Creative translation pathways for exploring gendered violence against Brazilian migrant women through a feminist translocational lens

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how research on gendered violence among Brazilian migrant women in London has been translated through a range of creative engagements. It argues that these can challenge traditional forms of knowledge production, and advance intersectional feminist struggles through a logic of translocation. Yet it also challenges homogenous artistic encounters through developing ‘creative translation pathways’ which delineate different configurations of how researchers, artists, and participants using varied art forms . The paper focuses on two ‘creative translation pathways’ that capture different interpretative framings around the same research project. The first reflects a curatorial perspective through Gaël Le Cornec’s verbatim theatre play, Efêmera, which foregrounds her interpretation of Brazilian women’s stories adding a metatheatrical dimension to strengthen the narrative and connection with the audience. The second is a co-produced collaborative engagement, We Still Fight in the Dark, with community drama group, Migrants in Action, based around experimental workshops to produce an audio-visual film and installation where survivors’ perspectives and well-being are paramount. While both creative translation pathways reflected translocational feminist goals in raising awareness around gendered violence with a view to transform them, each had tensions around the individual, collective, artistic and therapeutic logics in the process of knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendered violence
• Brazilian migrants
• creative translation pathways
• translocational approach
• arts-based approaches

Introduction

I belong nowhere.

I am not welcome.

I don’t belong here nor there.

I don’t fit in.

Even though I try.

Fear.

I fear losing my children.

I fear revenge.

I fear deportation.

In between four walls, I shrink.

They have the power.

This poem was written collectively by Brazilian migrant women from London who were participating in a series of applied drama workshops run by a community theatre organisation, Migrants in Action, and based on a research report (McIlwaine and Evans 2018). This is one of two sets of creative translations of this research through artistic collaborations. The other was created by a Brazilian actor, director and playwright, Gaël Le Cornec, which resulted in a verbatim theatre play, Efêmera. These engagements have translated different dimensions of Brazilian migrant women’s experiences of gendered violence elicited using traditional social science approaches from a feminist translocational perspective.

The notion of translation is at the conceptual core of the paper and is here portrayed as a feminist, political and creative practice as well as being inherent within the wider framing of translocation, translocalities, and translocalidades. First conceptualised by Anthias (2001; 2013) in relation to ‘translocational postionality’ to encompass locations and dislocations beyond culture and identity as a critique of hybridities and ‘old ethnicities’, these ideas have been developed more recently within the Latin American feminist scholarship by Alvarez et al. (2014) and others. Here, translocalities/translocalidades refer to the physical, epistemic and conceptual flows and linkages that connect Latin America and the Caribbean with the United States and within which are embedded multiscalar and unequal diasporic power relations. These processes entail translocational feminist translations that are flexible, interrelated and which intersect with different subject positions (Laó-Montes 2007; Laó-Montes and Buggs 2014; Rivera Berruz 2021). A translocalities/translocalidades perspective thus encompasses multidirectional crossing of borders, disciplines and epistemes in physical and metaphorical ways (Alvarez 2014). I suggest that capturing such feminist translocational processes are central to understanding the lives of migrant women situated within wider systems of oppression as they navigate gendered violence beyond the Americas. Yet key to this are interdisciplinary crossings between the social sciences and the arts that can reveal these processes in ways that more traditional methods and textual reporting cannot.

The paper therefore contributes to wider debates around the value of arts-based research for addressing core social science challenges such as the vulnerability of marginalised populations (Coemans and Hannes 2017). As well as reflecting epistemologically and ethically on how arts-based approaches can engender more equitable knowledge production, the discussion assesses the process of moving beyond the textual and literal, towards embracing the visual, performative, sensory and collaborative dimensions (Barone and Eisner 2012; Leavy 2014). This is especially important in the current context of working with women migrants on their experiences of gendered violence from a feminist perspective (Jeffery et al. 2019; Keifer-Boyd 2011). Yet, I also call for a more nuanced approach to delineating and valuing arts-based approaches which are hugely diverse in terms of art forms, and types of encounters in epistemological and knowledge production terms.

More specifically, I suggest that artistic engagements between researchers, artists and research participants have different ‘creative translation pathways’ when working on gendered violence among migrant women from a translocational feminist perspective. These pathways aim to capture the range of interpretative framings around how different types of artistic encounters incorporate diverse epistemological implications and logics. In this paper, I discuss two ‘creative translation pathways’. The first relates to a curatorial perspective that foregrounds the artist and artistic outputs and focusing on enhancing understanding, creating a dramatic narrative and widening engagements with multiple audiences. The second pathway refers to a co-produced, collaborative approach that creates spaces for reflection, aims to improve research participants’ well-being, and foregrounds their perspectives. Both pathways produce knowledge based on the original social science research in different ways that engender tensions as well as being provocative and potentially transformative. These ‘creative translation pathways’ are underpinned by a translocational feminist approach which makes connections across actual and figurative borders to enhance understanding, communication and transformation (see also McIlwaine and Ryburn 2024 on ‘migration-violence creative pathways’). I also briefly elaborate on my role within these pathways as a feminist geographer straddling two worlds at once and becoming what I refer to as an ‘academic dramaturg’. In particular, I highlight the importance of developing a feminist decolonial dramaturgical approach that avoids a Western gaze.

The paper is divided into four sections. The first explores how arts-based research has been conceptualised from a translocational feminist perspective in relation to migration and gendered violence, as well as outlining the nature of ‘creative translation pathways’. The second maps the nature of gender-based violence experienced by Brazilian migrant women in London focusing on the underlying research. The third section analyses how artist, Gaël Le Cornec, has translated this research into Efêmera from a curatorial perspective, while the final part examines the work of Migrants in Action and their We Still Fight in the Dark (WSFD) project where co-production and collaborative are the founding principles.

Gendered violence among migrants through a feminist translocational lens: developing creative translation pathways

It is now acknowledged that understanding gendered violence requires a multiscalar perspective that captures its multi-sited and expansive dimensions spanning a range of domains from the intimate to the body to the global (Brickell and Maddrell 2016; Pain and Staeheli 2014), across a transnational continuum (McIlwaine and Evans 2020). A multiscalar lens is especially important when exploring gendered violence among migrant women given their transnational and translocational lives. Gendered violence encompasses indirect forms of structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence together with direct interpersonal and intimate physical, sexual and psychological abuse across private and public spheres that may be intensely experienced by migrant women survivors (McIlwaine and Evans 2023). This is not because of the ‘cultures’ of societies from where migrant women originate as is often suggested by essentialist discourses. Instead, it relates to the fact that they are invariably located within complex intersectional regimes of discrimination bolstered by hostile immigration regimes and deep-seated colonial and racialised global power relations (Sokoloff 2008; also Lopes Heimer 2024; Sheringham, Taylor and Duffy-Syedi 2024).

More specifically, migrant women experience gender-based violence throughout their migration trajectories, in their contexts of exit and reception as well as along their journeys. This may range from violence forcing women to migrate in the first place, dealing with sexist and racist border violence as they attempt to enter certain countries (Lopes Heimer 2021; 2023; Ryburn 2022, 2024), to experiencing multiple forms of interpersonal and intimate partner violence as well as structural and symbolic infrastructural violence in the places where they end-up living (McIlwaine and Evans 2023). While early research tended to focus on the specifics of individual migrant women’s gender-based violence along their journeys, it is now acknowledged that violent acts are deeply embedded within the material and political structures of the displacements of migrant women (Menjívar and Walsh 2017; Ryburn 2024).

A feminist politics of location has long been at the core of understanding these processes among migrant women as they traverse borders, the body, the home and labour markets (Mountz and Hyndman 2006). Indeed, a transnational feminist politics of location has an established history among diaspora groups focused on alliance building (Grewal and Kaplan 1994). These ideas are embedded within the renowned work of Mohanty (2013, 987) on ‘transnational feminist solidarities’ where she calls for feminists everywhere, across the global North and South, to create anti-racist and anti-imperialist alliances in order to engender local and global transformations to reduce gender inequalities. Bearing this foundational scholarship in mind, I turn to the work by Latin American feminists and other scholars to inform creative interpretations of gendered violence experienced by Brazilian migrant women, while also bearing in mind the dangers of ‘epistemic expropriation’ (Halvorsen 2018).

Importantly, conceptualisations of translocalities have a theoretical history beyond Latin American feminism. As noted above, Anthias’ (2001; 2013) earlier work on identities and hybridities has been especially instructive in relation to the importance of how translocation ‘flags place, time and scale in the understanding of the ways different modes of division are entangled in each other’ focusing on ‘hierarchical social ordering’ (2021, 27). Relatedly, and focusing specifically on migration, translocality refers to ‘simultaneous situatedness across different locales which provide ways of understanding the overlapping place-time(s) in migrants’ everyday lives’ (Brickell and Datta 2011, 4). However, whereas ‘translocal’ primarily encompasses physical and symbolic space, Anthias’s (2021) translocation reflects complex social processes and fluid categorisations situated within historical, political and geographical contexts. Yet, there are interesting synergies between this work and that of Alvarez (2014, 2) from a Latin American feminist perspective exploring the ‘multidirectional crossings and movements’ where the practices and processes of translocation capture the politics of multiscalar power relations that intersect with multiple identity positions (Laó-Montes and Buggs 2014, 391).

In challenging the epistemic and ontological violence of imposing North American ideas on Latin America, a translocational feminist politics of translation has been developed (Alvarez et al. 2014). Here, feminist discourse, practice and people travel through places and are translated politically and theoretically as forms of discursive and actual migration (Alvarez 2009; Rivera Berruz 2021). Translation is key for connecting or ‘connectant’ epistemologies as well as forging political alliances, sharing knowledge and disrupting dominant discourse (De Lima Costa 2020). The term ‘transloca’ incorporates the ‘trans’ of translation and the location of ‘loca’. Translocas as people are travelling translators and cultural and political mediators, as well as transloca being a metaphor encompassing ‘the movements of bodies, text, capital, and theories between North/South and to reflect the mobile epistemologies they inspire’ (Alvarez 2014, 3). The praxis of transloca also incorporates the decolonisation of knowledge production as part of the ‘“counter-practice” of translation found in translocation’ (Zaragocin 2021, 248). Therefore, translocational translation embedded within the broader notion of translocalities/translocalidades is linguistic, epistemological, conceptual and embodied as well as political and transformational (Thayer, 2014). While it also refers to disciplinary boundary crossing within and beyond the academy, with cultural agents and activists (Alvarez 2009), there is scope to be more explicit about translating across the social sciences and arts. Furthermore, while Alvarez (2009; 2014) mentions diasporic engagements beyond the Americas, there remains limited empirical exploration of this. I, therefore, make a plea for translocational creative translation to capture how feminist social science research on migrant women’s experiences of violence can be interpreted through artistic engagements (also McIlwaine et al. 2024).

While not situated within a translocational feminist creative perspective, there is a burgeoning field around understanding the experiences of migrants through various creative expressions and engagements (Erel, Reynolds, and Kaptani 2018; Jeffery et al. 2019; Kaptani and Yuval-Davis 2008). Much of this focuses on participatory theatre, performance and storytelling and addresses the structural violence experienced by female migrants from a feminist perspective (O’Neill et al. 2019; Pratt and Johnston 2009; Vacchelli 2018). Creative engagements portraying the lived experiences of violence have also been flourishing in relation to slow violence (Cahill and Pain 2019; Lopes Heimer 2024; Ryburn 2024; Sheringham, Taylor and Duffy-Syedi 2024 and more specific dimensions of gender-based violence (Thomas, Weber, and Bradbury-Jones 2022), in relation to memorial arts (Boesten and Scanlon 2021; Gideon 2024; Lines 2024).

As noted above, the most common benefits of creative translations entail the visceral power of communicating the emotional and embodied dimensions of violence, particularly among marginalised groups (Johnston and Pratt 2020). The types of knowledge created are also different, identified as rich and provocative compared with academic texts, being able to reach wider audiences, and challenging the idea of academic research as authoritative (O’Neill et al. 2019). The ethical advantages of participatory creative engagements that ostensibly allow research participants to develop their own agency is also a major advantage (Cole and Knowles 2008). Also frequently evoked is the potential for transformative power of arts-based research approaches especially in addressing social injustices. This may relate to positive changes experienced by research participants, to policy and institutional change, and/or to audience transformation (Coemans and Hannes 2017, 41; McIlwaine and Ryburn 2024).

Yet, creative engagements are not without challenges. These include difficulties in instituting structural change, together with problematic representations in the artistic outputs that may not always align between researchers, artists and research participants (Jeffery et al. 2019). Some translations may compromise the honesty of the research as the responsibility to the audience may be prioritised over research subjects (Coemans and Hannes 2017). Johnston and Pratt (2020) identify ‘uneasy translations’ in their work with Filipino migrant women referring to language translation between Tagalog and English, the complexity of creative translations, and ‘uneasy collaborations’ with artists and activists. Echoing others, they also warn against focusing on pain and suffering which can generate ‘liberal benevolence’ and reinforcement of a colonial gaze (ibid.; Hartman 2007; also Ryburn 2024). This reflects Tuck’s (2009) proposal for a ‘desire-based framework’ (as opposed to a ‘damage-centred’ one) when researching gendered violence (also Lopes Heimer 2023, 2024). Yet, artistic engagements can also help to avoid reproducing violence and re-traumatisation (Pain and Cahill 2022; Thomas, Weber, and Bradbury-Jones 2022).

A range of approaches have captured the complexity of arts-based approaches. In relation to the visual, Gillian Rose (2016, 24–25) delineates four ‘sites’ of engagements that include production, the image, circulation and display, and the audience. Others identify multiple art forms including the visual, performing, and literary which themselves incorporate a wide range of types (Leavy 2014). Migration scholars have increasingly worked with creative approaches as a way of challenging dangerous representations of migrants, and to engage marginalised groups in ways which subvert traditional forms of knowledge production and power hierarchies, especially through participatory approaches (Desille and Nikielska-Sekula 2021; Martiniello 2022) and increasingly through a decolonial lens (Lopes Heimer 2024).

However, arts-based research on gendered violence and migration has involved limited reflection on the diversity of creative encounters and methods that have different epistemological logics and outcomes. Here, I develop a taxonomy of ‘creative translation pathways’ to capture the diversity of interpretative framings when working with arts-based approaches to understand migrant women’s experiences of gendered violence (see also McIlwaine and Ryburn 2024). Different pathways emphasise various configurations of creative collaborations among researchers, artists and research participants ranging from curatorial to participatory and co-produced translations. These pathways have diverse epistemological logics that variously emphasise the roles of different stakeholders and create alternative forms of knowledge or ‘truths’. Here, I differentiate two main ‘creative translation pathways’. The first focuses on a curatorial creative translation pathway where an artist interprets the social science material with a focus on dramatic narrative and audience, while downplaying or excluding research participants. This emphasises ‘art for consumption’ (Askins and Pain 2011, 812) to reach multiple audiences. The second is a co-produced and collaborative creative translation pathway based on ‘participatory art as process’ that emphasises the views of research participants and potentially enhances their well-being (Askins and Pain 2011, 812). These pathways are not mutually exclusive and can involve either/or/both professional and amateur artistic practices as part of a holistic epistemological process of creative translation. Yet, as noted above, they may also create tensions where stakeholder expectations may not align in terms of the nature of the collaboration and/or the artistic output produced, and which may also critique the original research in uncomfortable ways. Researchers may also have different roles and inputs in these pathways. In some situations, they may be active bystanders concerned about their lack of creative skills (Hawkins 2019), while in others, may be actively collaborating in the process (McIlwaine and Ryburn 2024).

Both these creative translation pathways are underpinned by a feminist translocational perspective that focuses on the potential to confront, translate and transform multiscalar linguistic, epistemological, conceptual and embodied power inequalities inherent in working with diasporic women on gendered violence. I will explain this approach more fully below as I turn to examine the two artistic engagements developed with Brazilian migrant women.

Mapping gendered violence among Brazilians in London

This section briefly maps the research with Brazilian migrant women in London that was subsequently interpreted in different creative ways by a Brazilian artist and a Brazilian migrant organisation. The research as a whole was conceived through a long-standing collaboration with the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (LAWRS), a feminist migrant rights organisation in London, who identified the need to generate information on gender-based violence among their community (and as part of a larger project in London and Rio de Janeiro – Krenzinger et al. 2018; McIlwaine et al. 2024). LAWRS identified the need to research the high levels of gendered violence experienced by Brazilian migrant women that was associated not with ‘cultures of violence’ among this group, but rather with the UK’s ‘hostile immigration environment’. This regime negatively affects migrant women’s rights to work and access to state social support which has exacerbated gendered violence, especially through the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) restriction linked to temporary visas that prevents women from accessing assistance (McIlwaine, Granada, and Valenzuela-Oblitas 2019; Lopes Heimer 2024). This was marked among Brazilian migrant women who experienced gendered violence as racialised and colonised subjects who have been excluded from services due to ‘gendered infrastructural violence’, a type of slow, structural violence (McIlwaine and Evans 2023).

The research was conducted in 2016 and 2017. It incorporated an online survey with 175 Brazilian migrant women in London, and 25 further interviews with women who had not necessarily taken part in the survey, of whom 20 were survivors and had used the services of our partner organisation, LAWRS. Six focus group discussions were also carried out including 5 with women and 1 with men (with 16 people in total). We also conducted 12 interviews with service provider organisations working on gender-based violence in London. The 175 women surveyed were well-educated (72% had a university education), with more than half working in professional and managerial occupations (53%). Most identified as White (74%) or Mixed heritage (21%), with 4% Asian, 2% Black and 1% Indigenous (based on Brazilian census categories). In terms of their gender, all were cis women. Although the majority had secure immigration status at the time of survey, 3% were undocumented, 17% were restricted from claiming for state support, and two-thirds had experienced insecure status at some time since arriving. The 25 women interviewed had lower levels of education, were more likely to work in cleaning and caring jobs, and to have experienced insecure immigration status. All were cis women, with 15 identifying as White, seven as Black, and three as Mixed (McIlwaine and Evans 2023).

In terms of gender-based violence among those surveyed, 82% experienced at least one form over their lifetime. While women often suffered multiple forms simultaneously, psychological violence was the most common (48%), followed by physical (38) and sexual (14%). Those identifying as Mixed heritage were more likely to suffer (66%) than White women (58%) together with two of the three Black women surveyed. Two-thirds of violence was perpetrated by men known to women, with 78% occurring in the public sphere, especially in the workplace. While 77% of those surveyed spoke of how they had experienced gendered violence before leaving Brazil, 52% who had suffered in Brazil, experienced it again in London. More than half (56%) of women surveyed never reported violence linked with lack of information, shame and fearing deportation. Indeed, abusive intimate partners routinely used threats of reporting and deportation as a tool of control in cases where women had insecure status (McIlwaine and Evans 2018; 2023).

This provides the foundation for the creative translation pathways to which the discussion now turns. While these reflect an epistemological taxonomy to differentiate types of artistic encounters, the biography of the research is also embedded within these in more chronological terms. The original research planned the work with Gaël Le Cornec as dissemination through the arts in collaboration with People’s Palace Projects (at Queen Mary, University of London) and CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, while the subsequent work with Migrants in Action was a decision to engage with migrant women survivors through a co-produced process. Both were collaborative but with different epistemological logics.

My role as a feminist geographer committed to a co-produced and collaborative process across the academic and creative research was complex. I developed and managed all the projects, setting up the partnerships and closely liaising with People’s Palace Projects. Reflecting the decolonial feminist lens embedded within the research, it was also my role to ensure that everyone’s views, whether artist, research participant or organisation, were foregrounded and respected throughout. This was important given my own relatively limited experience in developing creative work (beyond earlier collaborations in a play, Juana in Million, and producing two documentary films with CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, and LAWRS/Trust for London).¹ In this sense, I relied closely on People’s Palace Projects and especially Paul Heritage and Renata Peppl who provided invaluable guidance, especially around defining my role in a context where my discomfort, as someone who was not an artist or arts practitioner, was palpable (Ryburn 2024).

It was through Paul that I discovered dramaturgy, a term from theatre studies, which seemed to capture my role. I learned that dramaturgy involved doing research to inform scripts, having oversight of the artistic form, supporting adaptations, and thinking through how the art interacts with the audience. I, therefore, began to see my role as an ‘academic dramaturg’ in the creative process in the sense of being an ‘external eye, the first audience, the observer at a distance, or even the critic’ while also collaborating through ‘both closeness and distance, both similarity and difference’ (Bleeker 2003, 163). I had oversight of what Barba (1985, 75) calls the ‘weave’ of the creative work that included the original research and how it was interpreted in creative ways over time (see also Shutt, Martin, and Coetzee 2023). Yet, I did not intervene in the artistic interpretations, but was always on hand, along with my co-collaborators, to reflect and provide feedback. I was also not a Brazilian migrant woman, but rather a British/Irish migrant in London, and so I was careful not to impose a Western dramaturgical perspective. The stories of women in the research and artistic engagements were not my story and so I keen to develop a form of dramaturgical allyship that reflected my decolonial commitment to social transformation (see also Kelly 2022; also McIlwaine et al. 2024). Together with Renata, who was the Brazilian project manager on all the projects, we also managed the challenges that emerged among and between researchers, artists, organisations and participants. This was at times draining and emotional, not least because of the sensitivities of the work around gendered violence, but always rewarding. There was always a lot at stake, and it was essential that we did not misrepresent or disrespect any of the constituencies involved in the process or reinforce a Western, colonial gaze (Ravengai 2018; see also McIlwaine and Ryburn 2024).

Translating gendered violence through translocational creative curation: Efêmera by Gaël Le Cornec

The partnership with Gaël Le Cornec was written into the original project as part of the collaboration with CASA. As a Brazilian writer, director and actor, Gaël was commissioned in 2017 to develop an artistic output based on the research with Brazilian women (McIlwaine 2021; 2022). The aim was not to develop a participatory and/or therapeutic piece for two main reasons; first, because of potential harms to women survivors; second, the original research subjects were assured confidentiality. Therefore, a verbatim theatre play was chosen as a medium that uses the words of those interviewed and is closely aligned with political theatre. Verbatim crafts a narrative and/or script using the direct experiences and testimonies of those researched (Garson 2021). The focus was on art for consumption and as a professional product with no input from research participants. The reflections from Gaël on the creative process outlined below are derived from a conversation between Gaël and I about activist art conducted by Sophie Stevens (Stevens, Le Cornec, and McIlwaine 2021) and from the script for the play.

Here, I explore how Gaël’s creation of Efêmera, and the subsequent short film and viral video, reflects a curatorial ‘creative translation pathway’. While she did not identify as a curator, Gaël and her creative team (fellow actor, Rosie MacPherson and assistant director, Angie Peña Arenas), were entrusted with turning the research material into a performance. Curatorial practice is often associated with staging exhibitions in art galleries and museums. Yet it is relevant here in thinking through how more ‘critical curations’ (de Leeuw and Hawkins 2017) can capture the feminist translocational politics of research through performance. The process of creating Efêmera entailed intervening through theatre rather than an institutional space. Following the Cameroonian curator, Yvon Langue, critical curations regarding migrants should broaden ‘the borders of curatorial practice to deal with the geographies and lexicon of mobility’ (Jeffery et al. 2019, 10) and work through complex layers of authorship and translation. Returning to Rose’s (2016) four sites (production, image, display, and audience), curation of Efêmera reflected progressing through all four stages.

Gaël created the script by reading the interview transcripts (based on English transcriptions of the original interviews conducted in Portuguese) and a draft of the report (McIlwaine and Evans 2018). She had no pre-conceived idea about the play but instead: ‘wanted the idea to come from the source material given to me. I guess I wanted to be faithful to the material and trust I’d find the shape of the artistic outcome during rehearsals’. This idea became an interview process between a British documentary filmmaker (Joanne) and a Brazilian migrant woman survivor (Ana). Ana was an amalgamation of the stories of survivors in the interviews becoming what Gaël called ‘a symbolic figure and a vector for all these stories’. Joanne was partly based on myself as a researcher and advocate for the Latin American community. The interactions between Ana and Joanne are the crux of the play to reinforce what Gaël refers to as ‘the intersectional feminism side of the research’.

Gaël also had a vision for the play:

To push the boundaries of what a verbatim play could be. I wanted to see if I could somehow shift between the real and fictional realms … If you are creating work, as long as you respect those real words, then you can push the boundaries. (Stevens, Le Cornec, and McIlwaine 2021, 188)

This was achieved through a metatheatrical layer where Gaël and Rosie also played themselves. This arose because the creative team began to share their own experiences of gendered violence in response to the research material and so Gaël felt it would be truthful to share these. As a curator, Gaël had responsibility for the creative translation as a playwright, director, and actor. Together with Yara Evans (the researcher on the project) and the People’s Palace Projects team, I discussed the narrative and we made some collective decisions about certain scenes as a form of academic dramaturgy. Some of these were taken on board, while others were not, reflecting some uneasiness in the translation (Johnston and Pratt 2020) and ‘discomfort’ in the process (Ryburn 2024). Indeed, it was difficult to make demands given the sensitivities of the subject and being mindful of challenging Gaël’s artistic integrity.

While the curatorial translation process raised questions of honesty to the research material in favour of dramatic effect, Efêmera also used many verbatim passages from the interview transcripts spoken by Ana (in both Portuguese and English). For example, one scene where Ana describes what happens when she arrives at the airport in London is almost verbatim:

After 3 hours of interviewing, they let me go to get my luggage. An English immigration officer accompanied me. Inside the elevator, he looked at me up and down then said: ‘wow you’ve got cute breasts, can I touch them?’.

Similarly, Ana’s story of incestuous child abuse in Brazil was taken directly from an interview transcript as were many aspects of the violence she experienced at the hands of her abusive husband, and her trauma at reporting this violence to the police:

I thought the police were taking me to report him, but they were arresting me. I’ll never forget it. I thought the world was ending. They took me to a cell. I kept saying ‘why am I in jail, I was the one asking for help. Why am I in jail’. At least they had the decency to not close the cell gate, I couldn’t stop crying. It took me 2 hours to convince them of the opposite.

The verbal and physical depiction of violence on stage is at the centre of the play, communicating the reality of violence between intimate partners (see Figure 1). This became what Gaël noted as ‘a surreal choreography between me and Rosie’ where Ana and Joanne enacted the violence in physical ways. This was an especially powerful embodied tool to communicate the visceral nature of violence that moves beyond language and text. However, the metatheatrical layer subsequently focuses attention on Gaël and Rosie ending the play with the spotlight on them. The logic according to Gaël was to create a relationship with the audience and to provide ‘a breathing space for them to process the verbatim side of the story’. Arguably, this also mutes the voices of women survivors and foregrounds Gaël’s interpretation and hers and Rosie’s experiences of violence rather than migrant women.

Efêmera played to a range of audiences in the UK and in Brazil in 2017 and 2018, opening at Southwark Playhouse in London in October 2017 as part of the CASA festival for three performances. Also in 2017, we took Efêmera to Rio de Janeiro where it was performed at the Casa de Bellas Artes – a centre run by our partner, Redes da Maré, in the favelas of Maré – and at a feminist theatre festival at Sede Das Cias in Rio de Janeiro. In 2018, it was performed three times at the Brighton Fringe Festival. Efêmera was performed mainly in English in the UK with some Portuguese that was translated by Gaël as part of the narrative, and in English and Portuguese in Brazil (with simultaneous translation provided for Rosie speaking in English and Gaël in Portuguese). In the UK, the inclusion of Portuguese was a deliberate political choice as part of a wider translocational effort to speak literally and creatively in the language of the migrant women. In both contexts, Gaël noted: ‘What was really interesting about language was seeing how different parts of the play had different effects on the audiences in England and in Brazil. So, for instance, what people would laugh at was completely different’ (Stevens, Le Cornec, and McIlwaine 2021, 190).

Figure 1. On stage violence between Ana and Joanne, Efêmera (photo: Luciana Whitaker Aikins).

The audiences in the UK and Brazil were undoubtedly emotionally moved by Efêmera. Post-show discussions were held at all the venues, and women approached Gaël after the shows everywhere to share their stories. In Brazil, Gaël noted: ‘A lot of working-class women [approached] saying they had been abused by their boss or middle-class men. Others shared stories of intergenerational incest. And some of gang raping’. In Brighton, audience perceptions were captured through feedback cards. Among many comments, two main issues emerged. One was the power and emotion of the performance: ‘very powerful content and an amazing representation of the multiple complexities of emotion/ feelings of what the women experience’. The other was how the play spoke to survivors and across borders: ‘As a Mexican-American who has been sexually abused as a child and later on helped others deal with the same issues. It is inspired and I’m continually inspired by those who choose to speak out’. Another noted: ‘Great to watch verbatim theatre – especially about silenced topic like domestic abuses. Love how it connected Brazil and England – made the issue of abuse and violence toward women more of a global problem’.

A curatorial creative translation that does not directly involve migrant women research participants thus has advantages in terms of shielding them from re-traumatisation. However, challenges include distancing and re-interpretation of research that prioritises the views of the artist, the dramatic narrative, and the audience (see also Blomfield and Lenette 2018 on the role of the artist). Yet curation as creative translation speaks to wide, non-academic audiences who would not normally access academic research; it can transform how audiences engage through emotional registers and provide novel insights (Coemans and Hannes 2017; Johnstone and Pratt 2020). It can also raise awareness and break taboos around violence not just as individual incidents, but as part of a chain of abuses that are exacerbated by the structural, symbolic and state violence. Indeed, Gaël sees herself as an activist: ‘For me as an artist, my work is always about creating awareness. Art can pressure to make change happen and support the change’ (Stevens, Le Cornec, and McIlwaine 2021, 191–192).

Making the ‘display’ of Efêmera more enduring was part of a wider translocational feminist goal to ensure that the Brazilian women’s stories were told to wider global audiences. Gaël and her team therefore turned Efêmera into a short film, Ana, that focused on the relationship between Ana and Joanne (excluding the experiences of Gaël and Rosie) and why we (myself and PPP led by Paul Heritage and Renata Peppl) made a viral video that uses filmed excerpts from the play.² However, the engagement with the audiences of Efêmera and the films was directed towards Gaël and was passive rather than active and did not re-engage research participants. Yet Efêmera and Ana provided a safe artistic interpretation that spoke to international audiences in the UK and Brazil (and more widely through showing Ana at several international film festivals – Davis Feminist Film Festival and the NYC Directed by Women Festival [US], Vox Feminae Festival [Croatia], Wow Festival [Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia], and Kautik Festival [India]). The play and films curated a translocational feminist perspective in that they were bilingual, communicated the realities of gendered intimate and state violence and challenged the idea that only migrant Brazilian women experienced such violence. However, while they aimed to transform through audience engagement, they were not directly collective endeavours with research participants which is why in part I developed the collaborative work with Migrants in Action to which the discussion now turns.

Translating gendered violence through creative co-production: ‘We still fight in the dark’ with Migrants in Action

Co-production of artistic work through collaboration represents another creative translation pathway with a different epistemological and interpretive architecture. This entailed a separately funded community theatre project led by Carolina Cal Angrisani as artistic director of Migrants in Action (MinA) working with 14 Brazilian migrant women survivors (one of whom was interviewed for the original project), together with myself and Niall Sreenan from King’s College London, Renata Peppl from People’s Palace Projects with support from Isabela Miranda Gomes from LAWRS. The actual workshops were facilitated by Carolina Cal Angrisani, Nina Franco (visual artist who also collaborated with Lopes Heimer 2024), Alba Cabral (musician), and Louise Carpenedo (videomaker). Adapting the title of the original report, this involved a collective, experimental and co-produced creative translation of the research findings through ten drama workshops conducted both online and in person between 2021 and 2022. WSFD was multi-media in nature including poetry, storytelling, music, art, and film-making, that combined to create an audio-visual installation with an accompanying performance. The aim was to enhance well-being, engender community healing and heighten the visibility of gendered violence experienced by Brazilian migrant women. The analysis discussed here draws on the material produced in the workshops, observer notes, and an evaluation conducted before and after the process (McIlwaine et al. 2022a).

Participatory arts-based approaches used to understand social justice from an intersectional feminist perspective have long emphasised the need to work with the subjects of research to address power imbalances and transfer the production of knowledge in ethical ways (with roots in 1990s research in the global South around poverty and violence – see Thomas, Weber, and Bradbury-Jones 2022; Moser and McIlwaine 1999). Yet a distinction is often made between participatory arts-based approaches as a method to collect data and a way to interpret and/or disseminate research data, even if this is a false distinction (Kara 2015). The tension between art as product and participatory art as process also remained in relation to WSFD (Askins and Pain 2011). Yet collaboration and co-production among researchers, artists and research subjects was central to the participatory, feminist arts-based approaches created (also Erel, Reynolds, and Kaptani 2018; Kaptani et al. 2021; Keifer-Boyd, 2011; O’Neill 2011). While the co-production embedded within this creative translation pathway was not based initially on participatory research with survivors, their interpretations and well-being were integral. This was facilitated through therapeutic arts-based methods used in workshops drawing on the notion of self-care (Lorde 1988; also McIlwaine et al. 2023). They also drew on Brazilian playwright, Augusto Boal’s (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed methods on social transformation through collective empowerment using participatory techniques. Many activities revolved around Brazilian women’s rights-claiming (also Erel, Reynolds, and Kaptani 2018; Kaptani and Yuval-Davis 2008; Kaptani et al. 2021). The co-produced creative translation of the research therefore became part of the women’s healing, their spaces for reflection and their attempt to make their community known to the wider world (O’Neill et al. 2019). My role was again as an academic dramaturg with oversight as insider and outsider, as someone both comfortable and uncomfortable with not having directly experienced the violence that women spoke of (Ryburn 2024).

The process of WSFD entailed evaluating women’s well-being at the beginning and at the end of the process. It is telling that, while a small sample (14), half were identified as having ‘low well-being’ placing them in the bottom 15% of the wider population (McIlwaine et al. 2022a, 20). Reflecting on her expectations prior to the workshops, one participant noted:

Take away from me the hurt from two whole years, using the arts, my own body expression; take away from my body everything that does not belong to me. Everything that comes from others and that I have been carrying like a heavy suitcase full of clothes that no longer fit me.

The first workshop focused on the findings of the research, with the subsequent five developing different translations through visual artwork, creative writing and poetry, Theatre of the Oppressed methods to create scenes from the research, exploring intersectionality through performance, and body percussion (all conducted in Portuguese). The writing, visuals, sounds, and music from the workshops were then forged into a single narrative that became a script for the film. Several themes emerged from the workshops that fed into the film. One of the most important was belonging linked to isolation and susceptibility to violence which was fostered by exclusion produced by the hostile immigration environment underpinned by institutional racism. Women spoke of not being supported: ‘The worst feeling is for you to be at home and not to have a support network, you don’t have options’. Another reflected on the emotional implications: ‘I’m in a limbo where I don’t know where I belong, when my skin and my flesh do not translate what I am […] I do not belong there or here’. This theme shone through one woman’s poetry:

I don’t’ belong anywhere

I no longer fear loneliness as I feared

before, time has taught me.

I don’t belong here or there

I unlearn everything I am, what I was,

And I don’t fit.

This reflects a translocational way of thinking translated through poetry; this woman has been displaced from her homeland across temporal and spatial scales, yet social and structural oppression is embedded within this process (Anthias, 2021). She must navigate these multiscalar power hierarchies if she is to survive as a migrant in London.

Pain emerged as another major theme, with one workshop focusing on turning pain into art with artist Nina Franco who uses tangled red thread to symbolise emotional experiences (and which is the main aesthetic of the film). One woman stated: ‘The red yarn and what it represents made me reflect, look back and realise all I went through. But it also helped me to recognise where I am today and feel proud of it’. The importance of collectively experiencing pain for building strength was discussed by all the women, as one noted: ‘I find it very creative to have the opportunity to re-signify the pain experienced by domestic violence and to be able to work on self-esteem for personal and collective strengthening’. This leads to another theme, again linked with the translocational lens, around individual and collective agency reflected in another poem:

Where does your pain hurt?

Where is your deepest scar?

Give me your hand, hold my hand

And together, in sisterhood

We will walk side by side

To heal. To be.

Storytelling as a group and sharing pain in a safe space emerged as important (Sheringham, Taylor and Duffy-Syedi 2024). It also allowed the women to assert themselves collectively through these processes, as one stated:

I don’t feel like telling my own personal story but our stories, and because of that I feel safe. This is powerful because by telling our stories, as a group, it feels like we are shouting and making our struggles louder and visible.

Yet the workshops were not without disagreements. The main one revolved around race and the lack of attention paid to it in the original research. Although the research used the Brazilian census categories, some of the women did not like the term ‘Mixed race’ because they felt it made Black women invisible:

I think it’s important to talk about the invisibility of Black women. This statistic is not in the project, and it took Black women involved in the project to stand up and say: ‘Wait a minute, but where are we here? … So, it is important that we don’t put all of us in the same pot, because it is not the same experience’.

This discussion caused considerable distress with one White participant noting that she felt ‘unrepresented’ in the material about Black women suggesting that their work should reflect everyone. This generated debate around unconscious racism and representation that was conflictive but was ultimately resolved. It was also a powerful critique of the original research that was welcome and useful as well as a direct challenge to the epistemic violence of muting the experiences of certain groups of women when viewed from a translocational perspective (Laó-Montes and Buggs 2014).

Still focusing on the creative process, improvements in women’s individual and community well-being were noticeable. The post-workshop survey reflected an increase in the group’s aggregate score of the Edinburgh-Warwick scale to within the average for the UK population (McIlwaine et al. 2022a, 21). One woman recalled how her mental health had improved; prior to being involved she was seeing a counsellor and was insecure and afraid of speaking in public. The workshops gave her self-confidence, strength and the ability to express her feelings. Similarly, another noted:

I expressed myself, participated, and spoke without fear, it was something that made me release my fears. I had never done theatre before, I was a bit shy, but every meeting was different: dancing, singing, writing poems, being able to express our emotions, something that helped me a lot and the other women too. Every meeting was an emotion. I cried, I rejoiced, I felt special.

This sense of taking control of their histories and experiences was consistent in participants accounts of the workshops and was embedded within the final film. The film itself was based on a script written by the women including their poetry, music and shots of them tangled in red yarn (Figure 2).³ The script included some of the statistics from the research spoken in English and Portuguese (the film was bilingual with sub-titles). It also asserted that Black Brazilian women exist as shown in the excerpt from the script:

Figure 2. Making the We Still Fight in the Dark film (photo: Renata Peppl).

We meet in the desire of affection, in the desire to break through the pain.

We mismatch in the lack of empathy, in the privileges, of colour.

I exist, Black!

We meet as migrant women

We mismatch in the right to immigrate.

We had our history burned and with that our right to come and go was denied.

We don’t know our history and we don’t even have European ancestry.

The film was a multi-authored, multi-layered creative translation that was symbolic, literal and again reflected a sense of ‘uneasiness’ (Johnston and Pratt 2020). The film reclaimed the research for the women through their eyes, righting the wrongs of the original study while also communicating it in complex, creative and aesthetically beautiful ways.

Once the film was completed, MinA began a series of dissemination events around the UK and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (including at the Festival of Latin American Women in Arts – FLAWA, London, Migration Matters Festival, Sheffield, and at Casa Rio Arts Centre and the Casa das Mulheres in Rio de Janeiro and at a range of academic conferences including at the King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London and the universities of Oxford and Leicester) as well as a showing in Santiago, Chile. The majority of these involved staging an installation with the screen draped with the red yarn (see Figure 3). After the initial event in London, the women decided that they needed to create a short performance to accompany the staging of the film/installation. One participant stated:

When we watched the video with the audience and went straight to the Q&A, I felt like a subject of study, a guinea pig. But when we added the live performance, the acting, I felt much more comfortable. It felt that we were representing a collective, that story wasn’t mine, it was everyone’s.

The performances used Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies where the audience member becomes a ‘spect-actor’ as they interact with the actors based on principles of collective empowerment for transformation (see Erel, Reynolds, and Kaptani 2018). However, the women were also part of the audience for the film too. They reflected on seeing themselves in the film as simultaneously uncomfortable, empowering and transformational: ‘I’ve learnt how to use my image to call people for action and transform them. To see myself on the screen was very empowering, it made me proud and in a “shock”; I’ve learnt to accept myself’. Therefore, while they found watching themselves painful, their collective voice protected them making them stronger. In Rio de Janeiro, several women at the screening at the Casa das Mulheres in the favelas of Maré expressed surprise that migrants experienced such racialised exclusion in the UK but also voiced pride that they were representing Brazilian women abroad in transformative ways. In London, responses from participants at an exhibition including the film installation reflected how it spoke across cultures: ‘So interesting, so powerful, to see the world as others see it, to remember others’ strength and suffering’.

Figure 3. We Still Fight in the Dark audio-visual installation (photo: Renata Peppl).

In contrast to the curatorial process of Efêmera with Gaël as artist at the centre, WSFD was co-produced, collective, and therapeutic. The women participants reclaimed authorship of the research through their own creative translation, actively embodying what it means to be a migrant woman experiencing gendered violence but also challenging it. Through their creative translations of the original report, the research participants were able to develop a collective praxis of care that was translocational in nature. They developed their own forms of co-produced creative knowledge production that spoke across epistemic borders to highlight what they viewed as important, they re-centred race and they transformed their own lives and those of their audiences for the better, as one woman noted:

In the beginning I felt exposed but as the performance went, and people related with our lines/stories, I could sense a shift. From being subjects of study we were then ‘humanized’ and then I felt at the same level as the audience – from strangeness to recognition.

The importance of transforming pain, harm and brutality into praxes of care has been noted elsewhere (Cahill and Pain 2019; Ryburn 2024; Sheringham, Taylor and Duffy-Syedi 2024). For migrant women, the need to draw attention to how they are treated, especially when they have insecure immigration status, is especially important as evidenced by the Step Up Migrant Women campaign run by LAWRS (McIlwaine, Granada, and Valenzuela-Oblitas 2019).

Conclusions

This paper has explored how research on the nature of gendered violence among Brazilian migrant women has been translated into creative outputs using different epistemological approaches. Adapting a Latin American feminist translocational perspective, I suggest that the Brazilian women included in the artistic encounters outlined here cross multiple borders in terms of challenging traditional forms of knowledge production, negotiating epistemological boundaries and advancing intersectional feminist struggles. In contributing to the burgeoning work on feminist interpretations of migrant women’s experiences through the arts (Kaptani and Yuval-Davies 2008; O’Neill et al. 2019; Erel, Reynolds, and Kaptani 2018), I reflect on two different types of ‘creative translation pathways’ to help explain the different ways that arts-based approaches can interpret social science research using different epistemological logics. I differentiate a curatorial creative translation approach in Efêmera from a co-produced, collaborative one in WSFD. Efêmera centred the interpretation of the artist through their relationship with the audience, focusing on art as a product, and not engaging with research participants. WSFD entailed a collective, co-designed creative translation where the research participants created the art as a therapeutic, aesthetic and transformational exercise through active engagement with their audiences using Theatre of the Oppressed methods. My role as researcher was one of an ‘academic dramaturg’ with oversight of the process, loosely directing from within and beyond, as well as dealing with inevitable tensions and some of the emotional fall-out of working on such complex and sensitive issues. Key to this was to ensure that the narratives and ideas of the participants and artists was foregrounded to ensure a feminist decolonial dramaturgical approach. Raising awareness of gendered violence and challenging taboos were embedded in both approaches through translocational feminist politics. Indeed, a feminist translocational viewpoint is crucial in ensuring that knowledge production and critical translation are embedded in creative work as a way of capturing the embodiment of violence in all its brutal forms, but also in forging a just feminist future for migrant women everywhere as a way to resist it. This will also ensure that epistemologies are connected across borders, between disciplines, and beyond academia (De Lima Costa 2020). This will not occur without tension as translation is always ‘uneasy’ (Johnston and Pratt 2020) and/or ‘equivocal’ (De Lima Costa 2020). These vary according to whether creative translations pathways are curatorial or co-produced with opportunities and challenges inherent in both but with a shared feminist translocational vision that speaks across actual and symbolic borders, across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries, and across language, place, audiences and experiences of gendered violence.

Acknowledgements

I am exceptionally grateful to all the women who participated in the original research and in the WSFD workshops including Adriana Pereira, Aline Santos, Annaís Berlim, Eliete Reis, Karina Sgarbi, Letícia Gonçalves, Luciana Duailibe, Marcia Alves, Michelle Nicoletti, Simone Amorim, Simone Souza, Taline Schubach, Tathiane Mattos and Vera Jus. I would also like to acknowledge the Visual and Embodied Methodologies (VEM) network at King's College London who have supported the work discussed here in various ways. Finally, I would like to thank Megan Ryburn, Jelke Boesten and Michael Keith for constructive comments on earlier drafts as well as two anonymous referee.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

I would like to thank the ESRC and Newton Fund for funding the research on which this paper is based (ES/N013247/1 and ES/N013247/2) as well as the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (Carolina Gottardo), People’s Palace Projects (Paul Heritage and Renata Peppl), CASA Latin American Theatre Festival and Gaël Le Cornec. The WSFD project was funded by an ESRC Impact Acceleration Account grant and a Social Science and Public Policy Faculty Research Fund grant at King’s College London with Migrants in Action led by Carolina Cal Angrisani and Renata Peppl together with Niall Sreenan, with contributions by Isabela Miranda Gomes, Nina Franco, Alba Cabral, Louise Carpenedo, Isadora Chamis, Beatriz Grasso, Paulica Santos.

Notes

1 See information about Juana in a Million here: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/qmul/international/publicengagement/files/Juana-programme.pdf; about the CASA documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUodF_IaKpY; about LAWRS/Trust for London here: https://youtu.be/Tw46pn1SzZw (accessed 5 March 2024).

2 See Ana here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10503906/?ref_=nm_ov_bio_lk1 and Raising awareness of violence against Brazilian women in London here: https://youtu.be/LPDNxtWB9e0 (5 March 2024).

3 The film can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/tDsvgA8pUlg (accessed 5 March 2024).