Brainstorm #5 - Caroline Johnson

In Senorita Extraviada the concept of “social death” is seen here as the government and the police think of these women as disposable. This is seen through their lack of action to find the culprits of these horrible murders and crimes and also their contribution to it which can be seen through the testimony of the one woman who was raped while in jail. The families and mothers practice resilience as they continue to live their life and protect their own family. They paint the crosses and paint their cars and hold protests. They also try and go search for bodies in the desert. This video shows how these women are not disposable and explains how every single woman who has gone missing is just as worthy of living a life as any other woman is. They negate the explanation that the women lived a double life or that they wore promiscuous clothes by saying that the people who are committing these crimes must be held accountable. Art is a witness to this as it is a way to paint the crosses to be in solidarity with the woman who have died and also as a way to explain what is going on.

In “Toward a Planetary Civil Society” it fully discusses what the feminicide was, in that “Feminicide in Juárez makes evident the reality of overlapping power relations on gendered and racialized bodies as much as it clarifies the degree to which violence against women has been naturalized as a method of social control” (3). They said the feminicide was due to the nonnormative activities and loss of social norms. Feminicide and globalization are described as a way to ‘“eliminate a part of that population; erase them from the face of the earth,”’(10). This is how you can connect Cacho’s concept of social death. As she explained it, social death is the people who through neoliberalism and capitalism are not considered as worthy, which is clearly shown in the feminicide in this article. This article explains how crosses were placed and “As a political and discursive strategy, religiosity gives voice to a new consciousness, one that recognizes the contradictions in the interface between woman’s visibility as abject subject (murder victim) and the invisibility of woman in the public sphere (citizen)” (21).