More or Less Dead

Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico

Alice Driver

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780816531165
• eBook ISBN: 9780816501847
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, people disappear, their bodies dumped in deserted city lots or jettisoned in the unforgiving desert. All too many of them are women.

More or Less Dead analyzes how such violence against women has been represented in news media, books, films, photography, and art. Alice Driver argues that the various cultural reports often express anxiety or criticism about how women traverse and inhabit the geography of Ciudad Juárez and further the idea of the public female body as hypersexualized. Rather than searching for justice, the various media—art, photography, and even graffiti—often reuse victimized bodies in sensationalist, attention-grabbing ways. In order to counteract such views, local activists mark the city with graffiti and memorials that create a living memory of the violence and try to humanize the victims of these crimes.

The phrase "more or less dead" was coined by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in his novel 2666, a penetrating fictional study of Juárez. Driver explains that victims are "more or less dead" because their bodies are never found or aren't properly identified, leaving families with an uncertainty lasting for decades—or forever.

The author's clear, precise journalistic style tackles the ethics of representing feminicide victims in Ciudad Juárez. Making a distinction between the words "femicide" (the murder of girls or women) and "feminicide" (murder as a gender-driven event), one of her interviewees says, "Women are killed for being women, and they are victims of masculine violence because they are women. It is a crime of hate against the female gender. These are crimes of power."

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Disappearances Have to Disappear
• Introduction: Feminicide and Memory Creation
• Interview: Photographer Julián Cardona on Juárez and the Limits of Photography
• 1. Monuments, Memorials, Graffiti, and Street Art: Memory Creation in an Apocalyptic Landscape
• Interview: Writer Charles Bowden on Feminicide and the Aesthetics of Violence in Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future
• 2. More or Less Dead: Literary Representations of Feminicide in Juárez
• Interview: Filmmaker Ursula Biemann on Feminicide in Juárez
• 3. Representations of Feminicide in Documentary Film: Searching for Ecotestimonios
• Interview: Writer and Filmmaker Mario Bellatin on Dark Humor and the Horror of Postmodernity
• 4. The Death of Humanity and the Human
• Epilogue: Salvaging the Luminosity of a Lost City
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index