alicelaureldriver

Mary King has earned international acclaim for her writing and work focused on social justice movements around the globe. But the important role she played in helping to advance the struggle for women’s rights is a lesser known story of how the success of one social movement, the US civil rights struggle, helped to expand the space for another movement. Read more in English at Narco News Read more in Spanish at Narco News

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“For all of us, the only thing that moves us is our children,” explained Norma Andrade, Juárez activist and founder of May Our Daughters Return Home in a 2012 interview with Mexican filmmaker Ernesto Godoy. Andrade’s daughter, Lilia Alejandra, disappeared on February 14, 2001 and her body was discovered on February 21st, in what has become an epidemic of violence in Juárez over the last two decades. Read more at Women´s Media Center

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El mexicano Julián Cardona, fotoperiodista que radica en Juárez, se ha dedicado desde 1993 a documentar la violencia económica y física existente en Juárez que es resultado de la globalización. Cardona, en su declaración de artista explica, “En un mundo plano, la única frontera por conquistar es el espacio vacío dentro de nosotros mismos, y por alguna razón, tratamos de llenar ese espacio con bienes y entretenimientos.” En 1995, Cardona organizó la exposición fotográfica Nada que ver que lo llevó […]

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An introduction to a my short film that reflects on the images we devour and the limits of photography from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Edited by Diego Trejo Avila.

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1. How did you end up in Mexico City? Can you talk about your trajectory as an academic? The day after I defended my dissertation at the University of Kentucky, I moved to Mexico City to volunteer at Asilegal (a non-profit that works with vulnerable groups such as women, indigenous people, and the poor to help advocate for their legal rights) and to work as a freelance writer. Writing my dissertation was a long, lonely process. I wrote about the […]

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Bodies meant nothing to me. When they jammed into me on the metro or the bus, rather than tensing, pushing, or fighting for some tiny symbolic personal space I learned to let all my air out and flatten myself into the crowd, into the wall; to press myself out of my own body. I became good at it, nonchalant like the sweat running down your arm can mix with mine and your buttocks can push against mine, but I will not […]

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“The only thing left to say is, ‘If you don’t want anything to happen to you, go out without your body,’” instructed Mexican journalist Carlos Monsiváis. He was writing about the victims of violence against women and feminicide in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and criticizing the way in which the media read the women’s bodies – the clothes, the lipstick, the location of the body in the city – as signs of their personal guilt. Why was she in that part of […]

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Some people we know only through their words. And so it was with author Charles Bowden and his images of bloated bodies, scurrying rats, of air so hot that a single match would light it on fire, images of savagery inverted into beauty that came with the uncomfortable awareness of the nature of the human condition. Keep reading at The Feminist Wire

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Por Alice Driver, Coordinadora de Contenidos Institucionales de Justiciahable. Experta en temas de género y frontera alice.driver@gmail.com A las mujeres viajeras solas: si no quieren que les pase nada, salgan sin cuerpo “Sólo le faltó decir: Si no quieren que les pase nada, salgan sin cuerpo”, escribió Carlos Monsiváis para describir como habían tratado los medios a las víctimas de violencia y feminicidio en Ciudad Juárez.  Ellos criticaban a las víctimas al tiempo que describían sus cuerpos – su ropa, su […]

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Swiss filmmaker, curator, and cultural theorist Ursula Biemann’s 1999 video essay Performing the Border was the first documentary to address feminicide in Ciudad Juárez (fig. 1).1 The video essay focuses on the geographical space of the border and provides an introduction to several issues traditionally related to feminicide—NAFTA, maquiladoras, and the sex trade. It is divided into four distinct parts—“The Plant,” “The Settlement,” “Sex Work,” and “The Killings”—that demonstrate how feminicide is tied to the specific environment of the border. […]

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I met Adam Skolnick in 2006 on a speedboat in the Andaman Sea off the coast of Thailand. WE WERE BOTH ATTEMPTING to write about the Moken Sea Gypsies, a romanticized group of seafaring people who struggled with all that arrived from outside: Cheetos, AIDS, packaged ramen, Coke, prejudice, obesity. Adam has authored or coauthored 16 Lonely Planet guidebooks, and he recently published a piece on the Free Burma Rangers — The Jesus-Kissed, War-Fringed, Love-Swirled Rangers— in Outside Magazine. Reading his piece […]

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A photography exhibit opening in Vienna, Austria, is designed to raise awareness of crimes of femicide and violence against women and girls. For the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on November 26, the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS) is sponsoring the exhibit. Femicide is a term that addresses not only violence against women, but also the institutional structures and cultural attitudes that create extreme violence against women as well as and members of the transvestite […]

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LAST YEAR, as a personal project to chase away my writing demons, I kept a journal of all my negative thoughts. I was working as a freelance writer and spending all of my time basking in the glow of the computer screen. Without coworkers and the daily social interactions and distractions they provide, I felt locked inside a cycle of negative thoughts.   The thoughts poured out like dark, wet animals; their mental suffocation threatened to shut me down. Once […]

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ONE DAY, ON MY WAY to the metro as I returned home from volunteering, I saw a pale peach leg hovering above the crowd. It floated, disembodied and naked, towards the entrance to Metro Eugenia in Mexico City. I picked up my pace, pushed forward, and made my way towards the ragged man carrying the leg. As I got closer, I saw the lean amputated thigh. The man, sensing my gaze, turned, and pushed the leg towards me. With a […]

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IN MEXICO CITY I woke up every morning and listened to the lament of the juice seller. As Mario made my pineapple, guava, and lime smoothie, he told me about life. “Kids these days don’t drink fresh squeezed juice. They drink Coke.” I sat on a stool at the empty juice bar and lamented with him, nodding my head as he sliced pineapples and limes. “They drink bottled juice full of sugar, and it costs twice as much as natural juice.” […]

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SITTING ON THE STREET in front of a display of bras, she caked on mascara with a delicate wand, repeating the motion until the inky black accumulated, clung to her lashes. The tits (for they were tits and not breasts) hung on display, a dismembered section of a female mannequin cut from diaphragm to neck. The tits were the size of bowling balls, as pointy as cones, and they floated independent of any body, covered in turquoise, red, pink, and […]

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PASSPORT CHECKED. Permission slip given. We were met by the doctors who would escort us to the medical center of the Reclusorio Sur prison on the southern outskirts of Mexico City. I had to go through a pat down by a group of women. They were seated at a table eating tortillas and chicken with mole. They didn’t look up. The fattest one reached out her chubby arms to pat my sides a bit. She didn’t get up from the […]

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“Your Shot” [taken at La Lagunilla market in Mexico City]. National Geographic “¿Cuba Libre?.” November 2012, p. 24.

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The official 2012 GOP platform calls for a federal ban on abortion with no exception for rape or incest victims.  Although some Americans support this platform in theory, they may not realize what limiting a woman’s right to a safe abortion looks like in practice. The GOP platform promotes the idea that a ban on abortion will decrease abortions, but it does nothing to address the situations that create the need for abortion. Those situations – rape, incest, socio-economic factors, […]

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