Cuerpo-Territorio/Body-Territory

While there is a long transnational history of feminist thinking about the body and territory together (see for example McClintock 1995), the genealogy of the specific term cuerpo-territorio can be situated in communitarian feminist theory and movement-building in Abya Yala. The concept was first introduced by the Maya-Xinka communitarian feminist Lorena Cabnal (2010) to refer to the gendered interconnections between Indigenous bodies and lands as pivotal sites, battlefields or “territories” of colonial control, extraction, and exploitation and anticolonial resistance. We will first briefly address the origins of communitarian feminism. Then we will discuss the different meanings and materialisations of the term cuerpo-territorio, and describe how the concept gained significance in Palestine where the settler colonial state of “Israel” deploys reproductive-demographic arithmetic to acquire and control Indigenous lands.

Communitarian feminism emerged and developed in Bolivia and Guatemala through Indigenous women intellectuals and activists (Cabnal 2010; Paredes 2010). In subsequent years, this feminism spread to other countries in Abya Yala and beyond. Communitarian feminists propose an epistemology that is shaped through their own lived experiences as Indigenous women in Abya Yala. Their feminism feeds from the struggles of their mothers, grandmothers, and ancestors who fought against the gendered and racialized forms of domination and dispossession experienced before, during, and after colonisation (Paredes 2017). In contrast to other feminist traditions, communitarian feminism acknowledges the situated socio-political history of Indigenous women at the intersection of place, race, class, and gender hierarchies. It views colonialism and capitalism as co-produced by ongoing histories of heteropatriarchy and holds both ancestral and modern patriarchy responsible for the continued oppression of and violence against women (ibid.).

Communitarian feminism conceptualises women’s bodies as gendered territories that, like Indigenous lands and natural environments, have been transformed into extractable and exploitable natural “resources” for colonial capitalist powers. Cuerpo-territorio therefore underscores the inseparable gendered interconnectedness between, on the one hand, the human body, and, on the other hand, the land as subjected to pervasive, oppressive, and violent forces of colonial and capitalist patriarchy. This resulted in the widespread historical dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ natural and embodied “resources” including water, silver, copper, guano, fish, minerals, gases, hydrocarbons, but also soy, palm oil, labour power, and human organs, which are not only grounded in the land and the soil, but also in human bodies and biologies. Verónica Gago (2020:85), in her expanded take on contemporary extractions of body-territories, also includes urban real estate speculation, virtual territories of data mining, and algorithmic operations and debt-apparatuses. For her, body-territory is a versatile “practical” concept that has the potential to relate diverging struggles, by demonstrating “how the exploitation of community territories, be it Indigenous, peasant, urban and suburban, involved the violation of each person, as well as the collective body, through dispossession” (ibid.).

Communitarian feminists such as Cabnal view the body as historically situated gendered territory that is in continuous struggle against ancestral and colonial patriarchal forces (Cabnal in López 2018). Within this framework, the notion of body-territory also plays a pivotal role in the restoration of Indigenous life. As Gago (2020:99) writes: “From the beginning, the body-territory is marked by its capacity for combat: one of simultaneous care, defense, healing, and strengthening.”

Although the term cuerpo-territorio originated in Abya Yala, it also gains and regains significance when traveling to other colonial locations. In Palestine, for instance, the dialectical relations between Indigenous and settler body-territories become highly visible in the reproductive-demographic policies of the colonial state of “Israel.” Since its creation in 1948, the colonial state of “Israel” has adopted highly pronatalist policies, aimed at encouraging high birth rates by offering financial incentives for reproducing large families, welfare benefits for (working) mothers, high child allowances, and, more recently, generous subsidies for assisted reproductive technologies including in vitro fertilisation, egg donation, surrogacy, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis/screening, and posthumous fertility. This has resulted in relatively high total fertility rates of 2.9 children per woman in 2023, compared to 1.5 in other countries that are members of the OECD (Weinreb 2024). This “pronatalism” has often been explained and legitimised through cultural(ist) paradigms that emphasise the importance of reproduction for Jewish religion and tradition, and the long-lasting impact of the Holocaust on Jewish people’s reproductive imaginaries for collective survival. Moreover, when used as a single narrative, they can also obfuscate the political-demographic importance of reproduction and fertility for Zionism’s century-old settler colonial project in Historical Palestine, that aims to create and consolidate a demographically Jewish state at the expense of Indigenous Palestinian life and sovereignty (Vertommen 2024).

To understand the gendered and reproductive logics of “Israel’s” settler colonial formation, the communitarian feminist term cuerpo-territorio is particularly poignant, as it highlights the intra-connections between the two pillars of any settler colonial formation (not just the Zionist one): the maximum confiscation of Indigenous lands and the demographic transfer of the settler populations and bodies to the newly acquired territories. According to scholars of settler colonialism, including Patrick Wolfe (2016) and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2015), this double movement is undergirded by a structural logic of elimination of the Indigenous populations and their claims to land, culture, history, sovereignty, and life.

In Gaza today, we are witnessing an accelerated eliminatory logic of Indigenous body-territories through the targeted attack of the collective infrastructures of life and social reproduction, including hospitals, fertility clinics, schools and universities, humanitarian aid and food distribution points, residential areas, refugee camps, etc. The Palestine Feminist Collective and other feminist scholars and organizers termed this reproductive genocide (Ihmoud 2024).1 Recent findings by the UN Human Rights Office indicate that “women and children” (that troublesome yet troubling category) represent nearly 70 percent of the dead that were counted during the first six months of the onslaught, with the biggest single category of killed children being those aged five to nine, transforming Gaza into a “graveyard for children” as UN Secretary General Antonio Gutterez termed it in the first months of the genocide (UN 2023). For the 50.000 pregnant people in Gaza, giving birth has turned into a living nightmare. The UNFPA (2024) has reported a 300 percent increase in miscarriages since October 2023. There are also acute shortages of antiseptics and blood products for treating postpartum haemorrhages, resulting in large increases in obstetric complications and premature births. Hysterectomies are performed as a last resort to save pregnant women’s lives. C-sections are conducted without anaesthesia, and labouring people are forced to give birth without pain relief.2 Newborns are increasingly dying because of famine with their mothers unable to breastfeed because of critical shortages of food and nutritional supplements for pregnant and breastfeeding women (Ferguson and Desai 2024).

With this targeted attack on birth and reproductivity in Gaza, it is crucial to keep in mind the insistence of communitarian feminists to see cuerpo-territorio as a site of resistance or steadfastness, and to perceive the Indigenous body as the first territory to be defended against colonial-patriarchal violence. Specifically in the field of assisted reproduction, Palestinian political prisoners and their spouses have been re-appropriating their means of reproduction by making families through the assisted reproductive practice of sperm-smuggling. According to recent reports, at least 76 babies have been born after Palestinian political prisoners managed to smuggle their sperm out of Israeli prisons.3 The semen, termed “ambassadors of freedom” in Palestine, is then brought to fertility clinics in the West Bank where it is frozen in order for the spouses of the prisoners to get pregnant via insemination or an IVF procedure. The concept of cuerpo-territorio is useful to make sense of the politics of assisted reproduction in Palestine, and the dialectical ways in which reproductive technologies and bodies are “put to work” in a settler colonial reality. It also illustrates that settler colonial projects, like the Zionist one in Palestine, are not only enacted through the (re)appropriation of land and soil, but as much through the monopoly of technology markets, gendered territories, and embodied labours of surrogates, egg donors, (intended) mothers, fathers, pregnant people, and their reproductive biologies, including sperm, oocytes, wombs, and embryos.

• 1. See for instance https://palestinianfeministcollective.org/the-pfc-condemns-reproductive-genocide-in-gaza/ and https://reprosist.org/2023/12/19/resistance-is-fertile-endorse-our-statement-for-reproductive-justice-for-palestine/
• 2. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-hospital-procedures-without-anaesthetics-prompted-screams-prayers-2023-11-10/ and https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67398743
• 3. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230517-report-76-palestinian-prisoners-had-children-through-smuggled-sperm/