Coloniality and the political economy of gender: Edgework in Juárez City

Abstract

The manner in which urban locations are drawn into the global economy defines their spatial organisation, distribution and utilisation. The relationships that are generated by this process include economic exchanges, racialised dynamics between workers and owners, gendered divisions of labour and the use and abuse of natural resources and infrastructure. These encounters of globalisation are often unequal or awkward and mediated by varying forms of violence, from structural to interpersonal, as these are used to rebalance the terms on which they meet. Using coloniality as an analytical tool, this article discusses the delicate balance of these Western-led encounters. Globalisation has become colonial by embedding hierarchical relationships in the foundations of the modern political economy. Gender identities, whiteness and non-whiteness, developed and underdeveloped are continually redefined, stigmatising certain groups and locations while elevating others on the basis of colonial power dynamics. Through a case study of the US–Mexico border city of Juárez, this article examines ethnographic work in its global context to explore how shame has become attached to male identities in locations of urban marginality. Theorising around the coloniality of urban space production, I discuss how Juárez’s border location has shaped its development though gendered and racialised frictions that are kept in check with violence. A coloniality perspective enables the unpicking of dominant conceptions of industrial cities in the Global South as metonyms for underdevelopment. Using the concept of edgework, I draw out how violence oils the wheels of globalisation to renegotiate damaged identities in contexts of territorial stigma.