Transforming Terror: Documentary Poetics in Lourdes Portillo's Señorita Extraviada (2001) (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Art Through Education (IJETA), 2006
Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada (2000) is a riveting investigation that tells the story of the hundreds of raped, murdered, and missing young women of Juárez - a Mexican-US border city. This subversive documentary unravels binational and bicultural hegemonic power that, by omission or complicity, licenses and tolerates violence against women, including massive homicide (femicide/feminicidio). I argue that this film is a significant lens through which to pose important questions about transnational neocolonial encounters, gender discrimination, and patriarchal discourses in the Mexican-US borderlands. Moreover, it functions pedagogically to forge participatory relationships between the artists and the community. In so doing, it opens up spaces for educators who seek to counter subordination of peoples and support critical, feminist, and decolonizing perspectives to develop art content. This film can be used to engage students in a form of critical pedagogy that mobilizes their participation in social change.
The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from within the dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced representation. The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf (1965), locating in the novel’s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese Leng Tch’é execution a theory of the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta (1965) and Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas” (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War, respectively. Pizarnik’s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory’s crimes highlights both the fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate itself. Valenzuela’s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the regime’s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit’s critique of neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel Lumpérica (1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures—official and unofficial—are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.
The Language of Female Violence in Jorge Ibargüengoitia's Las muertas
I n the early 1960s in Mexico, accounts of three notorious sisters inundated newspapers. Delfina, María de Jesús and Luisa González Valenzuela, known as "Las Poquianchis," 2 were accused of crimes including mass murder, torture, the kidnapping of women for prostitution, and the clandestine operation of a brothel. Due to the extensive coverage of the case by the Mexican media, the Poquianchis became an infamous sensation, captivating the interest of the Mexican people and even drawing in international press. 3 With his novel Las muertas (1977), Jorge Ibargüengoitia responds to the overzealous media damnation of the women by providing an alternative narrative of the crimes of the Poquianchis.
Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, 2017
Engaging with the sizeable scholarship on Lourdes Portillo's 2001 documentary Señorita Extraviada/Missing Young Woman, this article investigates the potential of the visual image to create a form of radical melancholy that resists containment by the persistent patriarchal frameworks used to interpret the Juárez feminicide. Taking Señorita Extraviada as a historically important feminist text documenting a crucial moment in grassroots women's activism against the gender violence systematically expressed in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, this article discusses the film's resistant potential. Engaging with Rosa Linda Fregoso's measured praise and critique of the film, the article proposes other vantage points through which to interpret the Keywords Lourdes Portillo feminicide experimental documentary women's activism haptic visuality rituals of mourning
The Historiography of Feminicide in Ciudad Juárez: Critical and Revisionist Approaches
Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since activists first denounced as “feminicides” the murders of women and girls occurring with alarming frequency around Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The accumulating, gender-based murders generated a vibrant anti-feminicide movement and captured public interest far beyond the transborder region. Analysis of the murders also ignited heated debates within academic and journalistic communities. A first generation of writers studying the murders largely analyzed them within this gender-based, feminicide framework. More recently, a number of journalists and scholars have challenged that approach, arguing that the death of women in Juárez did not arise from any gender specificity, and that they could only be understood by reference to the more numerous murders of men in the region. These revisionist approaches dismiss those who frame the murders as feminicides as either shoddy researchers or opportunists. In this article, I explore the historiography of these debates and place the revisionist analyses within a larger debate about the utility of empiricist approaches as a primary instrument of social explanation. I suggest that critical theory, in particular feminist analysis, provides a better conceptual tool for understanding the nature and causes of violence against women in Ciudad Juárez.
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. To make anything terrible obscurity seems in general to be necessary." Edmund Burke "La pregunta obligada de cualquier persona que va a Ciudad Juárez se refiere a las muertes violentas de las mujeres. A las mujeres visitantes, la ciudad las atemoriza; cuando salen se les advierte sobre el riesgo que corren. Aunque, les dicen (los hombres), 'no te preocupes, no eres el prototipo, ya no eres joven, no tienes diecisiete anos, no eres morena.'" Julia Monárrez Fragoso "Hay psicosis en Ciudad Juárez: media hora de retraso de una mujer a su hogar es suficiente para que los familiares estén pidiendo ayuda para localizarla." Suly Ponce Comité Promotor de la Campaña ¡Alto a la impunidad: ni una muerta más!
Feminicide: the power of the word, the image and the practice
Estoy viva, Regina José Galindo. Skyra. ISBN 885722318, 2014
was 1993, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, on the border with the United States. Women began to disappear, and their lifeless bodies started to be found. From 1993 to 2003 alone, a total of 410 women were killed 1 , tortured, raped and abandoned in the desert. The desert is full of questions. What word can we use in order not to transform the murders of women from Juárez into a landmark case, making the vastness of the crime invisible and generalizing the problem? What word can be constructed to express the political meaning of violence against women? How can we unmask the mechanisms of a violence that maintains and reproduces asymmetrical power relationships, so ingrained as to be perceived as normal and natural? How can we conceive a new vocabulary 2 to create meanings that are constructed through collective conversations and audacious practices? In that desert, in order to start talking, one of the first things we become aware of is that studying the etymology of the terms is of no use, that we can see and make visible the atrocity of an event without reproducing violence and that, through choral practices, we can transform pain into the possibility of knowledge. The word "The life of words is drawn simultaneously on a field of experience and the socio-political practice that analyzes its effects on the community of speakers" 3. Who are the women of Ciudad Juárez? What chance of speech and visibility do they have, starting with the social inequalities to which they are subjected? Indigenous women, migrants, maquilladoras workers 4 , women whose race and gender place them in a particularly vulnerable position 5. In Latin American societies, with their history of colonization processes and genocide, the value of lives has historically been hierarchical. Killers of women are part of the history of Latin America, but in modern times, what changes are the reasons and the forms of the phenomenon, and this obliges us to rethink and give a name to other forms of violence. What does it mean to be a Latin American at the height of globalization 6 ? What does it mean to be a Maquilla worker in Juárez? "Latin American women in the era of globalization, whether integrated or not", writes feminist anthropologist Marcela Lagarde, "come from the rise of conquered and colonized societies and States that originated through violent processes or genocide. These societies were shaped by patriarchy. The social and political malformations have lived alongside distorted echoes of democracy and humanist utopias of freedom, where the States were weak and subsidiary mechanisms prevailed. The social structures solidified into closed classes and marginalized communities and the position of women remained backward" 7. Being a worker in a factory in a frontier town in Latin America means being a migrant woman, or a woman who must raise her children differently because she cannot always be at home, or a woman who is independent because she works and earns. It means that you are changing the gender role that was historically assigned to you. Popular imagination has described and transformed the maquiladoras of Juárez into maquilocas 8. They behave like American women, forgetting the morals of a good little Mexican woman, wearing shorts, high heels and glittery lipstick. And if you're a maquilocas or disobey the gender mandates, it is right that you should pay. Women are murdered merely for being women or not behaving appropriately. "The lack of appropriateness-writes Julia Monárrez Fragoso-assumes that women have 'crossed the line'" and have "gone beyond the limit" 9. Feminicide: the power of the word, the image and the practice Emanuela Borzacchiello 1993, Ciudad Juárez, Messico, frontiera con gli Stati Uniti. Iniziano a scomparire donne, iniziano a essere ritrovati i loro corpi senza vita. Solo dal 1993 al 2003 si contano un totale di 410 donne uccise 1 , torturate, violentate e abbandonate nel deserto. Un deserto pieno di domande. Quale parola usare per non trasformare gli omicidi di donne di Juárez in un caso esemplare, invisibilizzando la dimensione del crimine e la generalizzazione di un problema? Quale parola costruire per esprimere il senso politico della violenza contro le donne? Come smascherare i meccanismi di una violenza che mantiene e riproduce relazioni asimmetriche di potere, tanto sedimentate da percepirsi come normali e naturali? Come pensare a un nuovo vocabolario 2 da usare per creare significati che si costruiscono attraverso conversazioni collettive e pratiche audaci? In quel deserto, per iniziare a parlare, una delle prime consapevolezze è che lo studio etimologico dei termini non serve, che possiamo vedere e visibilizzare l'atrocità di un evento senza riprodurne la violenza e che, attraverso pratiche corali, possiamo trasformare il dolore in possibilità di conoscenza. La parola "La vita delle parole si disegna allo stesso tempo su un campo di esperienza e sulla pratica sociopolitica che analizza i suoi effetti sulla comunità dei parlanti" 3. Chi sono le donne di Ciudad Juárez? Che possibilità di parola e visibilità hanno a partire dalle disuguaglianze sociali che vivono? Indigene, migranti, operaie maquilladoras 4 , donne la cui condizione di razza e genere le colloca in una posizione di particolare vulnerabilità 5. Nelle società latinoamericane, attraversate da un processo di colonizzazione e genocidi, il valore delle vite è stato storicamente gerarchizzato. Gli assassini di donne sono parte della storia latinoamericana, ma in età contemporanea a cambiare sono le ragioni e le forme del fenomeno, che obbliga a ripensare e dare nome ad altre forme di violenza. Cosa significa essere latinoamericana in piena epoca di globalizzazione 6 ? Cosa significa essere una operaia della maquilla in Juárez? "Le donne latinoamericane dell'era della globalizzazione, integrate o meno-come scrive l'antropologa femminista Marcela Lagarde-provengono dall'ascesa di società conquistate e colonizzate e da Stati originati da processi violenti o da genocidi. Società e stati segnati dal patriarcato. Le malformazioni sociali e politiche hanno convissuto con echi democratici distorti e utopie umaniste di libertà, dove gli stati furono deboli e prevalsero meccanismi sussidiari, le strutture sociali si solidificarono in ceti chiusi e comunità emarginate e la posizione della donna rimase arretrata" 7. Essere un'operaia in una fabbrica di una città di frontiera in America Latina significa essere una donna migrante, o una donna che alleva i figli in maniera diversa perché non puoi essere sempre in casa, o una donna indipendente perché lavori e guadagni. Significa che stai cambiando il ruolo di genere che ti era stato storicamente assegnato. L'immaginario popolare ha descritto e trasformato le maquilladoras di Juárez in maquilocas 8 : si comportano come un'americana, perdendo la buona morale di bambina messicana, usano pantaloni corti, tacchi alti e lucidalabbra con brillantini. E se sei una maquiloca o disobbedisci ai mandati di genere, è giusto che paghi. Assassinate per il solo fatto di essere donne o per non esserlo in maniera adeguata. "La mancanza di adeguatezza-scrive Julia Monárrez Fragoso-presuppone che la donna abbia 'passato il segno'" e abbia "superato il limite del consentito" 9. È difficile comprendere un problema quando non si hanno termini per nominarlo. Iniziare a usare la Femminicidio: la potenza della parola, dell'immagine e della pratica Emanuela Borzacchiello 04_9318_saggio femminicidio.qxd:Scultura_def_andrea 24-02-2014 15:57 Pagina 42