Brainstorm #5 - Clarissa Lunday

The documentary Señorita Extraviada and "Toward a Planetary Civil Society" show compelling evidence that the state dismissed the killings of women by claiming they were promiscuous. In Señorita Extraviada, the attorney general of Mexico recommended that women followed a curfew and didn't dress promiscuously (11:00). Rosa Linda Fregoso also notes in "Toward a Planetary Civil Society" that the state blamed the victims because of their assumed sexual behavior. In Lisa Cacho's interview on the Office Hours podcast. She explains that "social death" deals a lot with status crime, which she explains is when people are criminalized due to their race, class, gender, and/or profession. The women who were murdered in Ciudad Juarez were assumed, by the state, to have committed as status crime and therefore had a "social death."

What the documentary and article shows is that families participated in protests. For example, Fregoso writes about March 2002 where protesters marched 370 kilometers from Chihuahua City to the Juarez-El Paso border in the Exodus for Life campaign. Both also note the paintings of crosses on pink backgrounds on electric poles with the Voices without Echo campaign. This art witnesses the state's ignorance when it comes to the deaths since nothing was done.