ABSTRACT
Travelling from the “Highway of Tears” in Northwestern Canada and the bleak economic periphery at the confluence of the borders of Northern New York State, the Akwesasne Reserve, and Ontario to the hyper-surveilled and deadly crossing points along the US–Mexican border and the economically devastated rural communities in the interior of Mexico, any rosy imaginary of “North America” falls away. Such spaces have become the subjects of a range of films produced over the past decade or so by women (and some avowedly feminist) filmmakers that offer narratives of women and whole communities made expendable within and across the states of North America. Together such films offer an avenue for thinking transnationally, but more accurately translocally (that is, putting seemingly unconnected local contexts in relation to each other), about violence in the region under its banner of security and prosperity. They also offer a way to think more about developing constructs of transnational feminism, further troubling romanticized notions of global or regional feminist/women’s solidarities yet suggestive of how differently-sited and situated women in the region are mutually, albeit unevenly, imbricated by the statist and regional forces in which they are enmeshed as they navigate and resist the localized violence visited upon them. I posit that by putting selected film narratives that image disparate locations and struggles in the region in relation to each other, these co-implications might be more easily seen. I do not argue that greater recognition of co-implications leads necessarily to solidarities, but rather that connecting these vantage points tells us more about the complex array of fortressing mechanisms in North America, mitigating against any easy assumptions about shared experiences or identities or cross-cutting collective struggle, but revealing of the undersides of the neoliberal imaginary of North America and its constituent states.
