To whom can we ascribe responsibility for the evil Hannah Arendt and Sergio González Rodriguez recount? Arendt identified a range of culprits. She named the Nazis and especially their SS as authors of violence and engineers of industrial death. But she also explained how others played along. The victims, "ghastly marionettes with human faces" (455), participated in their destruction. Totalitarian states achieved unequivocal authority in the death camps. What totalitarian authority then does González Rodriguez find residing in contemporary Mexico? Mysterious authors of femicide operate with impunity most effectively in the absence of a strong state. Their "refuge for libertinism" requires government "institutions [that] are an amorphous entity, connected less and less to reality" (91 and 86).
Foucault's notion of BioPower requires as prerequisite a state to claim sovereignty over the lives of individual human bodies. Mbembe complicates Foucault with the assertion that in stateless settings, distributing death can be a means for non-state agents to approximate or even to reproduce the kind of totalitarian authority Arendt imagines in the Nazi camps. The mechanism by which such power was dispersed in González Rodriguez's stateless Mexican borderlands is neoliberalism. Chapter four of The Femicide Machine began with the author ascribing significant meaning to the date 1993, the final year before the United States and Mexico ratified the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA). By the chapter's end, González Rodriguez had not made any specific accusation against the purported woman killers by name. Never did journalist Marcela Turati provide any concrete specific examples. Instead, González Rodriguez named design agency Rodarte and economist and neoliberalism architect Friedrich Von Hayek. Their total aspirations to power originate not in bureaucratic politics but in marketplace exchange. Ciudad Juarez's femicides' bodies not only vanish but also transform "into simple data or signs that become part of commercial creativity's available stock" (93). Novelist Roberto Bolaño's Benno von Archimbaldi, former Nazi and possible Juarez woman killer, might also evoke the Austrian economist with such a similar name. Neoliberalism, with its utopian aspiration to a post-state world, is no solution to the threat of totalitarian institutions. Through Mbembe's reading of Arendt, we know that mass death can manifest when the state exists not to perpetrate but merely to look aside.
Critic Cuauhtémoc Medina's timely intervention in rereading artist Teresa Margolles puts this work in the context of narco-state Necropolitics. Margolles relies on statelessness to convey her message that he Mexican government is complicit in the violence of the 1990s. State laxness enables sicarios to kill as much as it left Margolles an opportunity to purchase body parts and to smuggle them across international borders. Repeating the words, "Only in Mexico...," Medina avows the singularity of a "historic situation" in contemporary Mexico where the artist participates in Necropoltics (323). Asserting neoliberalism's particularity in place is to buy into an essentialist notion of national "difference," Medina still succeeds in reading art as also part of a corrupting marketplace. To attempt separating Margolles and femicide is to risk eliding the discursive links that make both possible.
In The Femicide Machine, González Rodríguez states that the crimes committed are altered by the media and authorities -somehow justifying the violence against women where the victims were associated with organized crime for instance (13). Civil coexistence in Juárez, its rapid growing population and the appearance of maquiladoras turned into gender harassment and aggression quickly. But besides the unfortunate events of the killings and disappearance of women there is the workplace at the maquiladoras where women workers keep being victimized at another but still powerful level: “The opaque factory would be, at its extreme, the femicide machine’s antechamber, an exceptional ‘camp’, as described by Agamben” (31). Juárez is a “lawless city sponsored by a State in crisis” (7) where people seem to have been become immune to the tragic and violent reality. We can see that by the popularity of rap and hip-hop songs of groups such as Mc Crimen.
ReplyDeleteHi Paola, Angelica and Peter. I really enjoyed reading this very eloquent post, for example the sentence “…mass death can manifest when the state exists not to perpetrate but merely to look aside”, it is as if you attribute the state with the agency to perform the ultimate ignorance to its people. There is an interesting parallel here with Nos Pintamos Solas in that a situation can be condemned unanimously, yet is so exclusive to itself, has created such a system of adaptation (see the scene at 44 minutes) that it is barely possible to rethink, let alone dismantle. This is a story of different arrangements of bodies, and Maria Teresa you bring in the perfect example in the maquiladoras (unfortunately the relationship with Archimboldi however is rather inaccurate), in his epic novel 2666, Roberto Bolaño talks about the femicides in the chapter ‘The Part about the Crimes’, which describes in mundane, often gruesome detail the lives of women working almost exclusively in maquiladoras — factories in which goods are assembled by hand. The landscape of factories, highways, harassment and death is the ultimate dystopia in which such daily tragedy unfolds.
ReplyDeleteI also really appreciated the comparation you raise between the sicarios and Margolles — both post-state control and relying on a recycling of morbidity for their agency to function.
I agree with Will, it is an enjoyable reading. In relation to your blog, I just want to add that today most of the cases of feminicides and violence against women are not in Ciudad Juarez, but in the Estado de México. The Estado de Mexico (México State?) is a political entity that is located in the borders of Mexico City; it has a conservative government dominated by the PRI party, and most of its economy is based on industries (quite similar to the Juarez case). It is very interesting to think that these cases of extreme violence against the feminine body occur in these interstices of the law, in these borders of the underdevelopment, which in this case are the suburbs of the Estado de México.
ReplyDeleteGreat post with a ton of references and a lot to unpack: I guess I'm interest most in the usage and differing engagements with neoliberalism... something that I've wanted us to take up in class... What is? How mobilized? How different?
ReplyDeleteTeresa brought up the quote Gonzales Rodriguez's quote -- “lawless city sponsored by a State in crisis” and it reminded me of Arendt's "killing the juridical person" by putting them "outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time...[the] recognition of lawlessness." In Arendt's case the State is the maker, enforcer, and breaker of law. The Femicide Machine argues that the State is incapable of enforcing ("not even a perfect law [would] remedy violence against women") because "rule of law does not exist in Mexico, just as it is absent in Ciudad Juarez" --making the State equally powerless and culpable. While criminal behavior is acting outside of the law, the "lawlessness" belongs to the State. The duality of law was also seen in the film, where the Constitution and Penal Code are both the cause and cure of incarceration, literally represented as doors of hope in the mural.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the excellent summary and analysis. I think it would be instrumental to apply these readings to the present conjuncture.
ReplyDeleteWith the current continuation of neoliberalization, neocoloniality and global empire, we have all become “ghastly marionettes with human faces”. When we buy a plastic tchotchke, we are buying into a supply chain wherein the transportation of that tchotchke required communities to be displaced for the expansion of ports and freeways; the lungs of those who remained to be sacrificed through asthma and lung disease in the name of the trucks carrying the tchotchke; the factory workers who produced and the shipworkers who transported it to be exploited to the point of suicide; the families left behind to suffer prolonged death. The oil to produce the plastic was extracted from the Earth by subaltern populations whose bodies were sacrificed by injury and toxins to acquire the fossil fuels, so that we might have that tchotchke. We might play with it for a month before it breaks, at which point it goes to the landfill. This entire process is an allocation of death not only to present life ‘elsewhere’, but also ‘here’ and ‘later’. Through greenhouse gas emissions, groundwater contamination, and ocean contamination/acidification we’re destroying the ecosystem that sustains us, cutting short many lives today and sacrificing future lives as well.
I had not considered the security of the body and the sovereign power's dominance of the body (Biopower) as having a direct analogue to the insecurity of the body under stateless conditions. It is a very basic connection but for whatever reason it has never played out so directly in discourse and rhetoric for me as it has here. The additional context of the statelessness seeded by neoliberalism as a backdrop for the "refuge [of] libertinism" in which those responsible for the disappearance of so many women's bodies thrive amid "institutions [that] are an amorphous entity, connected less and less to reality" (91 and 86), makes a poignant and simple connection that resonate loudly.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting post and comments. One question I have is on the difference between the terms "femicide" and "feminicide". The two seem to be used interchangeably, but is it just murders of women? Is it misogynist driven? It seems that feminicide may be more useful in providing an analytic framework of the larger phenomenon of violence against women based on gender power structures and larger social inequalities.
ReplyDeleteMarisa Belausteguigoitia brings up a very important element of identity and citizenship: the right to see and be seen. The lack of this right results in disappearance, to be visually removed as a form of cleansing of what is determined by the government or societal structures as “garbage.” The idea is reinforced through modernist ideals of cleanliness, purity, and aesthetic structure and organization - a type of visual sterility for the sake of aesthetic purity and integrity. However, the metaphor of vision is appropriate because it refers to subjectivity rather than objectivity. In reference to Will’s response to this post, at what point does the the right see and right to be seen become also a responsibility to see and be seen?
ReplyDelete"Art" is often seen as a distant and distinct from the every day. In this context, however, art is the expansion and ownership of space. What is the role of shared experience of art like this? Can it be applied to other projects? What are the long term effects for the environment? For the women artists? For future inmates?
ReplyDeleteWhat agency can be regained through the illumination of erasure and disappearance?