| Abstrakt: |
This article examines the status of poor migrant women as political actors in the denationalized space of Ciudad Juárez, in Mexico. Stories of captive labor and captured sexuality reverberate throughout the history of Mexican women's travels in the border space. The abuses Mexican women suffer in the international division of labor entail the decomposition of the integral body into its constituent parts. Repetitive labors of assembly and service are themselves forms of institutionalized gender violence that seek to detach women's critical agency from their bodily functions. For women in the border region, the feminicidio distorts and mirrors the sanctioned theft of their bodily integrity in migration and at work. As early as the mid-1950s, members of the Community Service Agency in San José, California, responded to the complaint of a migrant domestic worker who alleged that she was being held against her will by her employers. The archive did not tell what forms of gender aggression she experienced. The demand for a new rule of law in the border region returns us to the nature of the violation so brutally inscribed on the victims of feminicidio. The missing and murdered young women, no longer present, nevertheless occupy a place in this contest. The crosses erected in the desert require people to find new ways for thinking about rights from the vantage point of young girls and migrant women, whose new mobility and emergent sexuality challenge existing relations between women's bodies, the state, and global capital. Imagining a female life free of violence here demands new narratives of gender power, labor value, and political community, a new culture of citizenship that can carry young women's aspirations and energies out of the border as a space of death. |
