Gendabicod: a decolonial research method of reciprocity

Mónica Sánchez Hernández

As a woman of the Indigenous “Global South”, I have been “exoticized” and “extracted” since an early age. Therefore, when embarking on my own research project in 2022, I intended to avoid at all costs repeating the same pattern of exploiting my people with academic extractivism. Yet, the “more traditional methods” seemed to constrain.

Informed by the decolonizing methodologies and the idea of “doing and redoing” (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018) and to address some of the issues of an unbalanced relationship in research between “the Other” participants and “Us”, researchers, I ended up crafting a method that I named gendabicod .

The gendabicod is an art-based research method to elicit conversation that gives voice to “participants” in a similar format to the prehispanic codices of the Indigenous Mesoamerican peoples. The gendabicod is particularly suitable when exploring sensitive issues, or with participants with whom empathy might not be a given.

Recurrent witness of Domestic Abuse, my research was focused on the study of the notions of manhood for males accused of Intimate Partner Violence in Oaxaca, Mexico. Labelled as “perpetrators”, often males in prison or in probation reject participating in any type of “feminist” research; however, the gendabicods were successful at engaging participants. For instance, while accountability was at the center of the discussion, frequently, the participants defined the study activities as therapeutic and useful.