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Tavares, Rossana. “Por la rabia-deseo: de la cartografía al cuerpo” [Through rage-desire: from cartography to the body].In Arquitec(nudas): ensayos de investigación feminista [Architec(nudes): Feminist Research Essays], edited by LauraSarmiento, Rossana Tavares and María Novas. Córdoba: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios sobre Cultura y Sociedad, 2024, pp. 46-73.

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Tavares, Rossana. “Por la rabia-deseo: de la cartografía al cuerpo” [Through rage-desire: from cartography to the body].In Arquitec(nudas): ensayos de investigación feminista [Architec(nudes): Feminist Research Essays], edited by LauraSarmiento, Rossana Tavares and María Novas. Córdoba: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios sobre Cultura y Sociedad, 2024, pp. 46-73.

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The text „By Rage-Desire: from Cartography to the Body“ by Rossana Tavares explicitly advocates for female empowerment by exploring gendered spatial experience of segregation.

„We stand before and seek to deconstruct the universal and instrumental binarism of architecture and urbanism to which we have become accustomed, which has conveniently defined the public/ center/ power/ masculine/ appreciated and its residual other, private/ periphery/ subordination/ feminine/ disregarded.“ (p.127)

Overlaying this inequality/ exclusion/ oppression with our bodies as a site for rage and desire, she suggests that our feelings are strongly intertwined with broader social and political contexts and empowers individuals to use emotions as a source of resistance. (against erasure and silencing)

Throughout the text, the mapping of geographical spaces and the mapping of bodies are linked and can both be understood through power dynamics, histories and cultural narratives. Can the human body be a type of cartography?

Quoting Paola Jacques, the body is „a record of its experience of the city, a kind of urban writing, of the city lived, which is inscribed but also configures the body of the one who experiences it.“ (p.131)

Introducing the term „corpographies“, we understand that a „study of these bodily patterns of action can lead to an understanding of the experienced urban space.“ but have to question whos bodies the world is currently shaped by and how we can, for example by looking at female bodies, introduce alternative corpographies.

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In "Da Raiva, desejo", the speaker speaks of a visceral, poetic voice that unites rage and desire in a defiant act of self-affirmation. She speaks as a woman who has been silenced, shaped, and subdued by societal expectations - but who now reclaims her voice and body through unapologetic anger. This rage is not blind or destructive - it is lucid, ancient, and deeply political. It is the consequence of generations of domestication, humiliation, and quiet submission.

Her body becomes the primary site of resistance. She rejects the narratives that tell her to shrink, to please, to behave. She spits out imposed roles and reclaims the words she was forbidden to speak. Through vivid, corporeal imagery, the text connects the physical and emotional scars of womanhood with the symbolic violence of a patriarchal world. Her hunger is not just for food, but for autonomy, truth, and pleasure.

She refuses to be a "beautiful woman" if beauty is tied to silence and compliance. She no longer wants to be polite, digestible, acceptable. Her rage does not seek male validation - it seeks rupture. She aligns herself with archetypes of unruly femininity - figures historically labeled as witches, hysterics, monsters - reframing them as symbols of power rather than pathology.

The text is both a scream and a song: poetic, raw, and revolutionary. It dismantles binaries - between love and rage, desire and resistance, woman and myth. It shows that in reclaiming rage, a woman does not lose her humanity; she reclaims it. Thus challenging the cis-heteronormative, colonial, capitalist paradigms set in place.

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The transformative reorientation of emotions from personal sentiments to powerful instruments of knowledge and resistance is a theme that continues to invite deeper reflection on how we understand our identities and spaces. The text uses the notion of cartography to challenge fixed representations of the body. By depicting bodily experiences as maps inscribed with the emotional traces of rage and desire, Tavares emphasizes that our physical selves are not mere passive sites of oppression but active spaces where resistance and empowerment occur. This reconfiguration allows to rethink how deeply intertwined emotion and identity are with the landscapes of power we inhabit.

How do these ideas connect with other feminist theories of embodiment, and how is or could such cartographic metaphors influence Urban Design research today or in the future?

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While reading R. Tavares' text, I was particularly captivated by the compelling correlation she draws between urbanistic concepts—such as territory, cartography, and segregation—and terms intimately linked to the body, more precisely the female body. Corpographies, body-territory, and women's trajectories. The connection between living organisms and the urban (tissue) transcends mere metaphor. Human existence inherently contributes to the creation and shaping of the city, while simultaneously, and often "unconsciously," the city shape us in return. The distinctiveness of each individual's daily life naturally leads to varied experiences of the city.

However, the differentiated experiences of the city have been regulated by gendered expectations and had been problematically overlooked and accepted for centuries.  It is only in recent years that this has become a necessary focal point for attention and research concerning gendered spatiality. Yet, the embodiment of the city represents a parallel and more individualized field of inquiry. The body itself is also a space—personal, political, and a site of resistance.

I found the concepts of trajectory and corpography to be particularly beautiful and significant, applicable across diverse scales. The body, in this framework, becomes a site of inscription, mirroring social, cultural, and political dynamics. It reflects the interplay between one's own home, neighborhood(s), town, cit-y/-ies, and even countries. Tracing women's trajectories through various landscapes, both social and physical, emerges as an incredibly potent tool for change, offering a means to understand and renegotiate both bodily and spatial territories. In other words, analyzing their trajectories through a social reproduction lens reveals how their movements and experiences are shaped by the demands of reproductive labor and social expectations.  It enables an understanding of how women navigate and negotiate their body territories within the constraints of social reproduction and how they can stop being invisible to the productive space. The answer/solution relies, so far, on the methodology to approach the question/problem.

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The text explores how feminist urban experiences and embodied subjectivities challenge traditional ways of understanding the city. Women's everyday experiences—marked by displacement, precarious labor, and gendered violence—create embodied cartographies that resist top-down, statistical, and generic urban analyses. Instead of viewing the city from above, these experiences emerge from within, through movement, repetition, and the physical imprints of labor and struggle.

Wandering, in this context, is a feminist and critical method of experiencing space—not just geographically, but through the body. Inspired by thinkers like Paola Jacques, Sara Ahmed, and Frantz Fanon, the discussion emphasizes the importance of disorientation and deviation from normative paths as acts of resistance. Dissident, racialized, and feminized bodies do not simply adapt to the city but actively shape it through their non-conforming movements and collective knowledge.

This perspective reveals the city not as a neutral backdrop, but as a terrain shaped and contested by embodied experiences. Acknowledging the corpographies of marginalized bodies opens up alternative epistemologies and political possibilities rooted in lived experience, resistance, and everyday practices.

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Traditional urban systems carry a heavy burden because they painfully overlook women's perspectives. They establish a rigid dichotomy in which the public, the masculine and the valued take centre stage, while the private, the feminine and the neglected remain in the background. As a result, the domestic sphere, so often the sphere of activity of women, loses value and is not recognised as a necessary part of public life. For a long time, women have been denied the space and voice to question the world and its meaning. This silencing of their experiences and views leads to violence and an invisibilisation of their presence, even where inclusion is just an empty facade.

But in the midst of these injustices, new feminist ways of thinking are emerging that seek to break down these deep-rooted inequalities. There is the idea of ‘rage-desire’, which recognises women's repressed rage as a powerful source of creative energy. We look at the gendered experience of marginalisation and the body as a territory of its own to understand how women experience this separation and create sites of resistance in their living spaces. Social Reproduction Theory draws our attention to the often invisible and unpaid labour of reproduction that is so significantly performed by women and calls for a new appreciation of this activity in public discourse.

With counter-cartographies and body graphics, we attempt to make visible the lived experiences and resistance strategies of women and to question conventional representations of space by placing their stories, movements and embodied experiences at the centre. Feminist architecture emerges from the contradictions that exist in the territories of feminised bodies and strives for self-determination and connectedness. In the face of this constant challenge to established norms by the irrepressible power of bodies, how can we deal with this rigid binary system in the future?

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In „By Rage-Desire: From Cartography to the Body“, Rossana Brandão Tavares takes the discussion of social reproduction into a more intimate and embodied space. With introducing the term of "Copography" she talks about how our bodies “carry” the traces of a system. Identity, trauma, resistance and labor are not only experienced intellectually, but are embodied. She thinks of the body as a living archive or map. One that holds memory, pain, and also the potential for resistance and reimagination.

While Tithi Bhattacharya’s „Introduction to Social Reproduction Theory“ provides a structural analysis of how care and reproductive labor sustain the formal economy, Tavares adds another dimension by centering emotion, the body, and lived experience.

I find it powerful how Tavares moves beyond the economic framework to explore how the effects of social reproduction are written onto bodies. Her use of "rage-desire" as a conceptual tool, to capture the emotional and embodied responses that emerge from being positioned within systems of oppression, challenges us to think not only about how to value care labor but also about how bodies are marked, regulated, and resisted within those roles.

One part of Tavares’s text that stood out to me was: “Our concern is that if the domestic sphere has been relegated to reproductive activities, we must affirm its necessary recognition as a public domain. It is within this recognition that the possibility of reimagining the order of things resides.” (p.128, l.26) Here she offers recognition as a solution to achive transformation. But how do we actually achive this kind of recognition in practice? What political, cultural, or emotional shifts are needed for domestic labor and care work to be seen as part of the public, political sphere? And how do we make sure that this recognition leads to real change, rather than just symbolic inclusion?

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Tavares’ text burns with longing—for justice, for recognition, for meaning. But her “rage-desire,” while beautifully embodied, remains captive to the very machinery it seeks to escape. She maps bodies like territories, reads cities as systems of power, and reclaims space through lived story. I resonate with that. Story is the way. Embodied, inherited, transforming—it is how meaning travels.

But not all stories are equal. A map of wounds is not yet a path to healing. Without transcendent love, mapping resistance becomes another form of management—another algorithm rearranged. She sees injustice clearly, but offers no liturgy of hope.

I believe in love. Not as affect, not as pleasure, but as origin.
Love is not resistance. Love is resurrection.

If bodies are maps and rage is language, what speaks through us when we love—not as resistance, but as gift?

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sofia.gloor@gmail.com

How do systems leave their imprints not just on society at large, but on our very bodies?

Tavares argues, that Identity, trauma, resistance, and labor aren’t only processed through thought but that they’re lived and physically embodied and stored. The body is imagined as a kind of archive or map that holds memory, pain, and also the seeds of resistance and possibilities.

In Tithi Bhattacharya’s Introduction to Social Reproduction Theory she offers a big scale analysis of how reproductive and care labor carry the functioning of the broader economy, Tavares on the other hand focuses on the emotional and corporeal level. How are these systems lived on a daily basis? Her framing invites us to feel, not just understand, the impacts of social reproduction.

Tavares identifies recognition as a key step toward transformation. Where I agree that recognition is crucial step in change, we must think of the step that comes after recognition. Which in my opinion could be: What do we have to change in the system to make care work easier, healthier, fairer? In other words; What kind of cultural, political, or emotional changes are necessary for domestic and care labor to be acknowledged as central to public life? How can we ensure this recognition translates into substantive change rather than gestures?