A gendered security dispositif: Mobilizing gender in Mexico City

Abstract

This article concerns the security governance of gender in Mexico City. It begins by juxtaposing the alleged rape of a 17-year-old female by security officials against the policy responses that ensued: policies designed to make it safer for women to navigate dangerous streets. The article explores this radical turnaround: how an episode in violent opposition to security governance would ultimately sustain its implementation. It does so through what is called a gendered security dispositif – a dispositif consistent with the original formulation of Michel Foucault, albeit configured to an official account of gender-based violence that is confined to women. A gendered security dispositif renders a violent event intelligible to government by locating it in existing statistical and surveillance technologies, thereby reducing the alleged rape to citywide rates of violence and areas of high risk. Policy initiatives then target these high-risk areas, as practices of subjectification turn on the behavior of female inhabitants. The result is an official appreciation of gender-based violence that reduces the very matter of a violent event and its female victim to an administrative plane. What began as an episode contrary to security governance opens onto the production of gender and security in a manner derivative of rule.