Confronting the Wound: Feminicidio on the US-Mexico Border

Abstract

Abstract: This essay focuses on the social crisis Brown subalternized women have faced in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, since the early 1990s. I study counterhegemonic representations of the Juárez feminicides to bring out of the shadows the tacit, and tangible, social, cultural, spiritual, and even physical repercussions of these murders. Stemming from the “theories of the flesh” put forward by Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004), Cherríe Moraga (b. 1952), and other Chicana and Latina writers and scholars, I investigate manifestations of the wound in Lourdes Portillo’s highly acclaimed documentary Señorita Extraviada (2001) and Mexican film director Carlos Pérez Osorio’s Netflix documentary The Three Deaths of Marisela Escobedo (2020), along with Marisela Treviño Orta’s play Braided Sorrow (2005). Drawing on Stephanie Fetta’s theories of the soma and somatic analysis, I examine testimonios and other articulations and renderings of the wound as a means of discussing the internalized and somatic responses to the psychosocial repercussions brought forth by this wave of feminicides.