[Page 2: Killing as Performance: Violence and the Shaping of Community
by Verónica Zebadúa-Yañez]

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The twilight zone between legality and illegality inaugurated by the killing of a woman in 1993 has been steadily spreading. Perhaps one day it will reach the nation. Perhaps it already did. Over the last decade, the young, working-class women of Juárez have been turned into a perfect contemporary incarnation of what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called homo sacer (Agamben 1998: 8, 73): a life that may be killed but not sacrificed, a vulnerable life exposed to a murder that is followed by an empty reaction. A no-reaction, no punishment.

Agamben provocatively writes that every society, no matter how 'modern' –and, we could add, how 'democratic' – decides at some point who its sacred men will be (Agamben 1998: 139). By altering the Schmittian definition of the sovereign as he who decides on the state of exception, Agamben argues that in modern politics the sovereign is instead he who decides on the value or non-value of life as such, on what is to count as a life worthy of being lived. In contemporary politics, continues Agamben, "life – which, with the declarations of rights, had as such been invested with the principle of sovereignty – now becomes the place of a sovereign decision" (Agamben 1998: 142).

Agamben contends that the classical Greek distinction between the meaning of zoe (bare life, biological life) and bios (a way of life proper to an individual or a group) has collapsed, and that this breakdown constitutes the definitive mark of political modernity. The irruption of bare life into the political realm uncovers for him the hidden basis of the Western notion of the political: the fact that we must exclude our bodies in order to have a sociopolitical life and that this strange and impossible exclusion is what constitutes civil life as such. The political defined as a ban, as the ban of bare life and the authorization of a qualified life. However, Agamben explains that bare life is included in the political insofar as it is the condition of possibility of something like a political existence. Bare life marks the border between belonging and not belonging; the originary political move – the move that institutes politics – is that by which the 'sovereign' declares who are to be the righteous dwellers of the city, which qualified lives are to have value, and which lives are to be disposed of.

The life of homo sacer is not worthy of being lived; that is, it is not politically relevant. It is important to note that homo sacer does not play the role of the 'other' to the community, of a being that in fact belongs somewhere else. To the contrary, homo sacer stands at the very borders of what counts as a political community as if, by its very absence, it protected it from dissolution. In Agamben's words, "there is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation tothat bare life in an inclusive exclusion" (Agamben 1998: 8, emphasis mine).

The ancient separation of zoe from bios, of biological human life from political life, guaranteed each of these notions a clear space of action and existence. It was only with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) that bare life began to be regarded as the basis of national sovereignty and thus was thrown into the political stage. In Agamben's account, the coming into being of the political form of the nation-state closely related the fact of birth to the right of political belonging. He continues, echoing Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, "the fiction implicit here is that birth immediately becomes nation, such that there can be no distinction between the two moments. Rights, that is, are attributed to man only in the degree to which he is the immediately vanishing presupposition (indeed, he must never appear simply as man) of the citizen" (Agamben 1995: 118). The bare life of Man is not as worthy as the qualified life of the Citizen. Once citizens appear only in their bare humanity –as in the case of refugees and of the prisoners in Guantánamo and other 'detention camps' – without the backing of a nation-state, their vulnerability is very much increased, and their 'right to have rights' decreased (Arendt 1979).

As the dwellers of totalitarian camps, women in Juárez have now entered into direct contact with death even if they are not yet dead. They have been granted a 'capacity to be killed' (Agamben 1998: 100-114) just because of who they are, to which gender and class they belong, how they look, and the low regard with which the majority of the community esteem their lives. The unending repetition of the killings, the way they seem to cite each other, has rendered the female body a border that stands in between those who are authorized into the political community and those who are excluded, a vulnerable threshold that might be potentially incarnated by any (poor, non-privileged) young woman. Agamben says, "homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act like sovereigns" (Agamben 1998: 84). In this sense, the killing of one is, or at least could be, interchangeable with the killing of another.

Beyond the femicides, the performative process by which poor, mestizo Juárez women have come to be a community of replaceable homo sacer – in other words, the violent strategy by which women's citizenship is being steadily weakened and deconstructed – is also clearly illustrated and strengthened by the changing narratives of Juárez's political economy.  The economic elites of the city intend to transform Juárez, once regarded as a paradise of low-tech, unskilled, cheap female labor, into a heaven of a new high-tech type of maquila, one in which trained, middle class, male workers will prevail (see Wright 2001, 2004).5  An exclusionary strategy of community-building has thus been at work in a twofold manner: it has been enacted, on the one hand, by the violent physical disappearance of poor women and, on the other, by the growing masculinization of the maquila labor force. In this way, the political and economic exclusionary strategies actually feed each other.  

As Melissa Wright has rightly argued, women, once praised as the champions of Juárez's economic prosperity and as the main players of the maquila industry, have now turned into the foundation – a foundation that needs to be left behind – of a different economic future (Wright, 2001: 102). The signs of economic progress are now related to women's absence. If, by being regarded homo sacer, the value (or non-value) of the life of the Juárez woman had already been decided by the sovereigns of the city, then, by a similar strategy, "[…] we find progress in the places where she once worked, in the spaces she once occupied, in the city she once inhabited" (Wright, 2004: 371). And if economically disadvantaged women represent the limit that separates value from non-value, then we can say that the women who keep on coming to Juárez symbolize for the killers and the maquila industry a perpetual supply of a value-defining element, a line that draws and makes possible the existence of a certain community by means of the exclusion of unworthy lives. To sum up, the idea is that in Juárez women are "always on the way out of a job only to be replaced by someone else just like her" (Wright, 2002: 95, emphasis mine).

Going back to the killings, we can see now that a crucial characteristic proper to homo sacer, then, is its replaceability, its capacity to be easily incarnated by another, by any other, once the killing has been consummated. This is why it is of utmost importance to regard the exclusions and killings developing in Juárez as political acts enacted in a public space. In its acts and protests, civil society has strived to portray and represent the individuality of those considered by many disposable and interchangeable.6 Indeed, in this way the exclusionary shaping of the community might be subverted. It is the very acknowledgement of the fragility of political inclusion – of the fact that there is no a priori limit that could prevent our turning into homo sacer – that perhaps moves us to imagine a community that which fully recognizes the value of difference and diversity: one that accounts for every life and mourns every death.

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In her recent work on life, violence, and mourning, Butler has shown the link between public grief and the value of life. Butler throws a poignant question:  "Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And […] what makes for a grievable life?" (Butler 2004: 19)  Butler presents here a connection between vulnerability, political recognition, and the performative element of community by introducing a factor which, she says, socially constitutes each one of us, at least in part: violence and the experience of loss. Butler argues that we, as a community, perform the recognition of the life of the other precisely by acknowledging its and our own vulnerability. Recognizing the vulnerability of the other makes him or her real. The loss of those whose lives were not recognized as valuable human lives "cannot be mourned because they are always already lost, or rather, never 'were', and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness […] The derealization of the 'Other' means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral" (Butler 2004: 33-34, emphasis mine).

Could it be the case that the women of Juárez are not being truly recognized as losses by the community? Are they being derealized and, with this, expelled from the community of those we may publicly grieve?  Lourdes Portillo's documentary Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman, 2001) offers a key to react to these questions.7 At some point in her film – which portrays the difficult struggle for justice in which civil society groups and the family of the victims are engaged – Portillo talks to some girls in the street about their feelings, about life in Juárez. Do they feel safe? Yes, they answer smiling. Are you afraid? No. Did you know that a girl recently disappeared right here? Silence. As Rita González pointed out, "Portillo has consistently paid attention to an entire economy of gestures and silences." To this point, she continues, "her camera lingers on the mutable expression of a young girl who realizes that a disappearance has recently taken place on the corner in which she stands. The ebullient smile on the girl's face turns slowly to extreme concern and fear" (González 1993: 237). Just a moment later, Portillo tells us that the sister of one of those girls disappeared a few weeks after this interview.  

These girls' silence passes on a message they cannot verbally express. Resisting the self-recognition of their vulnerability, they refuse to accept the death of the other girls as true losses, perhaps as an attempt to disassociate themselves from the possibility of being subjected to the same violence. And when Portillo shows how the local authorities consistently prevent any decent and intelligent criminal investigation and do not acknowledge properly the severity of the case, we know that the girls' odds of suffering such fates are actually high.8

We come here at the intersection of several points that have preoccupied me in this essay. It is clear that the performative process by which the symbolic margins of Juárez are drawn and re-drawn is deeply sexualized. If, as I contend, rape and killing constitute a political performance, then it is left to explore the constitutive relation that violence – in this case, sexual violence – plays in the creation of the political field. Such violence may be potential or actual, but I believe that it always discloses itself in the absences that constitute the very notion of political belonging.

The fact that women in Juárez have been turned into homo sacer reveals a radical misrecognition of the value of their lives. The way by which Juárez, as a community, does not acknowledge that through every killing and every disappearance its borders are being demarcated anew, becoming each time more and more exclusionary, shows clearly that these women were not even regarded as once fully alive. They had been already marked as homo sacer; acts of violence against them were therefore symbolically authorized. Following Butler's insight once more, "violence against those who are not already quite living, that is, living in a state of suspension between life and death leaves a mark that is no mark" (Butler 2004: 36). The consequence is a loss that is not regarded as such. A murder that conveys a powerful message that many pretend not to hear.