Lisa Lowe, "The Gender of Sovereignty" (page 7 of 7)

Feminist organizing at the U.S.-Mexican border necessarily links processes and relationships that are transnational and not exclusively managed by citizenship in the nation-state; furthermore, the women who become activists and filmmakers in Maquilapolis are a nontraditional population, often unrecognized by the fields of sociology, political science, or economics. Maquilapolis is a cultural and social project in which these women—who are simultaneously workers, mothers, advocates, and teachers—are political actors addressing not only the conditions of waged labor within an individual factory, but who identify a broader frame to describe the lethal assault on life chances within globalization, both in their gendered treatment as disposable workers to be exploited and thrown away, and in the destruction of their border community environment through heedless dumping of industrial wastes. Their practices rearticulate the border as more than an export-processing zone, and name it as a dehumanized social space, a gendered necrospace, one of complex and pervasively gendered violence. The women explicitly foreground both state and capital's capacity to dictate who matters and who is dispensable, who may be used up to the point of extinction, what Achille Mbembe has termed "necropolitics."[48] Their actions aim to stop the conversion of populations of border women and children into what Giorgio Agamben calls "the new juridical category of 'life devoid of value.'"[49] In refusing to be less than human, the women contest the regime that presumes their lives to be readily available and easily dismissed. Contrary to formal exercises in political modernization that aim to universalize the ideal type of state-centered politics everywhere, collaborative projects like Maquilapolis instead constitute a transnational public sphere to address who may live and who must die within the longer history of global inequality.

Endnotes

1. While the concept of "new world order" harks back to Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations following World War I, I refer here to the more recent usage in the George H. W. Bush's September 11, 1990 speech "Toward a New World Order." Here he used it to name post-Cold War U.S.-led world political governance in which the U.S. and Russia would cooperate to contain third world instability, whether in the form of Asian economic challenges, Islamic movements, or Latin American social movements. At that time, the New York Times observed that many on the American left called "new world order" a "rationalization for imperial ambitions" in the Middle East. Many charged that it was a unipolar political vision, under the guise of multipolar collaboration. The term receded in the 1990s under the presidency of Bill Clinton, when liberal institutionalist policies were dominant. Since 2003, however, the term has recurred to name the designs of President George S. Bush's U.S.-led "war on terror." [Return to text]

2. In 1999, China lifted the prohibition on foreign-private economic cooperation. As the world's seventh largest trading country, China joined the WTO in 2001, and by 2002, China surpassed the United States as the most favored destination for foreign direct investment. Reports of U.S. trade deficits with China have grabbed headlines and fanned protectionist flames throughout the U.S. For some time, China has been extremely competitive in labor intensive manufacturing, but it has now moved ahead in sophisticated technology and innovative electronic design. The U.S. trade deficit with China is soon likely to pass $150 billion. [Return to text]

3. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 2002, 12. [Return to text]

4. On the "Washington Consensus," as well as neoliberal assumptions held by the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Treasury since the 1980s for developing countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, see Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents; and Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity. London: Verso, 2003. [Return to text]

5. Stephen Krasner, Ed. International Regimes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. [Return to text]

6. Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence. Glenview, IL.: Scott, Foresman / Little Brown, 1989, 271. [Return to text]

7. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689) wrote against the arbitrary rule of the absolute monarch, and asserted that once man accumulated property it would lead to the necessity to found a political society to protect rights to property. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762) [The Social Contract], wrote that natural rights are renewed and protected when individuals agree to enter into the social contract founding a political society, organized according to the collective, rather than individual, "general will." Drawing upon these thinkers and other Enlightenment philosophers, classical liberalism stressed not only human rationality, but the importance of individual property rights, natural rights, the need for constitutional limitations on government, and, especially, freedom of the individual from external restraint. In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill, major British theorist of political liberalism, synthesized the principles of representative government, the protection of civil liberties, and laissez-faire economics that were in force for much of the 19th century. [Return to text]

8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. [Return to text]

9. An early crucial formulation of this notion of public reason was Immanuel Kant's famous 1784 essay, "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" ["Beanwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?"] In What is Enlightenment?, James Schmidt, Ed. Berkeley: California, 1996. [Return to text]

10. Max Weber's sociology is the origin of the idea of the ideal type, a heuristic proposition against which the difference, variance, or convergence of specific social and historical instances were measured, a comparative mode of study that continues to be influential in most of the modern social sciences, including political science. Weber is well-known for having observed that social behavior in modern western society of the early 20th century had come to be dominated more and more by goal-oriented rationality and instrumental reason, and less and less by traditional values and forms of sociality. This ideal-typical construction of "pure rational action" presumed the individual within the context of modern western industrial society, and measured the different degrees of rationalization as "deviations," by comparing concrete social instances to this normative regulatory type. Weber, Economy and Society: Volume I. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968 [original pub. 1922]. [Return to text]

11. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994. [Return to text]

12. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. New York: Pantheon, 1987. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. [Return to text]

13. On anticolonial nationalisms, see Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review, 1973; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Intro. Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Grove, 1963; Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World; London: Zed, 1986; P. O. Esedebe, Pan-Africanism: The Idea and the Movement, 1776-1991. Washington, DC: Howard, 1994. [Return to text]

14. For the most lucid discussion of the challenges to decolonization after the capture of the state by the national bourgeoisie, see Frantz Fanon, Wretched. [Return to text]

15. For excellent critiques of the discourse of development and the impact of development policies in Latin America, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995; Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. [Return to text]

16. See Mortimer Sellers, Ed. The New World Order: Sovereignty, Human Rights, and the Self-Determination of Peoples. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1996. [Return to text]

17. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. [Return to text]

18. Adam Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury observe that the U.N. has proven to be much more successful as an international forum for debating and declaring principles, than as a body capable and powerful enough to govern or legislate war, peace, crime, or violations of human rights. They argue that power is shifting from increasingly enmeshed states to cross-state groupings or to international institutions; territoriality is declining as a central principle of organization, but nevertheless, the state remains the principle institution for achieving domestic order, and an interstate system continues to provide the skeletal framework for international society. Adam Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury, Presiding Over a Divided World: Changing United Nations Roles, 1945-1993. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994. [Return to text]

19. See The Non-Aligned Movement. [Return to text]

20. Since 1850, more than 25,000 non-profit, non-governmental organizations with an international focus have been established, most after World War II; roughly 6000 from 200 countries have been recognized by the Union of International Associations. Regarding issues like medical aid for the world's poor, human rights violations, women's rights, or the prevention of environmental or biological destruction, global social movements and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), have been much more effective on these issues than either individual nation-states or the United Nations. This suggests that nation-states may not be the most appropriate site for addressing issues that are global in nature, such as violations of labor rights by transnational corporations, or the destruction of the environment by industrial wastes. See John Boli and George Thomas, "World Culture in the World Polity: A Century of International Non-Governmental Organization," American Sociological Review (April 1997); John Keane, Global Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 2003. [Return to text]

21. Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes are often cited as intellectual ancestors of political realism. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [orig. pub. 1651] Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. On the legacy of Hobbes to international relations, see Robert O. Keohane, "Hobbes's Dilemma and Institutional Change in World Politics: Sovereignty in International Society," Hans-Henrik Holm and Georg Sorenson, Eds., Whose World Order?: Uneven Globalization and the End of the Cold War: Perspectives on World Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995. [Return to text]

22. See Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York: Knopf [orig. pub. 1948] 1973. [Return to text]

23. Kenneth Waltz Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979, 96. Waltz's book has been regarded as the paradigmatic work of a neorealist approach to international relations. See Robert O. Keohane, Ed. Neorealism and Its Critics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. [Return to text]

24. The "liberalism" of Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Franklin Roosevelt, and others, justified and encouraged the first era of globalization which came to an end with World War I, the Versailles Treaty, collapse of the gold standard, and the Depression. Neoliberalism is associated with the second era of globalization, beginning after World War II with Bretton Woods, the founding of the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and continuing today; it favors international institutions while de-emphasizing government interventions, advocating the reduction of local regulations and barriers to commerce, corporatism, and the privatization of state run enterprises. [Return to text]

25. See Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence; David A. Baldwin, Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 284. [Return to text]

26. See, for example, Robert O. Keohane, Joseph S. Nye, Stanley Hoffman, Eds. After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989-1991. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1993. [Return to text]

27. The neoconservative position is well represented by Donald Kagan, and his sons Frederick and Robert. In While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, Donald and Frederick Kagan draw an analogy between a post-Cold War U.S., which was vulnerable to "terrorism," and Great Britain between the two world wars; they characterize Britain as having ignored international realities and crippled itself by cutting military forces, arguing for greater military spending in the U.S. Robert Kagan argued for U.S. unilateralism in Iraq despite European opposition, see "Power and Weakness," Policy Review, 113 (June 2002) and for a position on greater military force in Iraq, "Do What It Takes in Iraq," Robert Kagan and William Kristol, Weekly Standard, Vol. 008, Issue 48 (Sept 2003).

Neoconservatives return not only to Thucydides and Hobbes, and to the anticommunist political realism of the Cold War, but also to the work of Leo Strauss. Strauss brought to American neoconservatism the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the German legal scholar and political philosopher of the 1920s and 30s, whose ideas, taken up in Germany, were largely suppressed in the U.S. due to Schmitt's Nazi association. Yet Strauss was engaged with Schmitt's thought in the 1930s and wrote the concluding notes to Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. [orig. pub. 1932] trans. George Schwab, foreword Tracy B. Strong. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996. See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue. Trans. J. Harvey Lomax. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995; Nicholas Xenos, "Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror," Telos.

Schmitt argued that the "concept of the political" is founded on the ineliminable role of power in an ongoing state of war epitomized in the distinction between "friend" and "enemy." Schmitt's vehement critique of liberalism, pluralism, and liberal process, charged that they "depoliticized," or hid, this condition. "The political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity. As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist," wrote Schmitt, in The Concept of the Political, 53. In Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, [orig. pub. 1922] Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985, Schmitt wrote that the state should have the sovereign power to declare the state of exception, if necessary, to override liberal political bodies and laws to maintain the authority and power of the state. [Return to text]

28. The other moment in U.S. history in which the use of force could be considered analogous to this "pre-emptive" move would be the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki under Truman. Certainly not "pre-emptive" in the sense of acting before an actual attack, but then, this sense in our current world is equally debatable—the bombing that followed the surrender of the Japanese government in World War II could have been calculated to finalize a deterrence of future contestations of U.S. power by any other powers. See Robert J. Art and Kenneth Waltz, Eds., The Use of Force: International Politics and Foreign Policy. Boston: Little Brown, 1971. Indeed, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, framing the nation's foreign policy in sweeping terms, Bush likened himself to Truman after World War II, restructuring U.S. national security to meet a transcendent new threat. [Return to text]

29. Art and Waltz, Eds., The Use of Force. [Return to text]

30. Stephen Krasner, Ed. International Regimes. Celeste A. Wallander and Robert O. Keohane, "An Institutional Approach to Alliance Theory," Center for International Affairs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1995. See also Keohane, Nye, Hoffman, Eds., After the Cold War. [Return to text]

31. Though within the subfield of sociological institutionalism, a good example of this approach might be found in the following text: John Meyer, John Boli, George Thomas, and Francisco Ramirez. "World Society and the Nation-State," American Journal of Sociology 103: 1 (July 1997): 144-81. Meyer et al. argue that a causally significant world culture creates incentives for countries to conform to the modern nation-state model in order to integrate into world society; alternative models have little legitimacy and find it difficult to survive if they do not assume the legitimized form. [Return to text]

32. Among the most important postwar theories of European integration were Leon N. Lindberg, The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963; Ernst Haas, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964. Current studies include Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998; Wolfgang Wessels, et al. Eds., Fifteen Into One? The European Union and Its Member States. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. [Return to text]

33. U.S. political science employs a top-down perspective on nation-states as the privileged unit of government and action; women, poor, non-elites, indigenous peoples, and international non-governmental organizations are largely invisible in most of these studies. The international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) that are the most bureaucratized are the most legible for study. [Return to text]

34. Native sovereignty refers to the authority of native peoples to determine and govern themselves. See David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002; Paul Chatt Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1997. In Canada, indigenous peoples are referred to as First Nation peoples; in other contexts, native people are considered "Fourth World." The Hawaiian sovereignty movement is a coalition of groups seeing self-determination for native peoples and redress of the U.S. government for military occupation and appropriation of lands beginning in 1893. See Hanauni Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999; Jocelyn Linnekin, "Indigenous Sovereignty Scenarios in Latin America and Hawaii: Parallels and Possibilities," Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1:2 (Spring 1996): 152-163. Aboriginal peoples in Australia have struggled for sovereignty, most recently the 1992 Mabo Case, which declared the long-held terra nullius to be invalid and recognized Aboriginal land claims before British settlement, and subsequent legislation enacted to establish Native title claims. See Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003. For an important collaboration that brings together Native and Pacific discussions of indigenous cultures, see See Vicente Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, eds., Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge, a special issue of The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall 2001. [Return to text]

35. The Asian-African Conference, convened upon the invitation of the Prime Ministers of Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia and Pakistan, met in Bandung in April, 1955. In addition to the sponsoring countries, the following 24 countries participated in the Conference: Afghanistan, Cambodia, People's Republic of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, State of Vietnam, and Yemen. The Asian-African Conference considered problems of common interest and concern to the countries of Asia and Africa and discussed ways and means by which their people could achieve fuller economic, cultural and political co-operation. [Return to text]

36. The Ten Principles of Bandung were:

1. Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
2. Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
3. Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.
4. Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.
5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
6. (a) Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defense to serve any particular interests of the big powers. (b) Abstention by any country from exerting pressures on other countries.
7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression of the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country.
8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, such as negotiation, conciliation, arbitration or judicial settlement as well as other peaceful means of the parties own choice, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
9. Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.
10. Respect for justice and international obligations.

37. The so-called "anti-globalization" movement—less than a decade old and manifested in the popular demonstrations at the Seattle WTO meetings or the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil—has yet to capture the attention of political science, though sociologists have begun to ask if "anti-globalization" may constitute a new transnational social movement. Best understood as "counter-capitalist" or "anti-corporatist," members of the "anti-globalization" movement protest the excesses of unregulated global corporate capitalism, and it includes single-issue groups focused on local agriculture as well as larger-scale transnational coalitions for global environmentalism. At this point, it even includes groups whose imperatives may appear nationally at odds, e.g. U.S. trade unions who object that their jobs are undercut by corporations moving their manufacture to locations with tax holidays and lower wages, and labor groups asking for the greater protection of labor rights and human rights among workers in the maquiladoras, or in the export industry zones. Yet a common target of protest supercedes the inconsistencies held by the various groups: the presumption of economic integration that demands the merging of all countries within a single model of development and into a single, centralized system. Though heterogeneous and even ununified, most participants in the movement propose a case for localization. Localization is a critique of centralized decision-making in the metropolitan headquarters; the case for localization argues that local politics and decision-making must be empowered by actively favoring the local—whether local agriculture, Malaysian arguments against deforestation, or Venezuelan management of its oil industry—it argues for local democratic control of economic processes, and the redistribution of its benefits. The "anti-globalization" movement affirms a vision of global justice in which the powerful will respect the unpowerful, in which the essential needs of all people could be met, with fair distribution so that the poor as well as the wealthy, can sustain growth. See James Harding, "Counter-Capitalism: Globalisation's Children Strike Back," Financial Times, September, 2001; Vandana Shiva, "Ecological Balance in an Era of Globalization," in Principled World Politics: The Challenge of Normative International Relations, Paul Ruiz and Lester Edwin J. Wapner, Eds. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. [Return to text]

38. Leslie Berestein, "Girl in piñata found during border check," San Diego Union Tribune, November 12, 2005. [Return to text]

39. The principle of Manifest Destiny was invoked to justify the late 19th century westward expansion, the U.S. war with Mexico, and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the U.S.-Mexican War and appropriated the lands that are now California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, from Mexico. Despite being granted equal protection under the law by the Treaty of 1848, for decades following the annexation, most former Mexican citizens occupied subordinate social and economic position. Anglo-American domination over local economies created an environment in which the annexed Mexican population lost political influence. See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Anglo-saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard, 1981.

In the 1910-1920s, new immigration from Mexico was met with fervent opposition. Anti-immigrant factions represented Mexicans as a threat to the racial, cultural, and social integrity of the U.S. Restrictionists cast Mexicans as a "foreign menace" that threatened the homogeneity of U.S. society. Proponents of immigration represented Mexicans as a tractable labor force to be exploited. But with the Depression, Mexican workers were singled out as scapegoats; nativists charged that they committed crimes and displaced U.S. workers. In the 1930s, repatriation campaigns sought to force workers to return to Mexico; the largest, most publicized campaign was in Los Angeles. As many as 350,000 Mexicans repatriated during the 1930s. See David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. [Return to text]

40. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents. [Return to text]

41. Girls and women routinely work within conditions and restrictions that are specifically "feminized": they are often required to wear color-coded smocks under the surveillance of male supervisors who comment on their physical and sexual traits; they receive unwanted touching, leering, verbal and physical advances from both managers and male coworkers; they are threatened and assaulted if they attempt to refuse; the maquiladoras require them to undergo pregnancy testing as a condition of employment and deny them work if they are pregnant; if a young woman becomes pregnant, she may be assigned to unhealthy or unsafe work to force her to resign; women workers are required to give weekly urine samples, and to answer intrusive questions about their sexual activities. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier. Albany: State University of New York, 1983; Susan Tiano, Patriarchy on the Line: Labor, Gender and Ideology in the Mexico Maquila Industry. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994; Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico's Global Factories, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. [Return to text]

42. The public discourses—from industry recruitment, to newspapers, to popular stereotypes—construct border femininity as docile, abject, and sexually improper. Rosa Linda Fregoso argues that the targeting of the Mexicana as an endangered figure in need of discipline—and not unregulated capitalist industries themselves—is necessary to nation-state discourses on both sides of the border. Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [Return to text]

43. Melissa W. Wright, "A Manifesto Against Feminicide," Antipode 33:3 (July 2001): 550-66, 564. [Return to text]

44. Organizing strategies that emerge from specifically gendered discrimination imply neither the dispersal of struggle nor the passivity of exploited workers. They recognize and bring into evidence a "new" subject impacted by forms of domination that are political, economic, regional and cultural, and gendered within both national and international frameworks. For example, in one instance of cross-border solidarity, maquiladora workers protested a factory's regular requirement of "beauty pageants" in which the women workers were required to parade scantily clad in front of factory managers. When the company responded by closing the factory and refusing the women severance pay, the women were joined by another workers' organization that assisted them in targeting the U.S. parent company that owned the maquiladora, who they pressured to ultimately award the severance checks. With the feminization of work and preferences for women laborers in assembly and manufacture, different strategies for organizing have emerged. These mixed strategies go beyond traditional organizing strategies that focus exclusively on wages or on state remediation. See Norma Iglesias Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladoras: Life Histories of Women Workers in Tijuana. Trans., Michael Stone and Gabrielle Winkler. Austin: University of Texas, 1997; Lisa Lowe, "Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics," The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. L. Lowe and D. Lloyd, Eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997; and Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Rupture of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006. [Return to text]

45. The women activists are "non-state actors" operating as a transnational advocacy network to publicize human rights violations. The norms-socialization literature on international human rights suggests that such advocacy groups aim to establish human rights norms so that they may be internalized by national states who will implement change; such norms define a category of states as "liberal democratic states," which respond quickly to such norms, and "authoritarian" or "norm-violating states" (e.g., China, Cuba) which do not. Moral consciousness-raising by the international human rights community often involves "shaming" of the norm-violating states as "pariah states who do not belong to the community of civilized nations." See Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, Eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 15.

To the contrary, however, the cross-border environmental campaigns I discuss here are not aimed at creating international norms of individual rights to create hierarchical classifications which discipline "norm-violating" states, but rather they consider all states as "violating" life at the border, and in effect, they target the governmentality—the larger set of social disciplines that includes state institutions, corporate industry, media discourses, border policing, and social norms themselves—that results in the treatment of the border as a zone of disposable life. [Return to text]

46. Norma Iglesias Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladoras. [Return to text]

47. More than a decade of feminicides in Ciudad Juarez are the most publicized example of this gendered violence. See especially, Rosa Linda Fregoso, MeXicana; Alicia Schmidt-Camacho, "Ciudadana X," The New Centennial Review 5:1 (Spring 2005): 255-292; Melissa W. Wright, "The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women and the Maquiladoras," Public Culture 11: 3 (1999): 452-74; Lourdes Portillo's "Señorita Extraviada" (2001). [Return to text]

48. Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," Public Culture, 15:1 (2003): 11-40. [Return to text]

49. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, 139. [Return to text]

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