Prathana D

Ohio University, USA

Title: Inscribing Justice: Counter-Monuments and Feminist Spatial Resistance in Mexico City

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Biography

Prathana D. is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. Her research focuses on feminist health communication, maternal and reproductive health, and critical rhetorical analyses of caregiving practices, with particular attention to breastfeeding, cross-nursing, and maternal embodiment. She employs feminist theory, affect theory, and qualitative methods to examine how women’s health experiences are communicated, governed, and contested within social, cultural, and institutional contexts.

Abstract

Feminist counter-monuments on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma transform commemoration into an ongoing practice of care, author ship, and resistance. Centering the Antimonumenta Vivas Nos Queremos—a grassroots installation created by Indigenous and feminist collectives, this study defines counter-monumentality as a feminist geography of persistence that reclaims urban space through embodied and affective labor. Methodologically, the project integrates rhetorical fieldwork, spatial discourse analysis, and feminist-decolonial interpretation to trace how color, inscription, and participation transform grief into public knowledge. The analysis unfolds across three modalities: first, it examines how practices of inscription and maintenance enact spatial jus tice by remapping colonial space into a participatory feminist cartography of care; second, it explores how linguistic and visual inscriptions generate grammars of resistance that transform writing into a material act of protest and relation; and third, it contrasts these vernacular practices with state-sanctioned monuments such as Tlalli and The Young Woman of Amajac, revealing how the rhetoric of coexistence often masks monologic power. Drawing from feminist rhetorical theory, decolonial geography, and scholarship on symbolic reparations, this paper contributes to feminist rhetorical studies by theorizing counter-monumentality as both method and critique—an embodied, affective practice through which marginalized publics reclaim authorship over memory and justice in space.