Gender Violence at the U.S.--Mexico Border

Gender Violence at the U.S.--Mexico Border
Author: HŽctor Dom’nguez-Ruvalcaba
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816527121

The U.S.ÐMexico border is frequently presented by contemporary media as a violent and dangerous place. But that is not a new perception. For decades the border has been constructed as a topographic metaphor for all forms of illegality, in which an ineffable link between space and violence is somehow assumed. The sociological and cultural implications of violence have recently emerged at the forefront of academic discussions about the border. And yet few studies have been devoted to one of its most disturbing manifestations: gender violence. This book analyzes this pervasive phenomenon, including the femicides in Ciudad Ju‡rez that have come to exemplify, at least for the media, its most extreme manifestation. Contributors to this volume propose that the study of gender-motivated violence requires interpretive and analytical strategies that draw on methods reaching across the divide between the social sciences and the humanities. Through such an interdisciplinary conversation, the book examines how such violence is (re)presented in oral narratives, newspaper reports, films and documentaries, novels, TV series, and legal discourse. It also examines the role that the media have played in this process, as well as the legal initiatives that might address this pressing social problem. Together these essays offer a new perspective on the implications of, and connections between, gendered forms of violence and topics such as mechanisms of social violence, the micro-social effects of economic models, the asymmetries of power in local, national, and transnational configurations, and the particular rhetoric, aesthetics, and ethics of discourses that represent violence.

Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Jurez

Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Jurez
Author: Nancy Pineda-Madrid
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2011-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1451415087

Nancy Pineda-Madrid re-conceives traditional Christian notions of salvation by closing attending to the experience of the embattled women of Ciudad Ju rez in Mexico, where hundreds have been slain and where survivors have found healing and salvation in solidarity and community practices that resist rather than acquiesce in the violence.

Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez

Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez
Author: Kathleen Staudt
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2015-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292763581

Ciudad Juárez has recently become infamous for its murder rate, which topped 3,000 in 2010 as competing drug cartels grew increasingly violent and the military responded with violence as well. Despite the atmosphere of intimidation by troops, police, and organized criminals, women have led the way in civil society activism, spurring the Juárez Resistance and forging powerful alliances with anti-militarization activists. An in-depth examination of la Resistencia Juarense, Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez draws on ethnographic research to analyze the resistance's focus on violence against women, as well as its clash with the war against drugs championed by Mexican President Felipe Calderón with the support of the United States. Through grounded insights, the authors trace the transformation of hidden discourses into public discourses that openly challenge the militarized border regimes. The authors also explore the advocacy carried on by social media, faith-based organizations, and peace-and-justice activist Javier Sicilia while Calderón faced U.S. political schisms over the role of border trade in this global manufacturing site. Bringing to light on-the-ground strategies as well as current theories from the fields of sociology, political anthropology, and human rights, this illuminating study is particularly significant because of its emphasis on the role of women in local and transnational attempts to extinguish a hot zone. As they overcome intimidation to become game-changing activists, the figures featured in Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez offer the possibility of peace and justice in the wake of seemingly irreconcilable conflict.

Cities and Citizenship at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Cities and Citizenship at the U.S.-Mexico Border
Author: K. Staudt
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2010-09-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230112919

The volume is a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing an enormously significant region in ways that clarify the kind of everyday life and work that is generated in a major urban global manufacturing site amid insecurity, inequality, and a virtually absent state.

Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America

Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America
Author: Maria Helena Rueda
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2011-08-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230120032

This volume includes contributions of scholars from various fields - the social sciences, journalism, the humanities and the arts - whose work offers insightful and innovative ways to understand the devastating and unprecedented forms of violence currently experienced in Latin America. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, it offers an array of perspectives that contribute to ongoing debates in the study of violence in the region.

Making a Killing

Making a Killing
Author: Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 029272277X

Since 1993, more than five hundred women and girls have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez across the border from El Paso, Texas. At least a third have been sexually violated and mutilated as well. Thousands more have been reported missing and remain unaccounted for. The crimes have been poorly investigated and have gone unpunished and unresolved by Mexican authorities, thus creating an epidemic of misogynist violence on an increasingly globalized U.S.-Mexico border. This book, the first anthology to focus exclusively on the Juárez femicides, as the crimes have come to be known, compiles several different scholarly "interventions" from diverse perspectives, including feminism, Marxism, critical race theory, semiotics, and textual analysis. Editor Alicia Gaspar de Alba shapes a multidisciplinary analytical framework for considering the interconnections between gender, violence, and the U.S.-Mexico border. The essays examine the social and cultural conditions that have led to the heinous victimization of women on the border—from globalization, free trade agreements, exploitative maquiladora working conditions, and border politics, to the sexist attitudes that pervade the social discourse about the victims. The book also explores the evolving social movement that has been created by NGOs, mothers' organizing efforts, and other grassroots forms of activism related to the crimes. Contributors include U.S. and Mexican scholars and activists, as well as personal testimonies of two mothers of femicide victims.

Robo Sacer

Robo Sacer
Author: David S. Dalton
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2023-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826505392

Robo Sacer engages the digital humanities, critical race theory, border studies, biopolitical theory, and necropolitical theory to interrogate how technology has been used to oppress people of Mexican descent—both within Mexico and in the United States—since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. As the book argues, robo-sacer identity emerges as transnational flows of bodies, capital, and technology become an institutionalized state of exception that relegates people from marginalized communities to the periphery. And yet the same technology can be utilized by the oppressed in the service of resistance. The texts studied here represent speculative stories about this technological empowerment. These texts theorize different means of techno-resistance to key realities that have emerged within Mexican and Chicano/a/x communities under the rise and reign of neoliberalism. The first three chapters deal with dehumanization, the trafficking of death, and unbalanced access to technology. The final two chapters deal with the major forms of violence—feminicide and drug-related violence—that have grown exponentially in Mexico with the rise of neoliberalism. These stories theorize the role of technology both in oppressing and in providing the subaltern with necessary tools for resistance. Robo Sacer builds on the previous studies of Sayak Valencia, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Guy Emerson, Achille Mbembe, and of course Giorgio Agamben, but it differentiates itself from them through its theorization on how technology—and particularly cyborg subjectivity—can amend the reigning biopolitical and necropolitical structures of power in potentially liberatory ways. Robo Sacer shows how the cyborg can denaturalize constructs of zoē by providing an outlet through which the oppressed can tell their stories, thus imbuing the oppressed with the power to combat imperialist forces.

Cultural Representations of Feminicidio at the US-Mexico Border

Cultural Representations of Feminicidio at the US-Mexico Border
Author: Nuala Finnegan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2018-07-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351058819

Since the early 1990s, the repeated murders of women from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico have become something of a global cause célèbre. Cultural Representations of Feminicidio at the US-Mexico Border examines creative responses to these acts of violence. It reveals how theatre, art, film, fiction and other popular cultural forms seek to remember and mourn the female victims of violent death in the city at the same time as they interrogate the political, legal and societal structures that produce the crimes. Different chapters examine the varying art forms to engage with Ciudad Juárez’s feminicidal wave. Finnegan discusses Àlex Rigola’s theatrical adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 by Teatre Lliure in Barcelona as well as painting about the victims of feminicidio by Irish painter Brian Maguire. There is analysis of documentary film about Ciudad Juárez, including Lourdes Portillo’s acclaimed Señorita Extraviada (2001). The final chapter turns its attention to writing about feminicide and examines testimonial and crime fiction narratives like the mystery novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, among other examples. By drawing on a range of artistic responses to the murders in Ciudad Juárez, Cultural Representations of Feminicidio at the US-Mexico Border shows how art, film, theatre and fiction can unsettle official narratives about the crimes and undo the static paradigms that are frequently used to interpret them.

The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South

The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South
Author: Kerry Carrington
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 1061
Release: 2018-01-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319650211

The first comprehensive collection of its kind, this handbook addresses the problem of knowledge production in criminology, redressing the global imbalance with an original focus on the Global South. Issues of vital criminological research and policy significance abound in the Global South, with important implications for South/North relations as well as global security and justice. In a world of high speed communication technologies and fluid national borders, empire building has shifted from colonising territories to colonising knowledge. The authors of this volume question whose voices, experiences, and theories are reflected in the discipline, and argue that diversity of discourse is more important now than ever before. Approaching the subject from a range of historical, theoretical, and social perspectives, this collection promotes the Global South not only as a space for the production of knowledge, but crucially, as a source of innovative research and theory on crime and justice. Wide-ranging in scope and authoritative in theory, this study will appeal to scholars, activists, policy-makers, and students from a wide range of social science disciplines from both the Global North and South, including criminal justice, human rights, and penology.