Saving whiteness: spectacular violence and the politics of white supremacist patriarchy

Abstract

ABSTRACT The frequency with which women are subjected to sexual assault along migratory corridors travelling through Mexico and into the United States is a disturbing phenomenon, one that has been spotlighted by human rights watches and organizations in advocating for migrant rights. Frustratingly, this sexual violence has also become a point of focus for nativist groups and militias patrolling the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, leveraged as evidence of the threat of a porous border. This paper investigates the intersections in the racialized and gendered processes that reaffirm the United States as a white, patriarchal, and heteronormative national space, by spotlighting the ways in which vigilante and nativist groups use spectacles of sexual violence against migrant women as justifications for their surveillance activities. Through images and narratives of migrant women as victims to violent Mexican men, vigilantes and nativist groups objectify and other these women in order to simultaneously disavow their own violence and position themselves as the privileged occupants and guardians of the United States.