Carla Yuja de la Fuente

Politics and Spaces of Kinesthetic Empathy

Within the background of difference feminism, which celebrates women’s ability to feel empathy, scholars have investigated the problems of the unbalanced phenomenon described as ‘empathism’ finding it as a potential blowback to women’s agency. This design based thesis explores spatial notions of this asymmetry, connecting empathy to theories of sense of self and kinesthetics, exhibiting it as a result of observation and mimicking of movement. Under this base, the project explores, maps and unpacks empathetic interactions to uncover possible traces of them in spaces, speculating the latter’s potential to re-produce power dynamics in small and larger scales.

Keywords: difference feminism, gendered empathy, spatial sense of self, kinesthetic empathy, einfühlung, movement, body, space