Even though the analysis of the body has been central to the feminist theory, the international cooperation agenda and the field interventions have been centered in the economic development, shadowing the body, which, as much, has been seen as a place of discrimination and violence, but has not been analyzed as place of agency and empowerment.
My hypothesis is that re-introducing the centrality of bodies in the development cooperation through positive bodily politics can have a transformative potential and facilitate a more horizontal cooperation. In this framework, menstruation is an exemplary case of central bodily process for women’s life; a process that, when not considered, prevents their full incorporation into society and limits the success of other interventions to improve local capabilities. In fact, my hypothesis is that including menstrual cycle would provoke a raise of women’s capabilities and empowerment.
Based on feminist epistemology, I recognize the importance of situated knowledges and embodied feminist objectivity (Haraway). Therefore, before starting the field research, I have conducted my own auto-ethnography as a tool to understand cultural experience starting from the analysis of my personal embodied experience.
Is this enough to locate myself in the same plane of the women I am investigating with? Is this a methodological tool to balance the power relationship with them? As part of a feminist activist process, the aim is to open a dialogue intended to reflect on the process of progressive problem solving, led by the same participants in the research, ensuring not only that they will own the results of the process but that they will also actively participate in an organized change procedure while conducting the research.
