaged knowledge. Drawing on a phenomenological perspective of the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1993), I examine how bodily experiences—both individual and collective—constitute living languages for narrating, resisting, and transforming structural inequalities within the framework of feminist, decolonial, and affective research practice (Ahmed, 2018).
In this process, the notion of embodiment takes center stage, understood as forms of gathering and mutual accompaniment in the face of shared violences emerging from otherness. This category allows for the interweaving of personal and collective memory, enabling modes of listening, care, and embodied resistance (Ahmed, 2022). Following Bock Gálvez (2023), I conceptualize performance as an embodied methodology that activates the body as an ontological, ethical, and subversive methodology of critically interrogating the historically depoliticized position assigned to women and other marginalized bodies in knowledge production.
As Diana Taylor (2003) suggests, performance constitutes a repertoire of knowledge that transcends the written archive and materializes living memory. From this perspective, I present two of my own performative experiences:
1. A performance-protest carried out in a public space, addressing the case of Samuel, a child victim of sexual abuse by his father, and Valentina Cosíos, an 11-year-old girl who was the victim of femicide in her school in 2015.
2. A performative action of a co-authored autoethnographic paper presented in an academic space, which proposed a hypertextual and multisensory reading that overflowed the written word, activating body, sound, and movement as legitimate and powerful narrative devices.
Both interventions transformed the performative gesture into a political act, a form of living memory, and a space for collective accompaniment. They also constituted shared spaces of affect, where the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of research intertwined with the urgency of denouncing, make visible, and move others (Ahmed, 2018).
From autoethnographic writing to performative action, this paper contributes to contemporary methodological debates that seek to dismantle epistemic hierarchies and open space for creative, collaborative methodologies grounded in feminism, social justice, and living memory. Ultimately, I advocate for embodied methodologies in the social sciences that highlight the transformative potential of aesthetic, affective, and performative practices in the production of anthropological knowledge.
I therefore propose a methodological approach that interlaces body, art, performance, and writing to foster modes of inquiry that not only narrate the world, but also reimagine it through an ethics of care, memory, and the co-creation of more just, livable, and plural futures.