Revolutionary countryside: A feminist counter-topography of war in Myanmar

Abstract

In the image below, Mi Mi ties together her experiences of seeing the Myanmar military burn homes, cooking by candlelight, and struggling to grow crops and make ends meet during a period of climate and economic crisis, all with her baby on her back. Her story raises broader questions about how we understand the intersections of gender, land and revolution in Myanmar and other militarized landscapes. In this paper, we employ collaborative and mixed methodologies to map violence and resistance on the land and in the body, starting from Mi Mi’s story to advance a feminist counter-topography of war. We borrow the notion of counter-topography from geographer Cindy Katz, who poses counter-topography as an analytical and political project that examines the intersecting effects and material consequences of large-scale processes in a particular place. Our analysis brings together diverse datasets to illustrate how Myanmar’s contemporary conflict is shaped by spatial patterns and intergenerational histories of violence and endured through embodied relations to land and kin.