[Page 3: Killing as Performance: Violence and the Shaping of Community
by Verónica Zebadúa-Yañez]

4

But now, in order to distill some political meaning out of this, let's look for a geography of vulnerability. Butler argues, "lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation to their claim to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as 'grievable'" (Butler 2004: 32).

This global unequal distribution of vulnerability is replicated within the community; this is perfectly illustrated by Juárez. The women at risk live literally at the margins, in the miserable neighborhoods, in the areas of the city that lack basic infrastructure. In the parts of the city that represent the very border between inside and outside, between relative security and probable death. These women inhabit a place that is "the non-democratic condition for democracy itself" (Balibar 2002: xi), or the unsafe condition for safety itself. What are the implications? What is the message these events convey and what can be learned from them?

First of all, the events uncover the social and political invisibility of a group of people. It is completely obvious by now that neither the local nor the federal government really sees, or wants to see, what is happening. It is as if both the physical presence of the bodies and the absence of the disappeared have escaped their radar. By now we may better understand why. As I tried to show in the second section of the essay these women are/were nothing more than homo sacer, and as such their lives never really counted.

Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo presents a chilling episode that clearly captures the peculiar invisibility of homo sacer. Delbo recounts a day when, during an early morning roll call at Auschwitz, a woman, a 'walking skeleton', she says, breaks line and walks towards a ditch. Delbo writes that the woman seemed so determined that no one tried to persuade her to stay in her place. She fell in the ditch. Everybody realized it. Everybody looked, but no one moved. Delbo imagines what went through the woman's head: "Why are all these women looking at me like this? Why are they there, lined up in close ranks, standing immobile? They look at me and yet they do not seem to see me. They cannot possibly see me, or they wouldn't stand there gaping. They'd help me climb up. Why don't you help me, you standing so close? Help me, pull me up. Lean in my direction. Stretch out your hand. Oh, they don't make a move" (Delbo 1995: 24-25).

Reading these words, it seems that, paradoxically, the most extreme and unjust social and political invisibility does not necessarily imply a total lack of awareness to the existence of a person. Delbo shows that these women knew that their fellow inmate fell into a ditch and that she was struggling to get out. They looked at her, but they did not see her. They looked at her physical, bodily presence but did not acknowledge her extreme vulnerability and the value of what remained of her life. Precisely by ignoring her pleading, Delbo makes the invisibility of this woman fully visible to us.

Delbo's account is helpful for a political analysis of the events that concern us. We all know, we all look, but few are courageous enough to see, to speak out, to act. Those in and outside the community that have the institutional capacity and economic resources needed to stop the femicide resist performing a recognition of the vulnerability of this group of women, and thus prevent any possibility of ending the cruelly exclusionary way in which Juarez's communal identity has been shaped over these years.9 In this way, even if they do not take a direct part in the killings, they bear a great part of the responsibility. Every time someone suggests that these women had it coming – the old game of blaming the victim – that person is making community with the killers (Butler 2004: 206). His/her utterance cites and legitimates the violent events in which the actual murderers took part. 

I consider that one way of moving towards a true recognition and true visibility of the humanity of these women is for the community to avow and accept that, as Butler argues, the exposure to violence and our (willing or unwilling) complicity in it, the experiences of loss that we all go through, and the process of mourning we engage in to resolve our loss, constitute perhaps the only universal human experience. Butler says, "loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing such attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure" (Butler 2004, 20).

The second message these events carry is the constitutive role that the border between inclusion and exclusion plays in constructing a sense of community. It is worth quoting Agamben at length here: "every interpretation of the political meaning of the term 'people' must begin with the singular fact that in modern European languages, 'people' also always indicate the poor, the disinherited, the excluded. One term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics" (Agamben 1998: 176).

The notion of 'People' as a way of referring to the politically relevant inhabitants of a community is formally codified in various Declarations and Constitutions: we know that, in democracies, the sovereign is the People, decisions are to be made according to what they want and need. In contrast, the political entitlements of the 'people' are not legally recognized; at most, they take the form of an empty promise. 'I will speak on your behalf, on behalf of the people', politicians love to say… Those belonging to the People are grievable because they actively shaped the community, were truly a part of it. And when they pass, they represent a true loss. This is not the case with the people. They are considered an excess that must be erased. Perhaps this is why, in fact, the burden of geographical vulnerability always rests upon them. Is it possible and desirable to merge the People and the people? Or is this a totalitarian fantasy? Here I can only suggest that the democracy to come would do better to rid itself of any notion of an all-inclusive subject. 'Universal' subjects have only worked to exclude, even exterminate, those who do not fit into their ideal model. 

How does the understanding of shaping the community as performance aid the democratic project? As Butler implies, critical reactions to the performative must be subversive. In the Juárez case, the situation is already positioned beyond the legal sphere; in fact, introducing fully the problem in the sphere of legality is a very difficult (but still necessary) task. While grappling with the legal battle, civil society must also act in a way that transcends the legal. The killers and the people who have worked to prevent a solution to the femicides have acted in a performative, exhibitionist way: through their acts and utterances they have given the community an exclusive shape, one which seeks to turn poor mestizo women invisible.

We need to find a similar, crude way to expose, and with this acknowledge, margins and borders – a way to mourn those on the margins and democratize the life of those on the borders – in order to counteract the exclusionary strategy with one which strives to build a democratic sense of community. We need truly, courageously, and collectively to perform the recognition of our human vulnerability and that of the other and, from it, begin to empower ourselves politically. The reality of Juárez women must then be made fully visible; the absent must reappear – if only symbolically – if Ciudad Juárez wants to erase (or at least render less obvious) the deep scars these events have left as inheritance to the community.10

References

Agamben, Giorgio. "We Refugees."  Symposium 49. Issue 2 (1995): pp. 114-119.

_______. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

Balibar, Etienne. Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, 2002.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

_______. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'. New York: Routledge, 1992.

_______. "Burning Acts, Injurious Speech." Performativity and Performance, eds. A. Parker and E.K. Sedgwick. New York: Routledge, 1995.

_______. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.

_______. Precarious Life: Violence, Mourning, Politics. London: Verso, 2004.

Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

González, Rita. "The Said and the Unsaid." Aztlan 28. Vol. 2 (2003):235-240.

González Rodríguez, Sergio. Huesos en el desierto. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2002.

Monárrez-Fragoso, Julia. "Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juárez: 1993-2001." Aztlan 28. Vol. 2 (2003): 153-158.

Parker, Andrew, and Eve K. Sedgwick.  Performativity and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Portillo, Lourdes. "Filming Señorita Extraviada". Aztlan 28. Vol. 2 (2003): 229-234.

Roach, Joseph. "Culture and Performance in the Circum-Atlantic World." Performativity and Performance. Edited by A. Parker and E.K. Sedgwick. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Scott, Joan. Only Paradoxes to Offer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Segato, Rita Laura. "Territorio, soberanía y crímenes de segundo Estado: la escritura en el cuerpo de las mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad Juárez," 2004. Online: www.mujeresdejuarez.org/serie362.htm 

Wolffer, Lorena. "Mientras dormíamos." Metapolítica, 2003. Online: www.metapolitica.com.mx/juarez/content/performance.htm

Wright, Melissa W. "Feminine Villains, Masculine Heroes, and the Reproduction of Ciudad Juárez." Social Text 69. Vol 19. No. 4 (2001): 93-113.

_______. "From Protests to Politics: Sex Work, Women's Worth, and Ciudad Juárez Modernity."  Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94. Vol. 2 (2004): 369-386.

Verónica Zebadúa-Yañez is a Ph.D. student in the New School for Social Research, in New York, where she focuses on contemporary political theory. She can be reached at zebav450@newschool.edu