Geanine Vargas Escobar
Maria Manuel Baptista
This article aims to discuss the subjective process for the finding of intersectional cartographic clues, contextualized in the qualitative analysis of data collected during the cultural mapping elaborated in conjunction with 20 black immigrant lesbian women living in the greater Lisbon area in Portugal. The black lesbian community experiences multiple intersectional discriminations across town, going through multiple violences (verbal, physical and/or psychological) that prevent them from using the urban space. All of these intersectional experiences (gender, race, class and sexual orientation) can be textually represented and through images of cultural maps. The main goal is to understand how the own community of black lesbian women, coming from lusophone countries like: Brazil, Portugal, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Angola, creates their own everyday maps, maps that are dreamed about and desired. It seeks to analyse micro political strategies through the collective practices of resistance and of reappropriation of social spaces by subjects who live daily with discriminations like sexism, racism and lesbophobia in the city of Lisbon. Finally, it looks to highlight the possibilities of constructing counter-cartographic maps as political tools to claim rights over their own territory, creating alternatives, languages and images counter-hegemonic produced by the practices of our subjects.
Keywords: Black Lesbianity; Cultural Mapping; Counter-Cartography; Cultural Studies; Lisbon – Portugal.