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Journal of Women in Culture and Society

Volume 36, Number 3 | Spring 2011

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Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered TOOLS

Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border
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Melissa W. Wright
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Departments of Geography and Women’s Studies
Pennsylvania State University
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Abstract

In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with the news that
dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the ARTICLE CITATION
city during the year. As the numbers of murders grew over the years, and as the police
forces proved unwilling and unable to find the perpetrators, the protestors became Melissa W. Wright, "Necropolitics,
Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered
activists. They called the violence and its surrounding impunity “femicide,” and they
Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border," Signs:
demanded that the Mexican government, at the local, state, and federal levels, stop the Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36,
violence and capture the perpetrators. Nearly two decades later, the city’s infamy as a no. 3 (Spring 2011): 707-731.
place of femicide is giving way to another terrible reputation as a place of
https://doi.org/10.1086/657496
unprecedented drug violence. Since 2006, more than six thousand people have died in
the city, as have more than twenty-eight thousand across the country, in relation to the
violence associated with the restructuring of the cartels that control the production MOST READ
and distribution of illegal drugs. In response to the public outcry against the violence,
Of all published articles, the following were the
the Mexican government has deployed thousands of troops to Ciudad Juárez as part of
most read within the past 12 months
a military strategy to secure the state against the cartels.
Making Black Women Scientists under
In this essay, I argue that the politics over the meaning of the drug-related murders White Empiricism: The Racialization of
Epistemology in Physics
and femicide must be understood in relation to gendered violence and its use as a tool
Prescod-Weinstein
for securing the state. To that end, I examine the wars over the interpretation of death
in northern Mexico through a feminist application of the concept of necropolitics as “I Get Paid to Have Orgasms”: Adult
elaborated by the postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. I examine how the wars over Webcam Models’ Negotiation of Pleasure
and Danger
the political meaning of death in relation both to femicide and to the events called Jones
“drug violence” unfold through a gendering of space, of violence, and of subjectivity.
My objective is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the antifemicide movement Misogynistic Men Online: How the Red Pill
Helped Elect Trump
illustrates the stakes for a democratic Mexican state and its citizens in a context where
Dignam et al.
governing elites argue that the violence devastating Ciudad Juárez is a positive
outcome of the government’s war against organized crime; and second, to show how a Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies:
politics of gender is central to this kind of necropolitics. Theory, Applications, and Praxis
Cho et al.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/657496 1/2
9/6/2020 Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Socie…
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https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/657496 2/2