ABSTRACT
Global restructuring is highly visible at international border sites that are potential magnets for capital and labor. Borders sites are places where the global meets the local, permitting grounded, contextualized knowledge and action. Borders are also locales wherein nationalized, often militarized conceptions of “border security” are practiced in this twenty-first century era of officially declared Wars on Drugs, Terror, and Crime, both Mexico and US-style declarations. Violence against women and/or gender-based violence rarely figure into national declarations of security. Over a forty-year period, the governments of Mexico and the US pursued
policies that fostered the growth of foreign-owned, export-processing industries (called maquiladoras in Mexico) and labor to work therein. One such site is the transnational, metropolitan region of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas, on which this chapter focuses through a gender lens. Powerful interests on both sides of the border have built and sustained the “Maquiladora Model” of development, with its long female-dominant – though more recently gender-balanced, yet gender-differentiated – workforce, wherein women workers occupy the lower-paid jobs (Kopinak 2004; Lugo 2008). Global restructuring changes gender conceptions, including masculinities, along with perception and experiences of threat, entitlement, and rights among women and men. Coincidentally or not, since 1993, Ciudad Juárez has suffered an infamous reputation as the site of over 500 murders of women and girls, known as femicide,1 one-third of which involved the sexualized torture of rape and mutilation. My sightings in this chapter take up feminist lenses that focus on the
various ways that people activate and resist border crossing, globalized production at borders, and trade along with their associated violence. National security strategies activate “hard” power, including militarization, fences or walls, and criminalization, in contrast to what Nye (2005) calls “soft power.” The US, in its Secure Fence Act of 2006, added 670 miles to the existing 100 miles of wall at this 2,000-mile border that separates the US and Mexico. Over the last 15 years, the US also tripled the number of Border Patrol
officers supplemented with technological equipment to keep out immigrants and crime (Staudt 2008b). Drawing on international feminist theories (Agathangelou and Ling 2004; highlighted in Staudt 2009b), border security policies signal a shift from the usually hegemonic masculine approach to a hyper-masculine approach to protect and secure the borderline. Anna Agathangelou and Lily Ling define common hegemony as a preference for super-imposed traditions that shape institutions, and hyper-masculinity as a reactionary stance that “arises when agents of hegemonic masculinity feel threatened or undermined, thereby needing to inflate, exaggerate, or otherwise distort their traditional masculinity” (2004: 519). Under President Calderón, Mexico posted more than 20,000 military troops to fight drug cartels, the largest numbers of which were posted in Ciudad Juárez during 2008-9. In 2008, some 1,600 mostly execution-style killings occurred, largely due to cartel – state and inter-cartel violence. Neither government satisfactorily addresses the everyday safety of women from gender-based violence, whether domestic violence or femicide. I also address the concept of resistance in this chapter, analyzing how
resistance takes on peculiar gender dynamics. I seek both to connect globalization with violence against women and to examine gendered resistance that either challenges such violence or inflates such violence in backlash response to perceived threats to traditional masculinity. Thus, rather than applaud all resistance as noble or romantic, I unpack its
various forms, whether direct or indirect, perverse or admirable. Drawing on transnational research over the last six years on violence against women and on activism surrounding violence, I offer a deeply grounded and contextualized interpretation of how the global meets the local at the globalized border. I argue that some men have resisted the way that global capital undermined their power, authority, and earning power relative to women. But their resistance is perverse and takes the form of violence against women, rather than against political and economic forces that are responsible for their relative powerlessness. Men face few risks for this criminal resistance, given Mexico’s ineffective law enforcement system wherein police act with impunity and mostly ignore crimes of violence against women (Staudt 2008a; see AI 2008). While women bear the brunt of this sort of men’s perverse resistance, they too resist and/or respond in a variety of ways that I group under four strategies: (1) negotiating individually with men; (2) self-medicated coping and/or exiting from dangerous relationships; (3) denouncing abusers to a flawed law enforcement system; and (4) collectively mobilizing against violence against women to work for regimes that respect human rights under the rule of law, on national and transnational bases. Each of these strategies carries risks. Borders offer mirror-like perspectives on people who, in the case of the
US-Mexico border, share much in common: language, culture, relatives and friends, and interdependent economies. On the US side of the border, domestic violence and sexual assault are common; however, female murder rates in El Paso are low compared to the Mexico side, where activists refer to
female murder as femicide in Ciudad Juárez (Staudt 2008a: Ch. 1). As I argue elsewhere (Staudt 2008a and 2009a), institutional intervention in the spiral of domestic violence partially explains these different rates. Both local law enforcement and non-profit battered women’s shelters offer remedies, albeit flawed in many ways, that reduce murder rates. In accordance with this volume, my focus here is on the border as a site, offering feminist sightings of its gendered dynamics, and complicating gendered forms of resistance to both restructuring and femicide on the Mexican side of the border. This chapter is divided into three sections. First, I examine the concept of
resistance, aiming to unpack the gendered analysis thereof and to argue that, for some men, resistance takes the form of violence against women in Mexico’s neocolonial global era. Then I contextualize and ground the site of this research at the global frontier of export-processing industrialization, Mexico’s northern border. Finally, I draw on original field research conducted since 2002, both from participant observation in the Bi-national Coalition Against Violence Toward Women at the Border and from survey research, as well as workshops conducted during 2004-5 in Ciudad Juárez. In that section, I discuss women’s different resistance strategies. I have lived, worked, taught, and researched at the US-Mexico border for
over two decades. While border theorists make much of the “in-between-ness” (Bhabha 1994) and hybridized qualities of the region (Anzaldúa 1987), I contend that border regions are sites wherein gender patterns, dormant and less visible elsewhere in the interior of mainstream societies, become overt, obvious, and allow mirror-like contrasts. One of these patterns is violence against women, the most extreme form of which is femicide. Femicide has prompted extensive collective action, a noble form of resistance; but, less visible everyday domestic violence is partly the result, I argue, of men’s perverse resistance to neoliberal restructuring. In my research and workshops with a representative sample of women, one in four women reported experiences of physical violence, and one in ten reported sexual violence. Alas, these figures are all too common in many countries around the world, including the US. Thus, this chapter focuses on the minority of both women and men who are both targets and perpetrators of interpersonal violence in Mexico’s globalized northern border context. I emphasize that these are minority experiences, since domestic violence rates of “one in four” tell us that not all women experience physical violence, nor do all men perpetrate violence against women. Moreover, violence against women did not begin with globalization or neoliberalism; it has long been “normalized” as a relic of hegemonic masculinity in Mexico as well as in the US. Normalization “hides” such crime, therefore, making it difficult to trace exact rates of increase or decrease.
The exertion of power in anything but an open vacuum produces resistance. Political scientists were slow to develop this insight, tied as the mainstream
discipline was to the study of formal institutions and overt, easily countable proactive individual political behavior, such as voting and electoral campaigns. Moreover, mainstream political scientists studied phenomena that functioned to support whole political systems, rather than undermine or transform them. In his breakthrough analysis of the “weapons of the weak,” James Scott (1985 and 1990) identified everyday resistance as political action in the context of power domination. Beginning first with an analysis of peasant societies and then moving to a more sweeping analysis of the whole of society and history, Scott’s sightings of the “arts of resistance” included sabotage, playing ignorant, and a host of behaviors that less attentive political scientists failed to see. Those political scientists who studied large-scale movements seeking to
undermine or transform political systems through revolution were relegated to the margins of the discipline, taking cues, instead, from anti-colonial and revolutionary writers in their analyses. But, like their mainstream counterparts, revolutionary-focused academics studied power and resistance in large systems rather than in smaller units, such as villages or households. However, feminist theorists have sought to unpack gender dynamics of power and resistance at both societal and household levels. Thus, they have complicated anti-colonial and revolutionary analyses by critiquing their failure to take seriously violence against women. The (neo)colonial setting – a setting that resembles Mexico’s northern border – provides a good place to search for more complicated readings of power and resistance.
