Cartography of Gender and Gender in Cartography: Analysis and Proposal for a Feminist Cartographic Semiology for Brazilian Geography

Abstract

The second half of the 20th century was a significant period for the renewal of various sciences. Amid the contestation of how Geography was thought and practiced, efforts to discuss the understanding of geographical space also challenged the cartography practiced until then, while producing conventional maps from a neopositivist perspective. Thus, a theoretical-epistemological field emerged, called Geographic Cartography, aimed at reflecting on Cartography from the perspective of geographic science. Reflecting the events of the late 20th century, especially the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s, gender discussions began to emerge within universities, particularly in Social Science research. Tied to a new way of understanding geographical space as multidimensional, complex, and non-neutral, gender discussions inaugurated a new subfield in geographic studies, called Gender/Feminist Geography, gaining greater visibility in Brazil only at the beginning of the 21st century. In an international context of the burgeoning feminist epistemologies to rethink Cartography from Geography, this research proposes a deepening of Geographic Cartography, challenging this field from the gender category, and the analysis and proposal of a Feminist Cartographic Semiology, which highlights gender relations as active elements in the production of geographical space through the map. The methodology to be applied consists of literature review, conducting collective mapping workshops, culminating in the analysis of how maps have been spatial representations imbued with gender relations and how other maps, breaking with male-chauvinist, misogyny, and phallocentrism, can be thought, produced, and used from a new set of codes and signs, called Feminist Cartographic Semiology. Thus, this research seeks to promote a significant contribution to Gender Geographic Cartography, a field of tensioning geographic praxis from a gender perspective, which few geographers have delved into, and which has the potential to inform public policies, influence cartographic and academic practices, and promote a richer and more complex understanding of gender relations in the Brazilian geographical context.